Baez - And a Voice to Sing With

JOAN BAEZ is a world-renowned singer, songwriter, and social activist. She has released over thirty albums, most recently her 2008 studio album, The Day After Tomorrow. In 2007, the National Academy of Recording Arts & Sciences presented her with a Lifetime Achievement Award. To learn more about Joan Baez and her music, visit www.joanbaez.com.

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COVER DESIGN BY THOMAS NG COVER PHOTOGRAPH BY DANA TYNAN

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PRAISE FOR
AND A VOICE TO SING WITH

[A] revealing autobiography... In charting her ascent in the world of folk music, Ms. Baez is possessed of rapier-sharp observation and recalls events in bright snapshots. Ms. Baezs 20-year metamorphosis from popular folk singer to 80s survivor provides an instructional tale from which one could extrapolate the changes in values in our society in the past two decades. [H]er honesty and ideals are appealing, and in her life story one can see the passage of an artistic Everyman. Joan Baez says, I was less than perfect, but also observes, I have led an extraordinary life. No one can disagree.

Barbara Goldsmith, The New York Times Book Review

Her reminiscence of 25 years of stardom has more range than most such memoirs... It also resonates with an eyewitness testimony of watchingindeed, makingcultural history. Eloquent and compassionate, Joan Baez has stunned millions with the purity of her voice; she has also acted unwaveringly on her non-party-line beliefs, and its fitting that her memoir would offer its own share of provocation.

Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe

A very personal memoir with stories of parents, siblings, and friends as well as rock musicians and movie stars; it is well written and, at times, moving. Recommended.

Tim LaBorie, Library Journal

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Copyright 1987 by Joan Baez
Introduction copyright 2009 by Anthony DeCurtis

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This Simon & Schuster trade paperback edition July 2009

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

Baez, Joan.
And a voice to sing with.
1. Baez, Joan. 2. SingersUnited StatesBiography.
I. Title.
ML420.B114A3 1987 784.4924 [B] 876506

ISBN 9781439169643
ISBN13: 978-1-4516-8840-5 (eBook)

Cover Photo Credits:
Front (Top): Dana Tynan; (Bottom, left to right): Bob Fitch Photo, Betsy Siggins
of Club Passim, Time Magazine / Getty Images, Dana Tynan, Jim Marshall /
courtesy of Joan, courtesy of Albert Baez, Getty Images, Associated Press

Spine: Time Magazine / Getty Images

Back (Top to Bottom): Getty Images / John Storey, Jim Marshall / courtesy of Joan, Corbis

FOR GABE

When people come up to me, as they do, and say something about the voice, there is a ninety-nine percent chance that they will also say something about the activism, Joan Baez explains about the two best-known aspects of her extraordinary life. And what they say is very moving to me. They talk about the part my activism has played in their lives, how it helped move them from one point to another on their journey.

The most affecting stories are from people who were in the military, she continues, how, when they were in Vietnam or another war zone, they got hold of an album, despite its being prohibited. They describe how they would play it at night, and what it meant to them. For some of them, it was part of their being able to leave the military. For others it was some kind of balm that helped them get through it all. When I hear stories like that, Im glad I was there.

As you read Joan Baezs candid, comprehensive autobiography, And a Voice to Sing With, which originally appeared in 1987, it sometimes seems that, from the time her first album appeared in 1960, when she was nineteen years old, to her opening the Live Aid concert in Philadelphia twenty-five years later, she was not simply there, but everywhere. She marched with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Mississippi and Alabama, and performed while pregnant in front of half a million people at Woodstock. She sang We Shall Overcome at Kings 1963 March on Washington, and she stood beside Vaclav Havel and Lech Walesa as they sought to free their countries from Soviet domination.

Baez spent decades traveling wherever she was most needed and could do the most good. She is a figure whose name is as indelibly linked to the ideal of nonviolence as those of King and Mahatma Gandhi. And despite the one-dimensional stereotype of her as a nave dupe of the left that still occasionally rears itself in the media, Baez has proven herself a thorn in the side of every regime, of whatever political stripe, that fails to live up to a civilized code of ethics.

Her account in this book of battles with the American left in the late 70s, after she criticized the government of Vietnam for human rights violations, should disabuse anyone of the notion that Baez is guided by anything other than a firm devotion to principle. If her values could lead her to visit North Vietnam during what turned out to be the most virulent bombing raids of the waranother completely riveting chapter of And a Voice to Sing With those same values would not permit her to countenance the post-war regimes brutality against its own people. For Baez, whats right is, quite simply, whats right.

For all those reasons, its very easy to gravitate toward her activism when discussing Baez; millions of people, in desperate situations all over the world, have had reason to be glad she was there for them. For many years that peerless degree of commitment was what mattered most to her. As she bluntly stated in 1970, music alone isnt enough for me. If Im not on the side of life in action as well as in music, then all those sounds, however beautiful, are irrelevant to the only real question of this century: How do we stop men from murdering each other, and what am I doing with my life to help stop the murdering?