Customer Reviews

Joan Baez

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The original release date for this album 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 "Noel"). She was gifted with a lyrical soprano that pierces like a flute and trembles like moonlit 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.

This CD contains two new songs that weren't on the original issue: "Girl of Constant Sorrow"; and "I know You Rider." You also get to hear Joan singing "John Riley" on two different tracks, the second time with an added verse. Note to Vanguard: that's a rather clunky way to fill an extra track.

My favorite song 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."

Before the Great Folk Scare of the 1960s, there was traditional music, songs that have triumphantly withstood the test of time and interpretation by thousands of singers both famous and of the back-porch variety. Folks have been singing these songs since before "music" was synonymous with "entertainment; they've been sung by mothers lulling their babies to sleep, and around campfires and kitchen tables, and as men (and a few women too!) went off to battle and to sea; they've been used to spread the news of palace doings and pirates and adventurers, and to tell the stories of regular folks going about their daily business. That's where these songs, sung so beautifully and cleanly by Joan Baez on her first album, come from, and the fact that these songs are still being sung and loved and passed on to the next generation is due in large part to Joan and Judy and Pete and even old Bob Dylan himself. They knew a good song, one that rings true to both the ear and the heart, when they heard one, and I remain perennially thankful that they saved them for us and our children and our children's children in such beautiful recordings as this.

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.

. . . humming in your chest, and in your eyes . . .

I didn't become aware of Joan Baez until the spring of 1970, when I moved into a communal house where several of the women my age played Joan, Judy and Joni a lot. Initially, I didn't like her all that much . . . the albums they had were 'Farewell Angelina', and 'Any Day Now', which are both collections of Bob Dylan songs. At the time, I much preferred the way Bob sang his own songs. I mean, these Baez albums were great mood enhancers, a/k/a background music, but I never considered buying them for myself way back then.

This situation changed in the mid-90's when I bought and read the book 'Baby Let Me Follow You Down: the Illustrated Story of the Cambridge Folk Years'. The author, Eric von Schmidt, was one of the very folksingers whom he was writing about, and boy, did he ever do a job of transporting me back in time, as it were. I began hunting for some of the older material, from where the urban folk revival started. One of my first acquisitions was Joan's first album. I absolutely fell in love with it.

Sure, Ms. Baez took a lot of flak for being in the habit of singing old traditional songs rather than the new topical protest material; and she didn't even write any of her own stuff. Then again, the artistry she summons when just singing is far more astounding than what many of the singer-songwriters were able to tap into while writing their own new tunes.

Her voice is pure, and her dynamics (ability to go from soft to loud and back again) is unmatched in the pop world. And there is quite a large acreage of feeling that inheres in, adheres to, and rustles in the deep undergrowth of her softer passages, then dances in the powerful frescos of her soaring soprano.

It's such that you don't dare listen to this on headphones--the alterations in volume are too great. It needs a relatively large, airy room to allow the attitude and ambience to emerge, for the delicately powerful sounds to swirl, grow into the strong, knowing organisms they are, then later to die away somewhere around the cornices (and other places).

[Or at the edge of space where time begins to steal the music away . . . until the whispered beginnings of the next phrase, or the next song.]

The person who recorded and engineered this did great work, by the way, not succumbing to the urge to compress the dickens out of the sound of this beautiful, amazing voice.

Be sure to check out her first two live albums. When she has the audience sing along with her on "We Shall Overcome", tears well up in me every time I hear it.

The recent PBS American Masters presentation of Martin Scorsese's "Bob Dylan: No Direction Home" made one thing clear: rather than history being unkind to Baez, the opposite is true. On a stage filled with luminaries, her voice transcended, rising above humbler vocal talents like a temple bell at a PTA meeting squabble.

When Joan sings "All My Trials," and hits the word "cold" in the line "The river Jordan is muddy and cold ..." she creates another language altogether - something simultaneously sinuous, tender, and bitter. You may only have one life. Do yourself a favor - somewhere along the way see the Alhambra in May, sip champagne in an Epernay cellar, turn out the lights and catch a Myrna Loy & William Powell flick, and listen to early Baez. Only a critical tendency to disparage perfection - passing over the Raphael to enthuse about Hieronymus Bosch - can account for any characterization of that voice as "removed". If removed, then why the goosebumps? Some prefer the sow's ear of homey folk to the silk purse of Baez. That's fine. Just don't attribute that bias to history. History will be the one in the corner with the headphones, playing "Silver Dagger" for the thousandth time.

