In the early 1970s, Joan Baez moved to the Bay Area, buying a modest home on the San Francisco Peninsula. One of her neighbors was Ginetta Sagan, a Jewish-Italian woman who was imprisoned and tortured during World War II for her role in the Italian resistance. Sagan, who was setting up a West Coast chapter of Amnesty International, dropped by Baez’s place to ask for her help.
As Elizabeth Thomson describes in her new book, Joan Baez: The Last Leaf, Baez readily agreed: “Sagan’s guest room was their office, Baez answering the phone, stuffing envelopes and, crucially, fundraising, sometimes with small dinners at her home. Soon she was on the organization’s advisory board.”
Wait a minute: Joan Baez, at the time and for decades since one of the world’s best-known and most revered folk singers, stuffed envelopes and answered phones?
One of the virtues of Thomson’s book—as well as a new biography about Woody Guthrie by Gustavus Stadler—is that they make such disclosures seem slightly less astonishing. Both books humanize their subjects within the larger context of their activism. Baez and Guthrie were not mainly seeking money or critical acclaim, but to change the world.
Baez, lauded for what was indelibly dubbed her “achingly pure soprano,” has produced dozens of albums and appeared on stages all over the globe. Thomson, a London-based music journalist who has followed Baez’s career for decades, provides the backstory to her life’s work.
Thomson casts Baez as the fortunate child of immigrant parents—her father was a mathematical physicist of Mexican heritage, her mother a native of Scotland who lived to be 100—motivated by a desire to help others.
“Hers is a life that demonstrates the transformative power of music,” Thomson writes, saying Baez “used her gift to bring solace and hope to people who had little of either.”
Baez, Thomson writes, “committed her first act of civil disobedience” at age seventeen, refusing to take part in an air-raid drill at her high school in Palo Alto, California. That same year, 1958, she performed at an event featuring Martin Luther King Jr., beginning a relationship that would include singing “We Shall Overcome” to 250,000 people at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963.
Baez, who converted to Quakerism as a child, along with her family, was fundamentally committed to nonviolence. “I’m a nonviolent soldier,” she once told an interviewer. “For six thousand years, violence has not brought brotherhood nor peace nor liberty. It has brought chaos and fear . . . . We must look for another way of fighting.”
That she did.
Baez’s performance contracts forbid segregating audiences by race. She refused to appear on a prime-time television program that excluded Pete Seeger because of his leftwing views. In the mid-1960s, she joined the free-speech protests at the University of California, Berkeley, and marched from Selma to Montgomery for Black voting rights.
In 1965, Baez founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence in Carmel Valley, California. She was jailed for thirty-one days, along with her mother, for blocking the Armed Forces Induction Center in Oakland. Her then-husband, David Harris, drew a three-year prison term for draft evasion, which she talked about while performing at Woodstock.
During the war in Vietnam, Baez withheld the 60 percent of her income tax used for defense spending. She spent twelve days in Hanoi during Nixon’s 1972 Christmas bombing campaign.
“What I’m asking you to do is take some risks,” Baez wrote in the liner notes for her 1972 album, Come from the Shadows. “Stop paying war taxes, refuse the armed forces, organize against the air war, support the strikes and boycotts of farmers, workers and poor people, analyze the flag salute, give up the nation state, share your money, refuse to hate, be willing to work . . . in short, sisters and brothers, arm up with love and come from the shadows.”
Baez was involved in the Nuclear Freeze movement and the early gay rights movement, and opposed U.S. interventions in Latin America. In March 2003, at the beginning of President George W. Bush’s war on Iraq, she wrote a letter urging Secretary of State Colin Powell to resign from “this monstrous administration” of “elite, shortsighted warmongers.”
Baez was, along with Woody Guthrie, a key part of Bob Dylan’s early career. She would later immortalize their complicated relationship in the song “Diamonds and Rust,” which she regards as the best song she’s written. When I saw Baez perform in Madison, Wisconsin, in October 2016, she commented from the stage about Dylan’s selection, three days prior, for that year’s Nobel Prize in Literature, which he had yet to acknowledge. Her message: He surely deserved it, but where were his manners? (Dylan waited another five months to agree to accept the prize.)
