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After 50 years in the public eye, singer, songwriter, activist and folk icon Joan Baez is still in the vanguard. In music, her album, "Day After Tomorrow," released two years ago, was nominated for a Grammy and has become her best-selling record since the 1970s.
This past month, "Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound" aired on PBS as part of its "American Masters" series, which profiles "our most outstanding cultural artists." Series Executive Producer Susan Lacy believes Joan Baez, without a doubt, meets that standard. "Her artistry and her commitment to human rights make her a musical and political force as relevant today as when she first started.
Over the decades, Baez's activism, in support of civil rights, human rights, the environment and other causes, has taken her to Mississippi protests with Martin Luther King, Jr., to North Vietnam to pray during Hanoi's bombing, and to war-torn Sarajevo in 1993. Her principles have always been her compass. As she told the British newspaper The Telegraph, "The foundation of my beliefs is the same as it was when I was 10. Non-violence."
And through it all, there is her exquisite, ethereal singing voice. From her start in 1959 at Boston coffee houses, to Greenwich Village, then to many Newport Folk Festivals, with many records and concerts along the way, Baez's soprano with its pulsing vibrato has soared. On November 5, take the rare opportunity to hear Joan Baez live in concert at New Haven's Shubert Theater, when she performs her best-known songs as well as recently-recorded ones written by Steve Earl, Gillian Welch, Josh Ritter and more. Her performance begins at 8 p.m. Tickets are $35-$55. For more information, visit the Shubert's website.
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