Customer Reviews

In Concert 1 (Reis)

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Time was, when this document of a 1962 Baez concert was released, that a musician could go on stage, armed with only a guitar and voice, sing songs that required listening and involvement by the audience -- and be successful. While that time may seem long ago and far away now, this first volume of "Joan Baez in Concert" proves that once upon a time, such things were possible.

One thing you might notice as soon as you listen to the release: there are no annoying hoots, hollers, yells, whistles, etc., etc., as Baez sings, or as she quietly prepares to play. One thing you will most certainly notice is the incredible quality of Baez's voice -- it was one of popular music's great instruments, producing bell-like tones of absolute purity. And finally, you will notice the quality of the material. Baez's love of songs that extend back in America's and the world's history is evident in her interpretations of much-sung tunes such as "Black Is the Color" and "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You."

Lest you think you are buying a hoary disc filled with dated protest songs, be assured that "In Concert" contains very little overtly political material. In fact, the only pure protest song, the excellent "What Have They Done to the Rain" is as much poetry as protest. And another of the disc's high points, the moonshine tune "Copper Kettle," leavens the performance with a dose of good humor.

This is music for quiet, reflective moments, a commodity in short supply today.

This was my first encounter with Joan Baez, back in the 70s. I was completely captivated. The purity and range of her voice, the quality of the songs and the simple guitar backing, all provided a very rich experience. "What have they done to the rain?" took my breath away, coming at a time when the nuclear debate was spreading world-wide. The contrast between the beauty of the melody and voice with the grimness of the meaning was very powerful. Time has not dimmed that first reaction.

Joan Baez has certainly fallen out of favor. Not sure I know why. Perhaps her music is too much out of step with the times. In any event, if you can get by the applause on this live CD, you will experience perhaps the finest artist of the prime folk movement at her prime - in voice and guitar. All the songs are a joy to listen to from a story/voice/instrument viewpoint. The voice and guitar on "Lady Mary" is perhaps Joan at her very best - a pure voice with no harsh edges and simple guitar which moves the heart. I have never heard "Black Is The Color Of My True Loves Hair" performed in any manner approaching this aching rendition. "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You" melds Joans moving voice with a guitar which literally pulls you down the highway. All in all a moving CD which demands that it be listened to - and therin may lie it's lack of popularity today. Buy it if you have an ounce of reflection in you.

This CD has three extra songs that were not on the original vinyl recording of "Joan Baez in Concert." They are "Streets of Laredo," "My Good Old Man," and "My Lord What a Morning." Not much of a bargain, considering the fact that Joan sings kind of wishy-washy spirituals, and "Streets of Laredo" is set to slightly unfamiliar music, which makes it difficult to sing along with. I'll get used to it, though, and as always Joan's Child Ballads and Southern Appalachian ballads are to kill for. The liner notes that accompany this CD are also quite interesting. They discuss Joan's very early career and how she overcame her fear of large audiences.

Remember that the songs on this CD were recorded 'in concert' so you will hear occasional applause and crowd noises.

There are sixteen songs in all, and here are a few of my favorites:

"Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You" - I always thought this was a Bob Dylan song, but the most popular version turns out to have been recorded by Led Zeppelin. According to their web site, Jimmy Page heard the Baez version and decided to rearrange it for his band. The original version of the song has been traced to Anne Bredon, a folk musician who wrote and recorded the original song in the 1950s. At any rate, Joan sings it as a very lovely, plaintive ballad. I'm probably one of the few people in America who has never heard the Led Zeppelin version.

