‘Gracias a la Vida’: Joan Baez on her “theme song”
Violeta Parra was a Chilean composer, singer-songwriter, folklorist, ethnomusicologist, and visual artist. She pioneered the Nueva Canción Chilena, a renewal and reinvention of Chilean folk music. Inspired by traditional Andean music, she used song as a form of cultural commentary, detailing the experiences of Chile’s working class, poor, and rural communities.
Just a few years following Para’s death in 1967, Augusto Pinochet took power in a US-backed coup on September 11th, 1973, ousting the socialist president, Salvador Allende. What followed was 17 years of violent crackdown of the left and anyone seen to be against the regime. While Nueva Canción was always political, after the coup, it became the soundtrack of resistance.
Composed by Parra in 1966, ‘Gracias a la Vida’ – translating to ‘Thanks for Life’ – was included on Las Últimas Composiciones, which proved to be the last album she would publish before dying by suicide in 1967. One of Parra’s most renowned songs, it is performed throughout the world and remains one of the most covered Latin American songs in history.
For Joan Baez – synonymous with and an icon of 1960s folk – ‘Gracias a la Vida’ sits in her top five protest songs. “This is an anthem and a change-maker that’s kind of become my own theme song,” Baez comments. “It’s a huge protest song and sung everywhere where people are living under a Latin-speaking dictator. It came out of a dictatorship and a woman living with disappearances, killings and torture. Instead of some song of outrage, she sang this beautiful song of thank you. She’s thanking everything.”
‘Gracias a la Vida’ offers a moment of reflection. Parra takes time to look around and sings about everything in her life for which she is thankful – from the sky above her to laughter to her ability to hear. She finds beauty in both happiness and pain, placing the ugly next to the awe-inspiring. As tragic as her passing was mere months after penning the track, she recognised the need for bad to live alongside good – as their existence and meaning would lack substance without the other.
Throughout the decades, ‘Gracias a la Vida’ has not been forgotten, with deserved and continuous recognition from artists such as Mercedes Sosa, Deerhoof, and, of course, Joan Baez covering the track. 2011 saw the release of Violeta Went to Heaven, a biopic depicting her life and bringing light to her musical work.
In the film, when Parra is presenting her art to a curator at the Louvre – where it was eventually displayed – she’s asked multiple times about her artistic training. She reveals she’s had none, at one moment pointing to her art’s origins: her head and her heart. When asked about technique, she answers that it doesn’t matter what age she learned.
“The important thing is that my country is represented here,” actor Francisca Gavilán asserts.
With such dedication to Chile and its people’s struggles, it’s no wonder the activist had such a profound impact on Joan Baez. As Bob Dylan proclaimed when recalling the Greenwich Village folk revival scene, Joan Baez (or Joaney as he calls her) was at the cutting edge of the movement: “Joaney was at the forefront of a new dynamic in American music.”
