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SPEAKER_01: A fear fighter manual for teens exists to loan courage to young people in the world, reminding them that they are never too young to make significant impact with their power, their voice and their action. Today, we're talking about the queen of folk music. She captivated audiences for 60 years with her warbling soprano and used her music as a tool to advocate for social justice and nonviolence. Please welcome Joan Baez. Joan was born on January 9th, 1941 in Staten Island, New York to pacifist Quaker parents. Her mother was born in Scotland while her father was born in Mexico and raised in Brooklyn. He worked as a physicist and his job with UNESCO kept their family moving around throughout Joan's childhood. Joan likes to say her voice is a gift, something she's lucky to have but cannot take credit for. She started sharing her gift from a young age. As a child, her father's friend gave her a ukulele and she learned how to play rhythm and blues songs. When Joan was 13, her aunt took her to see folk singer Pete Seeger in concert. Joan went home and taught herself how to play his songs. In 1958, Joan's family moved to Massachusetts where she started getting involved in the folk music scene. She gave her first concert that year at Club 47 in Cambridge. There were only eight people in the audience and she was paid $10. In 1959, Joan performed at the Newport Folk Festival. Nicknamed the Barefoot Madonna, she gained attention for her captivating voice and earned a record deal with Vanguard Records. In 1960, she released her first album featuring interpretations of traditional folk ballads like Wildwood Flower and House of the Rising Sun. She was only 19. In 1961, she gave a sold-out performance in New York City and her career continued to build momentum from there. Her next three albums went gold. Joan introduced her audience to other folk artists like the then-unknown Bob Dylan, whom she also dated. Over the years, she wrote original tracks, recorded protest songs and folk classics, and interpreted tunes by other artists she admired. More than just a musician, Joan was at the center of the social justice movement of the 1960s. In 1963, she performed the song We Shall Overcome at the March on Washington. The following year, she refused to pay federal taxes to protest U.S. involvement
SPEAKER_01: in Vietnam. And in 1965, she founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in Carmel, California. Joan went to jail for 10 days in 1967 for participating in a sit-in at a military induction center. During this time, Joan met anti-war organizer David Harris. The two were married the following year in 1968. The marriage was short-lived. David spent much of the marriage imprisoned for resisting the draft, which caused him to miss the birth of their son, Gabe, in 1969. Joan entered the Billboard's Top 10 for the first time in 1971 with the song The Nights They Drove Old Dixie Down. In 1975, she released what would come to be her most famous song, Diamonds and Rust, about her relationship with Bob Dylan. The pair reunited on Bob's Rolling Thunder Revue Tour that same year. In the 1980s, folk music waned in popularity. Joan was caricatured on Saturday Night Live and in the comic strip, Joanie Phoney, for her bleeding heart, hippie persona. But she still continued to release records and perform around the globe. In 2007, she received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, usually the sign of a career coming to a close. But the following year, Joan released the album Day After Tomorrow and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Contemporary Folk Album. She also continues to take part in protests. In 2011, Joan played at a concert for the protesters at Occupy Wall Street. In 2016, Joan performed in Standing Rock to protest the Dakota Access Pipeline. She wrote a new song for the first time in over 25 years following the election of President Donald Trump. She posted the tune called Nasty Man on her Facebook page and it went viral. Joan was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017. She stopped performing in 2019 and on New Year's Eve in 2020, she decided to stop singing. Joan lives in California where she paints portraits of her loved ones and artists she admires. All month, we're highlighting prodigies. For more information, find us on Facebook and Instagram at Wamanica Podcast. You can order Horizon Troublemaker everywhere books are sold. Special thanks to creators Jenny and Liz Kaplan for inviting me to guest host. Talk to you tomorrow.
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