The Joan Baez song Joan Baez couldnt live without: “The gift is really enormous”
Bob Dylan and the Greenwich Village folk revival have been at the centre of music history discourse this past year. While the added appreciation of Dylan’s already god-like status is a nice perk of the release of A Complete Unknown, the real win is the growing appreciation for Joan Baez’s work among a younger audience.
Her self-titled debut album from 1960 introduced the world to an angelic voice that tackled political subject matter with a quiet sense of defiance. Paired with technical prowess on the guitar, she truly was an artist “at the forefront of a new dynamic in American music,” as Dylan once said.
As a central voice in a decade mythologised like no other, Baez’s appearance on the much-loved Desert Island Discs piqued the interest of listeners who doted on every breath of the tastemakers from such a culturally rich era. Unsurprisingly, a large part of her choices drew on the classical, putting it down to her mother’s influence. To dedicated Baez fans, that parallel has always been apparent. She remarks on classical music’s ability to put her in a trance, which is a hallmark of her own music, which, through delicate storytelling and a captive vocal ability, has stunned audiences for decades.
Unsurprisingly, a song that stood out in her selection in the episode came from a 1960s powerhouse with scruffy hair and a wicked ability to pen romantic lyricism to a guitar-led melody. No, it was not Dylan, but rather Van Morrison and his nine-minute epic ‘Madame George’, which Baez claimed she was “addicted to”.
But if you’ve ever wondered where Baez’s artistic self-assurance came from, you may be surprised to know it took time to grow. While her songs were brimming with an assured narrative voice and an unwavering sense of artistic authenticity, underneath the surface was a growing insecurity about her own position within a fickle and fame-driven music industry.
So, over 20 years after the fact, the title track from her 1975 record Diamonds & Rust has become a tender folk anthem that acts as a sign of her own artistic worth: “I underestimated the gift [her own talents] for many years. The gift is really enormous. There’s nothing egotistical about saying that because it is a gift.”
The song muses on her relationship with Dylan, which was both fractious and loving in equal measures, while his star rose to the point of Folk royalty. But while he was lauded as the ‘King of Folk’, she was quietly staking her claim as Queen among those who understood the power of folk. However, to the wider audience, Dylan’s celebrity grew thanks to his divisive and uncompromising manner. What followed was a complex understanding of her own genius in relationship to the fierceness of Dylan’s.
“People had told me about this incredible guy, writing these incredible songs,” she said, of the experience of meeting Dylan. She continued to explain that he “was just scruffier than I had pictured, he was very scruffy. But, what they had said to me about the songwriting to me was true.”
She continued: “I guess I saw him the first time in Gerde’s Folk City which is where one went to hear local folk music and he sang ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’ that night”.
Even when Baez is pushed to claim credit for Dylan’s rise to fame, she refuses, saying, “I adored his music and I adored him. It was jolly run racing around the country, which is what I was doing, driving to my own shows, and I would present him during my concert. And so certain credit is offered to me for that, but it would have been a question of time.”
While Dylan’s celebrity transformed the folk scene in the early 1960s into something larger and at times commercial, the heart of what developed the scene was not only a love for the purity of the genre but a deep sense of community. Artists weren’t shoulder barging each other off the stage at Gerde’s Folk City; they were absorbing their thoughts, allowing their work to not only form their view of a fractured world but inform them of their own artistic practices.
That sort of steadfast independence was what Baez had in spades and ultimately helped make her one of the most important voices of the scene. Her acceptance of his genius allowed hers to flourish, not only collaborating with him, but allowing her own painful experience of living in such a close orbit of his to inform her own painful experience as an artist that could eventually be moulded into one of folk’s finest ever tracks.
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