Joan Baez - Joan Baez

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Free Music Notes for Joan Baez

Free Music Review: Long, Long Ago, Before the Beatles or even Bob Dylan...
Hit: 5 Stars

This album has been dubbed "essential" by the wise folks here at Amazon.com, and rightly so. It was first released way, way back in the very early '60s, before my generation of Baby Boomers had become world-weary and relentlessly politically correct. All of the songs on this album predate our 20th-century woes and wars, and most of them have their origins in "the old country", whether that be England or Africa or Spain or deepest Apalachia. But that doesn't mean that these are sweet, wimpy, wispy little ditties, and don't let the spine-tingling purity of Joan Baez's voice lull you into overlooking the power and substance of the material here!

In the songs that Joan gives us on this album, we have the stuff of life itself: loneliness ("10,000 Miles), love ("Wildwood Flower"), adultery, rape, and betrayal ("Mary Hamilton") and revenge ("Silver Dagger"), prostitution and gambling ("House of the Rising Sun"), and the deep suffering of slavery and oppression. Bastard babies, wronged women, pirates on the high sea, heedless rounders, murderous lovers, even baby Moses and the pharoahs - they're all here, and they've got a lot to say!

These songs were among the first I learned to play over 40 years ago on my old Montgomery Ward guitar with the hot pink "flower power" decals stuck all over it, and I'm still singing them today. My kids, now grown, know them from me & my friends singing them in the living room and the kitchen all of their lives, although I'd bet they've never heard this recording. In fact, I had forgotten about this album until I recently rediscovered it, and therein lies the incredible power of great "folk music": it is the song itself, more than any individual singer, that lives in the minds and voices throughout the years, decades, centuries. With this and the other earliest Joan Baez recordings, though, we have it all - enduring songs of the human condition and a singer whose simplicity and clarity of voice bring them to us in heartstoppingly beautiful form.

It would be easy enough, from our perspective of the wearying decades since the '60s, to lump Joan Baez in with our memories of love beads and protest marches and "girls' dorm music" and even our own foolish younger selves. After all, it was she who brought us the now-dreaded "Kumbayah" that we've all sung at countless campfire singalongs, and who perhaps gave voice to the earliest seeds of our "political correctness". Easy, perhaps, but a gross underestimation (or, as our current president has said "mis-underestimation" - but don't get me started!). The songs, the voice, the symbol of an era, and the woman who brought them to us are all right here in this first of her many albums. Buy it for the hauntingly beautiful traditional songs Joan brings us, or for the pure clear voice that will lift the hairs on the back of your neck, or for the incredibly and appropriate simple guitar accompaniment she gives us; buy it to expand your own and your kids' grounding in traditional folk music - heck, you can buy it for nostalgia and the sweet pangs over your innocent or misspent youth for all I care, but buy it. This is an album that should be in every American's collection, for once it is in your collection, the music will be in your ears and your heart your mind, where it belongs.

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