JOAN BAEZ, COMMITMENT & CIVIL RIGHTS IN SITGES

Joan Baez

Today, Claire Fontaine & The Grandma have gone to Sitges to listen to a legend of music and a great human rights activist, Joan Baez. They love her songs, many of them are considered hymns, and they admire her activism in defence of human rights around the world.

Claire and The Grandma don't live disconnected of the real situation of their day-by-day in their country which is suffering a terrible repression of a state that doesn't respect human and civil rights and attacks free speech and cultural difference.

Listening to Joan Baez is an incredible opportunity to take enough force to go on, to resist under this regime of repression, and also a wonderful way of remembering the fight in a favour of the civil and human rights along the last decades, a strong struggle reflected in the lyrics of her songs and in the beauty of her unforgettable voice.

Before going to Sitges, The Grandma has studied her Ms. Excel course.

Chapter 7. Cell Format (II) (Spanish Version)

Joan Chandos Baez (born January 9, 1941) is an American singer, songwriter, musician, and activist whose contemporary folk music often includes songs of protest or social justice.

Baez has performed publicly for over 60 years, releasing over 30 albums. Fluent in Spanish and English, she has also recorded songs in at least six other languages. Although generally regarded as a folk singer, her music has diversified since the counterculture era of the 1960s, and encompasses genres such as folk rock, pop, country, and gospel music.

Although a songwriter herself, Baez generally interprets other composers' work, having recorded songs by Bob Dylan, the Allman Brothers Band, the Beatles, Jackson Browne, Leonard Cohen, Woody Guthrie, Violeta Parra, the Rolling Stones, Pete Seeger, Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder and many others. On her past several albums, she has found success interpreting songs of more recent songwriters, including Ryan Adams, Josh Ritter, Steve Earle, Natalie Merchant and Joe Henry.

More information: Joan Baez

She began her recording career in 1960 and achieved immediate success. Her first three albums, Joan Baez, Joan Baez, Vol. 2, and Joan Baez in Concert all achieved gold record status.

Songs of acclaim include Diamonds & Rust and covers of Phil Ochs's There but for Fortune and The Band's The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down. She is also known for Farewell, Angelina, Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word, Forever Young, Here's to You, Joe Hill, Sweet Sir Galahad and We Shall Overcome.

Claire Fontaine & The Grandma in Sitges

She was one of the first major artists to record the songs of Bob Dylan in the early 1960s; Baez was already an internationally celebrated artist and did much to popularize his early songwriting efforts.

Baez also performed fourteen songs at the 1969 Woodstock Festival and has displayed a lifelong commitment to political and social activism in the fields of nonviolence, civil rights, human rights and the environment.

Baez was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame on April 7, 2017.

Baez was born on Staten Island, New York, on January 9, 1941. Joan's grandfather, the Reverend Alberto Baez, left the Catholic Church to become a Methodist minister and moved to the U.S. when her father was two years old. Her father, Albert Baez (1912–2007), was born in Puebla, Mexico and grew up in Brooklyn, New York, where his father preached to -and advocated for- a Spanish-speaking congregation.

Due to her father's work with UNESCO, their family moved many times, living in towns across the U.S, as well as in England, France, Switzerland, Spain, Canada, and the Middle East, including Iraq.

Joan Baez became involved with a variety of social causes early in her career, including civil rights and non-violence. Social justice, she stated in the PBS series American Masters, is the true core of her life, looming larger than music.

More information: DW

The opening line of Baez's memoir And a Voice to Sing With is I was born gifted, referencing her singing voice, which she explained was given to her and for which she can take no credit. A friend of Joan's father gave her a ukulele. She learned four chords, which enabled her to play rhythm and blues, the music she was listening to at the time. Her parents, however, were fearful that the music would lead her into a life of drug addiction.

When Baez was 13, her aunt and her aunt's boyfriend took her to a concert by folk musician Pete Seeger, and Baez found herself strongly moved by his music. She soon began practicing the songs of his repertoire and performing them publicly. One of her very earliest public performances was at a retreat in Saratoga, California for a youth group from Temple Beth Jacob, a Redwood City, California Jewish congregation. A few years later in 1957, Baez bought her first Gibson acoustic guitar.

Her true professional career began at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival. Following that appearance, she recorded her first album for Vanguard, Joan Baez (1960), produced by Fred Hellerman of The Weavers, who produced many albums by folk artists.

The War Is Over! Rally, May 1975

From the early-to-mid-1960s, Baez emerged at the forefront of the American roots revival, where she introduced her audiences to the then-unknown Bob Dylan, and was emulated by artists such as Judy Collins, Emmylou Harris, Joni Mitchell, and Bonnie Raitt.

Baez's distinctive vocal style and political activism had a significant impact on American popular music. She was one of the first musicians to use her popularity as a vehicle for social protest, singing and marching for human rights and peace.

Pete Seeger, Odetta, and decades-long friend Harry Belafonte were her early social justice advocate influences. Baez came to be considered the most accomplished interpretive folksinger/songwriter of the 1960s. Her appeal extended far beyond the folk-music audience.

In 1980, Baez was given honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degrees by Antioch University and Rutgers University for her political activism and the universality of her music. In 1983, she appeared on the Grammy Awards, performing Dylan's anthemic Blowin' in the Wind, a song she first performed twenty years earlier.

More information: ThoughtCo

Baez also played a significant role in the 1985 Live Aid concert for African famine relief, opening the U.S. segment of the show in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has toured on behalf of many other causes, including Amnesty International's 1986 A Conspiracy of Hope tour and a guest spot on their subsequent Human Rights Now! tour.