"Geordie" - A version of this Child ballad (#209) "God be wi' thee, Geordie" appears in the "Straloch Manuscripts (early 17th century)." It also appears in Buchan's "Ancient Ballads and Songs (1828)" under the name of "Gight's Lady." According to the Child Ballad web site, it's six pretty babies that Geordie's wife has borne, not Joan's three, and Geordie appears to have stolen 'six milk-white steeds' from the king, not deer. According to Buchan "Geordie" was Sir George Gordon of Gight (1512-1562), the son of the illegitimate daughter of James IV, who was imprisoned for becoming "too familiar" with the Laird of Bignet's wife (no deer or horses in this version). Geordie's wife, Lady Ann, went to Edinburgh to plead for his life. She was successful, but upon being freed Geordie killed his faithful wife. I like Joan's ending a bit better: Geordie is hanged in a golden chain and that's the end of it.

"Kumbaya" - This spiritual apparently originated with the Gullah, an African-American people living on the Sea Islands and adjacent coastal regions of South Carolina and Georgia. 'Kumbaya' means 'Come by here' and it really brings back the Sixties for me (we always sang it at the sit-ins). Joan asks the audience to sing along with her (you will hear it as a dull muttering in the background), and so I do.

"Black is the Color of my True Love's Hair" - There are many versions of this tune, including "Black is the Color of My True Love's Eyes." It's best known as a tune from the Southern Appalachian Mountains and is probably based on an 18th century English tune. Joan sings it almost as a lament, and I always expect the black-haired lover to die at the end, but in truth the ballad ends on a slightly happier note: the singer only threatens to kill herself if she loses her love.

"House Carpenter" - This Child ballad (#243) is also known as "James Harris, or the Daemon Lover." I like the Buffy Saint Marie version slightly better (on her album "Little Wheel Spin and Spin), in which the lover is an actual demon: "He stomped his foot and down they sank, and sank to rise no more." Joan's slightly sanitized version makes no mention of demons, although the carpenter's wife and her lover go to the 'hills of hell' when their ship accidentally sinks.

"Danger Waters"- This song has a chorus that I'd never been able to decipher completely, until I went to the web. Anyway the chorus goes something like this: "And I holler why, and I holler why, and I holler why," (now comes the hard part) the Burgess (or gorgeous?) boy "no mon ami." 'Burgess' turned out to be 'tortoise.' Oh well. This is a West African song, and Joan makes it sound very wistful even when she is demanding the return of her 'schillins.'

Lovely, lovely Joan. This CD is a 'must' for her fans.

For forty years, her pure voice and liberal beliefs have been part of the American fabric and of the lives of those of us who came of age in the 60's. When I hear her, I see myself in college waking up to this album, I see my grown sons as small children listening to her in front of the stereo while I studied in law school. When I had a "high lonely", retreated from whatever I was doing and went back to my "roots", it was Joan that I listened to. I love her music, not for what she is or isnt or what she ever has said or done, but for how her music did to me.

Joan Baez' third album "In Concert Part One" remains the quintessential album of the 1960s folk revival and stands on its own as a remarkably beautiful piece of music. Although recorded in the 1960s, its atmosphere is surprisingly dark and haunting throughout and satnds up very well to almost a half-century of time.

Baez' beautiful voice was at no point so intense or powerful as it was on "In Concert Part One". On some songs, such as "Gospel Ship" and "Kumbaya", she is truly tearful yet sings with a beauty so genuine it will live in your mind forever after one or two listens. Although her version of "Matty Groves" does not quite match the astonishing rendition from Liege and Lief, it still tells a brutal tale. Malvina Reynolds' "What Have They Done to the Rain", on the other hand, was Baez' first move into the realm of the protest song yet is remarkably touching and intimate with its simple yet powerful metaphor of the grass dying from poisoned rainwater.

The dark, despairing imagery is blackest on "House Carpenter's Daughter", "Geordie" and "Copper Kettle", which are further proof of the amazingly touching yet beautiful imagery of traditional folk that proved the richest of veins for such artists as Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span during the 1970s.

All Joan Baez albums up to the oft-misunderstood Baptism are worth owning, but there is little doubt "In Concert Part One" is the finest hour of her career. Anyone interested in traditional folk song should own this album.

