Customer Reviews

In Concert

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Eveything Baez does - esp. her earlier work, like this one - is beautiful to me. This is a good mosaic of many of her styles: classic broadside ballads (Fennario), Dylan (Don't Think Twice, With God, etc.), Appalachia (Copper Kettle), Spanish/Portuguese (Te Manha, etc.), Gospel (Gospel Ship), etc. This is the first Baez album I ever bought, and learned to play guitar with in the 60's. It's still a thrill - beautiful.

This is a compilation of live performances in 1962 and '63, including "We Shall Overcome" done at predominately black Mills College in Alabama in '63. Of the 20 selections, two are early Dylan classics ("Don't Think Twice" and "With God on our Side.") Three are sung in Spanish or Portuguese and ten are traditional folk airs. In the current age, when Britney Spears at 19 requires background dancers, taped vocals, fireworks, smoke, mirrors, et. al., it is refreshing to be reminded that in the early 60's, at around the same age as Britney, Ms. Baez could hold an audience with just her voice, excellent solo guitar work, and her perfect phrasing and diction. In addition, the songs often meant something real, and were worth learning. She bared her feet, but not her midriff, and her heart, but not her breasts. For those who would like to find out what made her the female lead performer of the whole folk/protest revival, this disc is a good purchase. For those who liked her back then, and would enjoy having some of her best early work on CD, it's also a great buy. My own favorite is "Gospel Ship"...and even if you aren't Christian, or don't normally like hymns, the clarity of her vocal, the crispness of her guitar accompaniment, and the simplicity of the song combine to make a three-minute wonder here. I also love the way she does "Long Black Veil" and for my dough, only Johnny Cash equals her performance. "Fennario" is great as well, but you may know it as "Pretty Peggy O". Dylan did this on his own debut album, and comparing the two versions is a treat. Joan's version of "Don't Think Twice, it's Alright" is equal to Bob's own, at least, in emotional impact. "We Shall Overcome" is probably the second best version by a white artist behind Pete Seeger's. This collection even offers "Kumbaya" the much-maligned campfire sing-along, but Joan is the one who made it so ubiquitous that people eventually got tired of it. Listen to it here, recorded in '62, and you realize why people fell in love with singing it.

Only one of two Joan Baez albums I've heard-but I love it! My favorites are Long Black Veil, Don't Think Twice, and With God ... She has SUCH an absolutely beautiful voice... and boy, do I wish I could play the guitar like that! I love Bob Dylan, but I can't help thinking she sounds better singing his songs than he does. (Sorry!)

`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.