Singer, activist and artist Joan Baez will perform at Zeiterion in New Bedford June 29
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| Joan Baez |
By Scott McLennan
Special to The Journal
Published: 22 June 2013 12:01 AM
Joan Baez is an activist. But you knew that, as Baez is perhaps as well known for championing civil rights, peace movements and clean energy as she is for her storied music career launched in 1958 from the Club 47 in Cambridge, Mass.
And Baez tries to be a musical activist, too, as interested in exploring new music as she is in presenting such signatures as “Diamonds and Rust” and her celebrated interpretations of “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and several Bob Dylan songs.
“New songs are not what people want to hear,” Baez says when reach by phone at her California home. “But it’s my job to get them involved in them. I try to cleverly arrange my concerts to include the new, the faves, and that stuff in the middle.”
Her last few records, for example, have featured songs and production by Steve Earle, as well as tunes by Ryan Adams, Gillian Welch and David Rawlins. But Baez laments how she too falls into comfort zones, and even solicits recommendations for new music amid answering interview questions.
“I’ve listened to nothing but Willie Nelson for the last week and a half,” Baez says, though she also enthuses about young folk duo Shovels and Rope.
Performing live is something the 72-year-old Baez still enjoys doing, and has scheduled a run of East Coast dates, including a concert at the Zeiterion Theatre in New Bedford on Saturday, June 29. Multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell and percussionist Gabriel Harris (who is Baez’s son) back Baez on tour, and the singer credits Powell in particular with inspiring fresh looks into her repertoire.
But even as a 19-year-old folkie just starting to capture the public eye, Baez had an intuitive sense about winning over an audience.
“I saw some footage used in the documentary about me (“How Sweet the Sound”), and it was of me performing in a coffee shop,” she recalls. “I saw myself singing, and the crowd was spellbound. Then a man at one of the tables moved his finger, and my eyes shot right over there. I was so aware of what was going on. My goal is to be in sync with the audience. I’m always making adjustments — consciously and unconsciously — to the settings I’m playing in.”
Baez still performs at benefits and addresses groups dedicated to liberal causes. Her idea of activism, she says, has evolved to a point where there is no real difference between the political and the personal.
“It’s all about the way you carry yourself,” Baez says, adding that is an attitude she learned and adopted from her mother, who died earlier this year shortly after her 100th birthday. “What I do is tell stories, and that’s how information gets out.”
Early in her career, Baez learned “The Death of Emmett Till,” (A.C. Bilbrew’s version from 1955, not Dylan’s rendition from ’62) a song about the murder of black teen accused of flirting with a white woman and subsequent acquittal of the man charged with the killing.
“I learned that song when I was 16,” she says. “It was the first politically conscious song I learned, and it served me well. Hopefully it is serving other people in other places as well.”
And though she describes herself as a perfectionist, Baez is also open to new creative outlets; music itself, she says, is something that found her rather than the other way around. That attitude has most recently led Baez into painting.
“It wasn’t something I was looking to do,” she says. “But I was looking at an art store window and walked into the shop and talked to a woman there. I told her I just wanted to put paint on a canvas. When I started, I had paint up to my elbows.”
Baez has since refined her technique and may start posting completed works on her website.
“No portraits of feet in a bathtub,” she says. “I promise.”
Joan Baez,
8 p.m. Saturday, June 29
Zeiterion Theatre, 684 Purchase St., New Bedford
$49.50, $46.50, zeiterion.org (508) 994-2900
Scott McLennan can be reached at smclennan1010@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter
@ScottMcLennan1
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