Oh this is so beautiful - the songs, the respectful audience and her pristine evocative voice! There's an almost gospel-like quality in the songs Kumbaya, Gospel Ship and the eery Lady Mary, while the Portuguese song Até Amanha is an uptempo, singalong ditty and Pretty Boy Floyd soars above the clouds. This is pure poetry, infused with a spirit of transcendence. A very sensitive and moving listening experience.

"Gospel Ship" is just a brief, traditional hymn, but it was the first Baez performance I ever heard and led me to become a fan. This collection has that one, and a nice mixture of the traditional folk songs which helped her get started near Harvard in the late 1950's, and a few more contemporary pieces. I have been quite disappointed in this artist's efforts over the past decade...but my, oh my, few folkies ever had a better FIRST decade.

`Joan Baez in Concert Parts 1 and 2' may have been the very first Joan Baez albums I heard, back in 1963, just a few months after having gotten my spiffy new portable record player for my small bedroom, and at least a year before I took to the Beatles and at least three years before I took to Bob Dylan.

It is entirely appropriate that Joan did these live albums so early in her career, as there is just something very right about hearing folksongs, both old and new in the presence of a live audience, as that is easily the most important point of folksongs, before they were mutated into the singer / songwriter product.

As the performances are so simple and the only real job of the soundman is to faithfully pick up Ms. Baez' voice and guitar, these albums are as good or better than her first two albums, both done in the studio. They are doubly valuable in that, unlike so many pop live albums, these repeat none of the material on her first two albums.

One thing that makes these better albums is that they mix several contemporary or at least recent songs from American sources in with the traditional English folk stuff.

It's fun to reflect, from the safe distance of 43 years from the performance and over 65 years from the writing, on the failure of logic in some `protest' songs such as Woody Guthrie's famous `Pretty Boy Floyd' the performance of which Ms. Baez dedicates to Pete Seeger. One has no trouble believing that this bank robber never took a house from a family, until you think of what his robbery may have done to the savings of townspeople in pre-FDIC 1930s depression days. To Guthrie's piece she adds Malvina Reynolds' sweet `What Have They Done to the Rain' and Bob Dylan's powerful `With God on Our Side' and `Don't Think Twice, It's All Right'. The most powerful selection may be the end of Part 2, which closes with the `Battle Hymn of the Republic'. Put into context, this may be the second most powerful example of musical / political theatre I have heard, outdone only by my seeing Pete Seeger, live, performing the `Internationale' in the mid-1980s on a suburban American music festival stage.

Of the traditional stuff, Ms. Baez easily outdoes Fairport Convention's performance of Matty Groves. Her versions of the lyrics are slightly different from the Brits, but the performance stands head and shoulders above Fairport Convention's renditions. On the other hand, Ms. Baez is outdone by a fair distance by Mick Jagger on the singing of `Long Black Veil' which Mr. J does on an album of the same name with The Chieftains.

Most of this is quibbling though, as the overall impression of the album is super high quality, with Ms. Baez easily at the top of her game and in her moment in history. I saw her perform live in the early nineties and her voice was simply not what it once was, and there seemed to be less energy there.

If you want to experience Joan Baez, I strongly recommend her earliest albums such as these two.

There is just something about the purity of Joanie's voice and whatever that something is, it's present here. Hard to believe she could improve on her two previous studio albums, but her virginal pure sound here washes over you, waves on through you, commands you to sit and listen and you do, because you don't want the sound to ever stop. Folk standards like "Copper Kettle" and "Kumbaya" take on new meaning, new life when Joanie does them. "Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair" will move you, "Lady Mary" will, too.

The opener, "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You," will make you ache and Woody Guthries "Pretty Boy Floyd" will make you love the outlaw. I've heard Woodie and Arlo and Pete and Bob all do this song and I've loved them all, especially Bob Dylan's version on the Folkways tribute record to Woody and Leadbelly called A Vision Shared, those are all great versions, but Joanie's is by far the best, because when she does a song, she makes it her own. She owns all the songs on this record and you should, too.