In 1993, at the invitation of Refugees International and sponsored by the Soros Foundation, she traveled to the war-torn Bosnia and Herzegovina region of former-Yugoslavia in an effort to help bring more attention to the suffering there. She was the first major artist to perform in Sarajevo since the outbreak of the Yugoslav civil war.

On April 4, 2017, Baez released on her Facebook page her first song in twenty-seven years, Nasty Man, a protest song against US President Donald Trump which became a viral hit.

In 1956, Baez first heard Martin Luther King, Jr., speak about nonviolence, civil rights and social change which brought tears to her eyes. Several years later, the two became friends, with Baez participating in many of the Civil Rights Movement demonstrations that Dr. King helped organize.

Martin Luther King, Jr. & Joan Baez

In 1958, at age 17, Baez committed her first act of civil disobedience by refusing to leave her Palo Alto High School classroom in Palo Alto, California, for an air raid drill.

The early years of Baez's career saw the Civil Rights Movement in the U.S. become a prominent issue. Her performance of We Shall Overcome, the civil rights anthem written by Pete Seeger and Guy Carawan, at the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom permanently linked her to the song.

Baez again sang We Shall Overcome in Sproul Plaza during the mid-1960s Free Speech Movement demonstrations at the University of California, Berkeley in Berkeley, California, and at many other rallies and protests.

Her recording of the song Birmingham Sunday (1964), written by her brother-in-law, Richard Fariña, was used in the opening of 4 Little Girls (1997), Spike Lee's documentary film about the four young victims killed in the 1963 16th Street Baptist Church bombing.

In 1965, Baez announced that she would be opening a school to teach nonviolent protest. She also participated in the 1965 Selma to Montgomery marches for voting rights.

Highly visible in civil-rights marches, Baez became more vocal about her disagreement with the Vietnam War.

Baez was arrested twice in 1967 for blocking the entrance of the Armed Forces Induction Center in Oakland, California, and spent over a month in jail.

More information: Nasty Man by Joan Baez

Baez was instrumental in founding the USA section of Amnesty International in the 1970s, and has remained an active supporter of the organization.

In 1976, she was awarded the Thomas Merton Award for her ongoing activism.

In 1989, after the Tiananmen Massacre in Beijing, Baez wrote and released the song China to condemn the Chinese government for its violent and bloody crackdown on thousands of student protesters who called for establishment of democratic republicanism.

In a second trip to Southeast Asia, Baez assisted in an effort to take food and medicine into the western regions of Cambodia, and participated in a United Nations Humanitarian Conference on Kampuchea.

On July 17, 2006, Baez received the Distinguished Leadership Award from the Legal Community Against Violence. At the annual dinner event, they honored her for her lifetime of work against violence of all kinds.

In 2015, Baez received the Ambassador of Conscience Award. 

Joan Baez & Bill Shipsey visit Carme Forcadell in prison

In 2016, Baez advocated for the Innocence Project and Innocence Network. At each concert, Baez informs the audience about the organizations' efforts to exhonerate the wrongfully convicted and reform the system to prevent such incidents.

In December 2005, Baez appeared and sang Swing Low, Sweet Chariot at the California protest at the San Quentin State Prison against the execution of Tookie Williams. She had previously performed the same song at San Quentin at the 1992 vigil protesting the execution of Robert Alton Harris, the first man to be executed in California after the death penalty was reinstated.

Baez has also been prominent in the struggle for gay and lesbian rights. In 1978, she performed at several benefit concerts to defeat the Briggs Initiative, which proposed banning all gay people from teaching in the public schools of California. Later that same year, she participated in memorial marches for the assassinated San Francisco city supervisor, Harvey Milk, who was openly gay.

On Earth Day 1999, Baez and Bonnie Raitt honored environmental activist Julia Butterfly Hill with Raitt's Arthur M. Sohcot Award in person on her 55 m-high redwood treetop platform, where Hill had camped to protect ancient redwoods in the Headwaters Forest from logging.

In early 2003, Baez performed at two rallies of hundreds of thousands of people in San Francisco protesting the U.S. invasion of Iraq, as she had earlier done before smaller crowds in 1991 to protest the Gulf War.

More information: The Guardian

In August 2003, she was invited by Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle to join them in London, UK, at the Concert For a Landmine-Free World.

In the summer of 2004, Baez joined Michael Moore's Slacker uprising Tour on American college campuses, encouraging young people to get out and vote for peace candidates in the upcoming national election.

In August 2005, Baez appeared at the Texas anti-war protest that had been started by Cindy Sheehan.

On June 25, 2009, Baez created a special version of We Shall Overcome with a few lines of Persian lyrics in support of peaceful protests by Iranian people. She recorded it in her home and posted the video on YouTube and on her personal website.

On March 18, 2011, Baez was honored by Amnesty International at its 50th Anniversary Annual General Meeting in San Francisco. The tribute to Baez was the inaugural event for the Amnesty International Joan Baez Award for Outstanding Inspirational Service in the Global Fight for Human Rights.

On November 11, 2011, Baez played as part of a musical concert for the protestors at Occupy Wall Street. Her three-song set included Joe Hill, a cover of the Rolling Stones' Salt of the Earth and her own composition Where's My Apple Pie?

Joan Baez has been a strong defender of the Catalan independence movement due to its non-violent nature. On July 21, 2019, she described Catalan independence leaders as political prisoners. A few days later, on July 26, 2019, she visited former President of the Parliament of Catalonia Carme Forcadell in prison.

More information: Catalan News

I think music has the power to transform people,

and in doing so, it has the power to transform situations 

-some large and some small.

Joan Baez