‘Sweet Sir Galahad’

If you’ve ever had the humiliating experience of writing your first song, this will make you seethe. Where yours (and mine) was almost certainly some fumbling ditty about girls, the first song Joan Baez wrote alone was an absolute joy of a number based on her late sister’s romance with music producer Milan Melvin.

Yet, perhaps it’s natural to feel like you outgrow your first song, even if you famously performed it at the Woodstock Festival the way Baez did. She referred to the song, astonishingly enough, as “mediocre”, so perhaps there’s some worth in your initial attempts at songwriting after all.

‘It Ain’t Me Babe’

I’m sure deep down Joan Baez would like to go one article without the name Bob Dylan being mentioned. Unfortunately, her work with the ‘Dean of Dylanology’ means that she can turn a Dylan cover out like it’s absolutely nothing and make it utterly spellbinding. There are a boatload to choose from; in fact, her version of ‘Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word’ is probably number 11 on this list, but I had to go with this.

I mean, ‘It Ain’t Me Babe’ is one of the best songs of the whole 1960s, and her commanding presence on the track completely reframes it. Gone is the wily fuckboy Dylan portrays on the original, where you feel as if no-one’s actually asking him to be anything other than decent and that’s just beyond him. Baez makes this song about the emotional labour women are put through from day one, and it has immense power because of it.

‘Fishing’

With an artist as timeless as Joan Baez, it’s always strange to hear her in a song that dates her. Gone From Danger is an album that could only come from 1997, with its tasteful AOR backing trying its best to stamp any kind of identity from its music. However, Baez hasn’t performed consistently for over half a century to let a little thing like lifeless backing get in her way, and on this Richard Shindell cover, her righteous anger still shines through.

It helps that lyrically, the song couldn’t suit Baez better if it tried. A storyteller through and through, ‘Fishing’ could almost work as flash fiction when read from the page. In Baez’s hands, it becomes something vital, chilling, and, considering it’s about an undocumented Latin American migrant facing a US immigration officer, punishingly timely.

‘Silver Dagger’

Baez’s not-so-secret weapon has always been her ability to embody a song. Ironically, for such a musician’s musician, it’s a skill she shares with the greatest pop stars of any given time period. She has the ability to take any song and make it sound like it comes from within, no matter the source.

For most others, this is used to make songs written by a fleet of songwriters sound like the truth. For Joan, it’s used to make centuries-old songs sound fresh and modern. Take this example from her very first album. A song that historians have dated back to the 1820s at the very latest becomes a vital thing in the hands of a barely 19-year-old Baez. Lines like “They’ll tell you wicked, lovin’ lies / The very next evening, they’ll court another / Leave you alone to pine and sigh” are almost unforgettably modern when coming from her.

‘Gulf Winds’

Folk music finds itself in simplicity. Most often, it’s one person singing a song, either penned by themselves or passed down from somewhere else. That’s an act that, even for the most remarkable folk musicians, has a time limit. Good luck getting past the three-minute mark accompanied by nothing more than your own voice and an acoustic guitar. Trust a voice and a guitar like Joan Baez’s to go far beyond that mark, though.

The title track of her 17th studio album is ten straight minutes of Joan, an acoustic guitar and nothing else. Those minutes pass like they’re nothing at all, though, due to her evocative, riveting recounting of her upbringing. She goes deep into her relationship with her father and how the songs of his childhood kick-started her love of music decades ago. It’s rare that music is described as a craft, but ‘Gulf Winds’, more than perhaps any other song on this list, sees a master craftsperson at work.

‘The President Sang Amazing Grace’

Bad news for anyone with a conscience, I’m afraid, the work never, ever stops. There will always be atrocities committed in the name of bigotry and hatred, and all we can do is try to stem the flow. Case in point, Baez has recorded two songs about atrocities committed in Alabama. One, ‘Birmingham Sunday’, in 1964, and another, half a century later, in 2018.

God only knows what must have been going through the mind of Baez when she realised that, in a way, her entire recording career is bookended by stories like this. Spiritually, this spot represents both songs, but this version of the latter song, penned by Zoe Mulford, just about takes it. The sheer power Baez can wield with half a century’s worth of experience is breathtaking, and few songs show this off quite like this one.

‘Prison Trilogy (Billy Rose)’

As much as we like to believe we live in unprecedented times, the early 1970s were pretty terrifying, and Joan Baez found herself directly in the middle of it. The year before, Baez’s husband, David Harris, was sentenced to a year in prison for dodging the Vietnam draft. Baez’s apocalyptic anger at the injustice of it is all over the album she made in the aftermath of it, 1972’s Come From the Shadows.

While the album is decked with gorgeous backing from some of Nashville’s most sought-after session players, Baez leaves no room for interpretation here. This is, after all, an album that begins with ‘Prison Trilogy (Billy Rose)’, a rollicking ballad which climaxes with Baez singing, as sweetly as ever, “help us raze prisons to the ground”. Preach, Joan!

‘Dida’

For all the ground broken in the 1960s, outside of a very specific sphere of pop music, it was still a very small place for women. There were only so many spots for women in the world of rock, and this was doubly so in the world of folk music. This led to a competitive streak in anyone trying to make a name for themselves, and nowhere was this more apparent than with Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell.

Considering that Mitchell once said in all seriousness that “Joan Baez would have broken my leg if she could”, the moment they shared a song together couldn’t have been more beautiful. They don’t even need words, harmonising together over a jazz backing that could have come straight from a Mitchell record from later that decade.

‘Love Song to a Stranger’

Baez has a reputation for being a little prim, a somewhat stern figure writing politically forthright songs with a straight face. This reputation is desperately unfair since she also brought songs into the world as intimate and dazzlingly romantic as this classic from Come From the Shadows. It’s an ode to how a one-night stand can sometimes be exactly what you need at the time.

Perhaps this isn’t the best example of Baez being edgy, as she systematically removes any sleaze or danger associated with the act. However, it’s absolutely a cliché to still think of one-night stands these days, and the fact that Baez was showing how they could be life-affirming connections with a stranger, in 1972 no less, speaks to how her personal songs could be just as radical as her political ones.

‘Diamonds & Rust’

Come on, though, what else could it be? This isn’t to condescend her other works either, but there’s not a songwriter alive for whom this masterstroke wouldn’t be their crowning achievement. It’s a painful irony that this spellbinding song is inspired by Baez’s relationship with Bob Dylan, a man she’s been forced into the shadow of since the mid-1960s. However, he wrote many songs to match it, and a man as savvy as he surely knows that to be a fact.

What’s even more astonishing is that ‘Diamonds & Rust’ is an outlier. For an artist whose career has been so politically active, her crowning moment comes not from her vital political and social commentary, but from a love song of such potency that it will likely never be forgotten. The words she puts to her dalliance with Dylan are evocative and thoughtful. Specific enough to never be vague, yet universal enough that anyone can see themselves in them, this one is a masterpiece in a career full of them.