Joan Baez Is Still Protesting

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

News, Wnyc, David, Arts, Yorker, Society & Culture, Storytelling, Books, New, Remnick, Politics

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 16 October 2018

⏱️ 22 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“You know, I think as I get older,” Joan Baez tells David Remnick, “someone will show me a photograph”—of the March on Washington, for example—“and I’ll think, ‘Oh my god, I was there. And those people were there, and Dr. King said what he said.’ Sometimes, going into a historic moment, you know it, and other times you don’t know it. In that case I think by midway through the morning, we all knew.” Baez became the defining voice of folk music as it intersected with the leftist politics of the sixties and beyond. She performed at the March on Washington and at Woodstock; she went on a peace mission to Hanoi where she was caught in an American bombing raid; she adopted cause after cause. Her work has changed with her age. She can’t hit the high notes of her youth, and she stopped writing songs decades ago—or as she describes it, the songs simply stopped coming to her. Yet she has never stopped performing protest music. At WNYC’s studios, she played two songs from her new record, “Whistle Down the Wind”: one is a prayer for healing after the mass killing in Charleston, written by Zoe Mulford; the other a dirge on climate change by Anohni.

Transcript

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0:00.0	from one world trade center in manhattan this is the new yorker radio hour a co-production of the new yorker and w nyc studios don't sing love sauce you'll wake my mother she's sleeping, right by my side.
0:24.4	That voice, that ringing, remarkable voice, belongs to Joan Baez, circa 1960s, singing the first
0:31.0	song on her first album.
0:33.3	Baez was just 19 at the time, and she would soon become one of the defining voices of folk music
0:38.3	as it gained a much wider audience in the 1960s.
0:42.3	She performed with Pete Seeger.
0:44.3	She sang We Shall Overcome at the March on Washington.
0:47.3	She played Woodstock.
0:48.3	And in 1972, she joined a peace delegation to North Vietnam,
0:53.3	where she was caught in the bombing of Hanoi.
0:56.5	Baez is 77 years old now, and earlier this year she released a new album called
1:00.8	Whistle Down the Wind, and she said it might be her last album, but you never know.
1:05.6	She joined me at the studio at WNYC.
1:09.6	Tell me a little bit about Whistle Down the Wind,
1:11.9	how this album came to be,
1:14.9	what you wanted to be.
1:16.3	It seems to mirror in some way your very first record
1:19.2	in some ways in a very conscious way.
1:21.6	It does.
1:22.1	I mean, the very first thought about it
1:24.2	was of some kind of bookend
1:25.8	because I had already started thinking
	...

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