Joan Baez

Joan Chandos Baez (born January 9, 1941) is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and activist. 

Her contemporary folk music often includes songs of protest and social justice. Baez has performed publicly for over 60 years, releasing more than 30 albums.

Baez is generally regarded as a folk singer, but her music has diversified since the counterculture era of the 1960s and encompasses genres such as folk rock, pop, country, and gospel music. She began her recording career in 1960 and achieved immediate success. Her first three albums, Joan Baez, Joan Baez, Vol. 2 and Joan Baez in Concert, all achieved gold record status. Although a songwriter herself, Baez generally interprets others' work, having recorded many traditional songs and songs written by the Allman Brothers Band, the Beatles, Jackson Browne, Leonard Cohen, Woody Guthrie, Violeta Parra, the Rolling Stones, Pete Seeger, Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, Bob Marley, and many others. She was one of the first major artists to record songs by Bob Dylan in the early 1960s; Baez was already an internationally celebrated artist and did much to popularize his early songwriting efforts. Her tumultuous relationship with Dylan later became the subject of songs by each of them and generated much public speculation. On her later albums she has found success interpreting the work of more recent songwriters, including Ryan Adams, Josh Ritter, Steve Earle, Natalie Merchant, and Joe Henry.

Baez's songs include "Diamonds & Rust" and covers of Phil Ochs's "There but for Fortune" and the Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down". She also recorded "Farewell, Angelina", "Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word", "Forever Young", "Here's to You", "Joe Hill", "Sweet Sir Galahad" and "We Shall Overcome". Baez performed fourteen songs at the 1969 Woodstock Festival and has displayed a lifelong commitment to political and social activism in the fields of nonviolence, civil rights, human rights, and the environment. Baez was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on April 7, 2017.

Early and personal life

Baez was born in the Staten Island borough of New York City on January 9, 1941. Her paternal grandfather Alberto Baez left the Catholic Church to become a Methodist minister and moved to the U.S. when her father was two years old. Her father Albert Baez (1912–2007) was born in Puebla, Mexico, and grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where his father preached to and advocated for a Spanish-speaking congregation. Albert first considered becoming a minister but instead turned to the study of mathematics and physics and received his PhD from Stanford University in 1950. Albert was later credited as a co-inventor of the X-ray microscope. Joan's cousin John C. Baez is a mathematical physicist. Her mother Joan Chandos Baez (née Bridge), referred to as "Joan Senior" or "Big Joan", was born in Edinburgh, Scotland, the second daughter of an English Anglican priest who claimed to be descended from the Dukes of Chandos. Born on April 11, 1913, she died on April 20, 2013 aged 100.

Baez was the second of three sisters, all of whom were political activists and musicians. The eldest was Pauline Thalia Baez Bryan (1938–2016), also known as Pauline Marden, and the youngest was Margarita Mimi Baez Fariña (1945–2001), who was better known as Mimi Fariña. The Baez family converted to Quakerism during Joan's early childhood, and she has continued to identify with the tradition, particularly in her commitment to pacifism and social issues. While growing up, Baez was subjected to racial slurs and discrimination because of her Mexican heritage. Consequently, she became involved in social causes early in her career. She declined to play in any white student venues that were segregated, which meant that when she toured the Southern states, she would play only at black colleges.

Owing to her father's work with UNESCO, their family moved many times, living in towns across the U.S. as well as in England, France, Switzerland, Spain, Canada, and the Middle East, including Iraq. Joan Baez became involved with a variety of social causes early in her career, including civil rights and nonviolence. Social justice, she stated in the PBS series American Masters, is the true core of her life, "looming larger than music". Baez spent much of her formative youth living in the San Francisco Bay area, where she graduated from Palo Alto High School in 1958. Here, Baez dated Michael New, a fellow student described as "Trinidad English" whom she met at her college in the late 1950s, and occasionally introduced as her husband. Baez committed her first act of civil disobedience by refusing to leave her Palo Alto High School classroom in Palo Alto, California for an air raid drill.

Baez remained close to her younger sister Mimi up until Mimi's death in 2001 and mentioned in the 2009 American Masters documentary that she had grown closer to her older sister Pauline in later years. Currently, Baez is a resident of Woodside, California, where she lived with her mother until the latter's death in 2013. She has said that her house has a backyard tree house in which she spends time meditating, writing, and "being close to nature". Since stepping down from the stage in 2019, she has devoted herself to portraiture. Responding to false assumptions that have been promoted about her, Baez stated in 2019 that she was not a vegetarian and had not been part of the second-wave feminist movement, remarking that her stardom shielded her from the everyday struggles of other women. She is the subject of the 2023 documentary Joan Baez: I Am a Noise in which she reflected on among other things her personal struggles, her political activism, and her personal and professional relationship with Bob Dylan. She also related that Mimi and she had struggled with depression and after years of therapy came to believe that they had been abused by their father. 

In her 2024 poetry collection When You See My Mother Ask Her to Dance, Joan Baez said that she has been diagnosed with Dissociative Identity Disorder.