A selection of Joan Baez’s favourite books
As one of the most pivotal singer-songwriters in music history, Joan Baez rose within the folk scene of the 1960s with her unflinching gaze towards the political and cultural upheaval that was transpiring around her, lending her voice and guitar to the classics of the folk tradition and wielding her pen to craft protest songs that continue to stand the test of time.
From when she first set foot on the stage of the inaugural Newport Folk Festival in 1959, Baez may have become her generation’s hero of folk music, but she ventured into other genres that centred her primary mission of social activism and justice. Over the course of over six decades, she has written and performed songs within pop, country, gospel and Latin traditions. With a reverence for music and its ability to reach the hearts and minds of millions, the singer utilised its power to channel her gift of a beautiful voice and poetic hand.
“To sing is to love and to affirm,” she writes in her first memoir, 1968’s Daybreak, “To fly and soar, to coast into the hearts of the people who listen, to tell them that life is to live, that love is there, that nothing is a promise, but that beauty exists, and must be hunted for and found.”
Baez’s talents expanded into her ability to turn renditions of others’ songs into works of art all her own, as the folk music practice is accustomed to, possessing the range to give them a new life, from her reimagining of Bob Dylan staples like ‘Farewell, Angelina’ and ‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’, to classics by Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie and more. Some of her most beautiful work, however, comes from her own writing, and of course, the essential ‘Diamonds and Rust’ is a standout of her discography, which she wrote and composed in the aftermath of her relationship with Dylan.
Baez wrote what she recalls as her first song, ‘Sweet Sir Galahad’, about her younger sister, Mimi Farina’s relationship with her husband, Milan Melvin, recounting the story of him climbing through her bedroom window, using a bird-like melody to toast, “And here’s to the dawn of their days”. This shows that her songs are often grounded in the human experience, the fleeting nature of both joy and sorrow, the lasting impacts of heartbreak, the imperative of human connection and resistance against injustice. Distinct from her pen alone, she writes with a flair that attempts to find beauty and kinship in the darkest of times, and her songs function as a conduit for this.
Thus, one would expect Baez’s songwriting abilities to come from a love of reading, especially as she has published multiple books over the years, including 2024’s poetry collection, When You See My Mother Ask Her to Dance, but, as she admitted to The New York Times in 2023, she is not much of a reader.
“People give me books to read, and I just smile blankly and say thank you, and wish I were a reader, she said, “I know I’m missing a world of treasures”.
However, she compromises with her newfound love of Audible, “to both entertain and educate me,” she explains, as she listens to books while painting and drawing. To both the NYT and the City Lights Bookstore, she named the 2016 historical fiction novel A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles as her favourite of the last decade, the story of which follows Count Alexander Rostov, a Russian aristocrat who is sentenced to house arrest in a luxury hotel. Ann Patchett’s 2001 novel Bel Canto comes “a close second”, telling a fictional story based on the Japanese embassy hostage crisis of 1996-97 in Lima, Peru.
To City Lights Bookstore, Baez offers a further list of books that “have enchanted me over the last decade” with Helen Macdonald’s 2014 memoir H Is For Hawk making her self-described “short list”, which is a recounting of the author’s experience training a goshawk named Mabel, as they grieved their father’s sudden death. Her final pick was Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 Hamnet, the fictional account of William Shakespeare’s family and the tragic death of his 11-year-old son, Hamnet, which has since been turned into a film starring Jessie Buckley and Paul Mescal under the guiding hand of Chloé Zhao.
Baez’s picks, if nothing, reflect her penchant for storytelling, with a fusion of fiction and reality that is similarly mirrored in her own writing.
Joan Baez’s favourite books:
- A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
- Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
- H Is For Hawk by Helen Macdonald
- Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
