Customer Reviews

Joan Baez 1

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Joan Baez is sublime. A clear, true soprano melded with a rich vibrato, she makes music soar to new heights. Her sound is crystalline and pure, whether she is singing a traditional folk song, a ballad, or a song with a message. All of the songs on this album were obviously chosen with care, as there is not one bad song among them. Each makes its contribution towards making this CD an outstanding one. It even has a song that Ms. Baez sings beautifully in Spanish, doing credit to her Mexican heritage. Ms. Baez is a singer without compare. There has been no one like her before, and no one like her since. This is an outstanding CD.

i just had to write because i read the "editorial review" and i thought that whoever wrote it must not understand joan at all. "icy" soprano? "painfully pretty?" joan's soprano is icy if you think of a gorgeous waterfall with snow on all the pine trees around, her songs painfully pretty if you mean the way something beautiful can stab at your heart and make you cry. her version of all my trials on this album is so nuanced and poignant it will blow you away. and silver dagger is fantastic, such guitar urgency. most of the songs on this album are just wonderful. i think that critical editor wanted some old man with a banjo from alabama to be doing these songs, someone more "authentic" like mississippi john hurt. well i love mississippi john hurt too, but joan is different and that's not wrong. just because her voice is the most beautiful and pure voice ever heard in american music doesn't mean that she is hence unauthentic. she's just doing something different with these tunes, which are, after all, folk tunes-- for all of us to sing. joan baez is The Voice of the early sixties, dylan's first fan, and the madonna of the guitar.

A clearly heartfelt belief in these old songs, expressed in a voice of incredible purity. This record was one of the inspirations for the idealism of the early Sixties.

Looking back at our wilted hopes, listening to Joan, still I am moved.

The original release date for this album (her second) was October, 1960, but no-one has since surpassed Joan Baez as a singer of Anglo-American ballads, most especially (in my opinion) those collected by Francis J. Child in his five volume work, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-1898). If you've never heard her sing, this album would be a good place to start. "Joan Baez Vol. 2" and "Joan Baez 5" also have some great ballads.

Joan Baez is a very admirable person. Her life and voice have been inseparable from the public events that have shaped the last four decades. However, I wish she could have sung more ballads and less soft pop (is that anything like soft porn?) and political ephemera. That's why I can't recommend any of her other, more recent albums (except "Nöel"). She was gifted with a clear, lyrical soprano that pierces like a flute and trembles like clear water. It is the perfect instrument to express the pathos and unrequited love of the minor keys. When she attempts a more robust C Major or G Major, she sounds jokey rather than robust--like someone in the manic phase of her bipolar disorder. I tend to disagree with the liner notes that suggest Joan has an effective snarl in her lower register in the song "Silver Dagger". She sings this Appalachian ballad in a way that will haunt you for decades, until you break down and purchase a CD remastering of the old vinyl recording that got loved to death. No snarl, though.

The remastered version of 'Joan Baez' contains three extra tracks, so you might prefer to purchase it instead of this album.

My favorite song on this album is from Child, "Vol. 6, Border Minstrelsy (Ballad #173)," more commonly known as "Mary Hamilton" or "The Four Marys." This ballad has almost the largest number of variants on record, an indication of its antiquity. Joan's arrangement is mercifully purged of most of the original Gaelic, and tells the story of Mary Hamilton, a lady-in-waiting at the Queen's court, who dies on the gallows because she killed her 'own wee babe' nine months after a tryst with the King.

Child relates the tune to the execution of Mary Hamilton in Russia on March 14, 1719. She was a maid of honor to Empress Catherine and was hung for the murder of her child. However, according to the "Viking Book of Folk Ballads," the song existed before the tragedy in Russia and therefore could not be related to it.

Another possibility for the scandal occurred in Mary Stewart's court in Scotland (which is the location mentioned in Joan's version of the song). A French maid had an affair with the Queen's apothecary and was hung for the murder of her child. There is speculation that the "apothecary" was actually Lord Darnley (the Queen's husband) in disguise. Legend has it that David Rizzio, the Queen's Chamberlain and close confidante found out about the affair and composed the tune and wrote the words. Lord Darnley's anger at Rizzio over the tune then contributed to his decision to murder Rizzio.