I had this album almost forty years ago; loved it then; love it now even more. My old copy went the way of all classic albums: got stratched up, bent, lent, lost or destroyed. This is Joan before Viet Nam, before the Sixties, before the era of protest songs and political statements in music. It's pure singing, pure guitar, pure innocence and beauty. It's got old English ballads about sailing ships and maidens held captive by possessive parents. It's got American folk songs before they were adulterated, such as House of the Rising Sun before Eric Burton and the Animals Rock & Rolled it. Its songs are sad and beautiful.

Among the interesting quirks of this album, Joan sings several songs from a male point of view, "... there I met a fair pretty maiden" (East Virginia). "... it's been the ruin of many a poor boy. And, God, I know I'm one" (Rising Sun). Most artists change the words to fit there sex, but Joan doesn't on this album. It's endearing, and something I've never heard before or since.

Over the years I basically lost interest in Joan Baez. I enjoyed her to a degree for most of the Sixties, but eventaully her social statements and political activism seemed to overshadow her music. But this album stands out for its putiry -- pure music, pure Baez, pure enjoyment. Melancholy but without social guilt. I wonder if a younger generation can enjoy this purity. I recommend that you try it out.

It's 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. This collection of 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.

As a lifelong fan of Joan Baez the singer AND Joan Baez the activist, I will admit right off that I am so into her that I'm sure I lost all of my objectivity long ago. It's not that I love absolutely everything she sings, or that I don't appreciate many other singers as much or better. Perhaps I can state it best through a personal experience. When I was seven years old (1960), I heard "East Virginia" coming through the single speaker in my parents' hi-fi console. The song was not coming from the grooves of a vinyl disc, but over the airwaves, during a period when college radio stations were playing folk music, rather than rock 'n' roll. Anyway, that voice and that melody haunted me for years afterwards, and now I must blame Joan Baez for having turned me into a music junkie for the rest of my life. When I was in the fifth grade, a friend's sister put Joan's first LP on her portable record player. "Silver Dagger" knocked me right out of my seat, and when "East Virginia" started to play, it all became clear when and where I had heard that voice before.

JOAN BAEZ became one of the first LP's I ever owned, but I did not buy it until I was a couple of years older and had enough of my own money to spend. I used the word "blame" earlier, because I swear that if I had never bought an album, cassette or CD, I would be a rich man today. Buying music has kept me financially poor, but I can't say I'm too sorry, because it has made me feel spiritually rich. So, because of this early connection to music, I can still revisit and enjoy this essential record; and yet I have not frozen Joan into this period, as others seem to have done. I like songs of hers throughout her incredibly long career and she has made several albums that remain among my favorites. The first of five times that I've gone to see and hear Joan Baez live didn't come until 1983, and by then she was doing almost every type of song one could imagine. A recent CD, DARK CHORDS ON A BIG GUITAR, serves as a reminder that Joan is still a vital, restless talent who has never stopped growing. Her singing may not have the purity it did when she made this first record for Vanguard, and I won't say that her voice isn't finally beginning to show the ravages of time, but over the years she has made up for the loss of range with a greater depth of feeling, shaded no doubt by experience and life itself, and has added colors to her box of vocal tones (she may have lost the high end, but the low end is better than ever). So some of Joan's old, folkie fans dumped her when she went country, or later, when she started in with the pop music, or still later when she tried to rock out, but I've found her evolution to be rewarding and fascinating at every turn. It could not be so without that voice; but for me, as my story illustrates, it goes deeper.

Ray Kasten, for Amazon, describes the youthful Joan Baez's voice as "painfully pretty" -- a strange phrase, though I think I know what he is trying to say -- perhaps that folk songs should be more roughly presented? But how can he describe her "soprano [as] icy and removed"?-- it is the most moving, most heartrending voice voice in the history of folk singing, perhaps of all popular singing. An extraordinary voice, an extraordinary, talent, and and extraordinary recording.

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, fully remastered and with three additional bonus tracks.

This is an outstanding reissue. I owned the original Vanguard recording, recorded over 45 years ago, and it was a favorite. Discarded years ago, I've occasionally wondered if my fondness for this album had more to with nostalgia than the quality of the music. The answer is a resounding no. Baez sings a superb selection of material in an unaffected, natural manner. At this stage of her career, she had a lovely voice, and one whose quality seems to be suited perfectly to the material. The aural quality of this reissue is excellent and adjusted for inflation, this may be a lower price than the cost of the album when first issued.