Baez, who will turn eighty in January, remains active and engaged, in recent months decrying “the indifference, the callousness, the cruelty of the non-leadership of the federal government” in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and calling for “a nonviolent show of moral force against the ugliness, the treachery, and the seemingly endless stupidity which has run through our society and which led to the death of George Floyd and hundreds of others who suffered fates like his.” She put in a virtual appearance at The Progressive’s Fighting Bob Fest in September, performing Phil Ochs’s “There But for Fortune” from her California kitchen.
Joan Baez: The Last Leaf is a heartfelt and fitting tribute to a performer who proves the power of music and protest to bring positive change.
Baez, in her career, recorded a number of songs written by Woody Guthrie, including “Pretty Boy Floyd” and “Deportee.” Guthrie’s famous anthem, “This Land Is Your Land,” was the finale of the Newport Folk Festival in 1963, featuring Baez’s legendary set with Dylan. Musician David Massengill, interviewed by Thomson, names Baez, Dylan, Pete Seeger, and Guthrie as “the fulcrums in folk music. No one has come along to match any of them.”
Stadler’s book, Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life, deals less with the music legend and more with the man, whom he argues was not just a troubadour for working people but a celebrant of human sensuality devoted to the eradication of body shame. It is in this context that he tries to make sense of behavior that at one point got Guthrie locked up for sending sexually explicit letters to a female acquaintance—what would now be referred to as sexual harassment.
Stadler, a professor of English at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, admits he is not always enamored of his subject, a philanderer prone to neglecting his three consecutive wives and eight children. But he is awed by Guthrie’s productivity as a multifaceted artist and moved by his broadminded if not always appropriately expressed views on sexuality.
Woodrow Wilson Guthrie was born on July 14, 1912, in Okemah, Oklahoma, about sixty miles from where hundreds of white Tulsa residents laid siege to a prosperous Black neighborhood in 1921, killing some 300 people—an atrocity recalled this year when President Donald Trump chose Tulsa for a campaign rally, initially scheduled to occur on Juneteenth.
From the start, Guthrie’s life was marked by tragedy, including his mother’s horrifying decline due to undiagnosed Huntington’s disease, which led to fires in their home that killed his older sister and badly injured his father. (Later in life, Guthrie also lost his daughter Cathy to fire, four days after her fourth birthday.)
As Guthrie would recount in his celebrated “autobiographical novel,” Bound for Glory, his mother, Nora, would go from being fine to where “her face would twitch and her lips would snarl and her teeth would show.” The trauma of this, Stadler suggests, shaped Guthrie’s “life-long preoccupation with the fragility of bodies, with their propensity for coming unorganized and undone.” Nora ended up in an insane asylum, a common outcome at that time for people with Huntington’s; she died three years later, when Woody was still in his teens.
Guthrie, in Stadler’s telling, believed that feeling shame about one’s body “was a kind of social wound that could be treated by love and reassurance.” He waxed about people being either “too old or too young or too fat or too slim. Too ugly or too this or too that,” saying they were “pretty . . . to the eyes and ears and to the fingers of others.” He refused to make fun of anyone’s appearance.
As Guthrie’s musical and writing career brought him national fame, he “routinely pledged allegiance to socialism and communism as sciences of social and economic organization,” as Stadler puts it. This seems not to have caused Guthrie much trouble, except when FBI agents visited the husband of the woman he would later marry to ask, “Do you know your wife is having an affair with a communist?”
Guthrie died in 1967, at age fifty-five, after his own long battle with Huntington’s and what he called “my wild disease of alcoholism.” (Guthrie, shares Stadler, “took to carrying around a liquor bottle as a prop, so people would think he was drunk rather than ill with a grave disease.”)
Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life adds powerfully to our understanding of a man who, like Joan Baez, never shied from blending the personal with the political.