In Joan's rendition, the King attempts to rescue Mary Hamilton from the gallows, but she will have none of his belated sympathy. And so "Yestreen the queen had four Maries/, The night she'll hae but three/; There was Marie Seaton, and Marie Beaten/, And Marie Carmichael, and me." (the text from Scott's edition of 1833).

This is a great ballad, beautifully sung, and well worth the price of this CD even if it didn't also have "Silver Dagger," "East Virginia," "House of the Rising Sun (Joan recorded this lament before Bob Dylan)," and "All My Trials."

I was 13 when this album came out and I listened to it so much I wore off the vinyl the cardboard album cover long ago faded away but not the songs.Long black hair streaming down eyes clear and wise. She was singing old songs but with a new style new clarity. I can only imagine how much of an influence her and Mr Bob Dylan were to me then and still are today. They survived an era that not many did. Joan taught me I really can't sing. Which is good.
But I remember my heart full of joy swaying in the rain listening to her sing sweet chariot at woodstock now that endures a lifetime. To me this her first album is the best. Begin with her at the start of her career.

I first heard this album as a 33 record, in the 1960's. Hearing it again on CD is such a rush. I think early Joan Baez, quite apart from my own nostalgia, in her folk-singing period, was one of the shining stars of the genre. She turned me, and many of my contemporaries on to the "roots" of our folk traditions, and brought a grace and pure-voiced clarity to these songs that ensure they will continue to endure, even in the face of the modern day "ballads." I would love to hear her render some of Leslie Fish's "Filk" songs.

It is nearly impossible to overestimate the importance of this album. To fully appreciate its impact, one must appreciate how things were 1960 when women artists were expected to simply look pretty, sing whatever was put in front of them, and do whatever their (almost always male) producers told them to do. It was nearly unheard of for a woman to choose her own materal and chart her own course. And yet on this album (though Maynard Solomon is given production credit) Baez -- who was barely nineteen at the time -- is clearly behind the wheel. These thirteen traditional ballads, essentially comprising her live set at Cambridge's Club 47, are done exactly as she saw fit, simply and without extraneous background instrumentation. (Solomon did manage to convince Baez to add a second guitar on a handful of these tunes, but beyond that, the songs remain pretty much exactly as Joan had performed them live.)

Of course, Joan's magnificent soprano, at its peak here, and her precise, underrated guitar playing are the only instruments needed to intrepret these songs, but one could easily picture record company execs wanting to add lots of strings, backround singers, etc., in an attempt to get that all-important radio airplay. (Perhaps not Vanguard, but certainly a larger, more profit-minded company would have done so; this in mind, it's easy to see why Baez chose Vanguard over the more lucrative deal with Columbia she was offered at the time.)

Without the integrity and talent Joan showed on these early recordings, it's next to impossible to imagine the subsequent careers of Joni Mitchell, Bonnie Raitt, Emmylou Harris, Tracy Chapman, or virtually any other independent, serious-minded woman musician ever coming to fruition.

We have lots and lots of old Joan Baez recordings at home. This one however was one that we did not have until recently. When I found it on Amazon, I became interested in it because I had heard Tom Glazer sing "Henry Martin," when I was little. It was on my Christmas list to ask Santa Claus for it on CD, until I found it on Vinyl at a Friend's home. I asked her if I could borrow it and she said yes. I took it home and copied it onto a blank tape. We now listen to it in the car. If you don't already have this album BUY IT AT ONCE! You and your family will love it!

Sure, she had a voice that was purity itself. And she wasn't a bad guitar player either, which in itself would make this a pretty good record.

But the best thing about this record are the songs themselves. They're not ALL pretty, by any means. There is death among the flowers and love quite often goes unrequited, to say the very least (Silver Dagger, Mary O'Reilly). But when love DOES triumph, it is invariably True Love. People wander through France and through Spain in search of their absent lovers or wait for twenty years for them to return from a voyage (Henry Martin). Nick Cave has nothing on this stuff.

I was 11 when I received this album for my birthday. I had been playing the trombone for three years,( that has grown to 50 years ) and have played and sang and cried along with this masterpiece ever since. In 1967, I hit the road on my Harley with Dharma Bums in my grip and these songs carved in my soul and headed straight for Mexico.

Thank you, Joan