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Fans of Joan Baez called out their favorite oldies as the singer-songwriter, now in her sixth decade of a career that began in high school talent shows in Palo Alto, Calif., was finishing a concert that drew, still again, an overflow crowd.
"Farewell, Angelina." "Diamonds and Rust." "Fairfax County." "Silver Dagger." "Carry It On."
As more songs were shouted out front rows to back - a thunderclap voice from a side aisle put a loud end to it all: "Honey, you sing anything you want."
And so she did, easing into the high notes of "Gracia a la Vida," the next to last song of the evening at the Birchmere, an Alexandria, Va., music hall. At 63, the Baez voice, though huskier, retains the unaffected purity that has always been the mark of her 418 songs in 48 U.S.-released albums and CDs. Still intact, also, is the physical energy that brought her by bus and plane last summer to full houses in Europe including Bucharest, Istanbul, Frankfurt, Genoa, Rome, Trieste, Dresden, Bonn, Hamburg, Paris - and followed with some 20 sold-out autumn concerts on the U.S. East Coast.
At each site, audiences heard songs about migrant workers (Woody Guthrie's "Deportees"), prisoners ("There But For Fortune," which was dedicated to Virginia inmate Joseph Giarratano), labor organizing ("Joe Hill"), antiwar beliefs ("Reunion Hill"). These songs, and others in the two-hour set, covered the range of Baez's spiritual and political liberalism, all of it grounded in her personal commitment to nonviolence. "I can't tell you how boring it would be for me," she said, "to give a concert and not have it connected with people's lives, and suffering and real issues. There's no music for me outside of that."
After the concert, I spent some time with Joan in a backstage reception room. It was one of a couple of dozen visits we've had, going back to the early 1970s. Our friendship was cemented by a mutual interest in freeing political prisoners. She has always had a moral firmness that I have known in few others.
Returning from concert tours in countries where men and women were stashed or tortured in dungeons, she would often pass through Washington and give me the facts and stories about political prisoners....