Joan Baez – Joan Baez (1960)

Tracks: Silver Dagger//East Virginia//Fare Thee Well//House of the Rising Sun//All My Trials//Wildwood Flower//Donna Donna//John Riley//Rake & Rambling Boy//Little Moses//Mary Hamilton//Henry Martin//El Preso Numero Uno

We’ll never get anywhere at this rate...

Well, here’s the 60s, and we open with one of the most iconic styles of the decade – folk – and one of its most iconic figures – Joan Baez, naturally.

It’s difficult to say all that much about Joan Baez as a musician. Yes, she was seemingly everywhere when it came to activism and hobnobbing. She introduced the world to Bob Dylan! She developed a specialised form of yoga which allowed her to splinter into several thousand simulacra of herself, thus explaining her ability to appear in footage of seemingly every major political event of the early to mid 60s. She and her friends got together at a concert once and pestered Tom Waits off the stage. All fascinating and admirable of course, but leaving that aside is there really all that much to say about a young woman crooning along to a guitar?

Well, to Baez credit she did do it first. The album was recorded live with her sitting down on the floor in a hall somewhere or other – as Baez put it, at the time it was probably all she knew how to do. Well, thankfully she did it well. Not only does she possess a truly extraordinary voice, with a steady vibrato and near-inhuman control, but she was also a pretty good guitarist, and for some reason no matter how tired I sometimes get of rock music, I can always stomach a lightly handled acoustic guitar. Although putting good points aside, Christ but she doesn’t half belt at times. The high notes are enough to level a bunker.

Lyrically, we get the standard selection of songs from the folk repertoire, most of them kind of depressing. There’s even an alternative version of “Silver Dagger”, which we last heard on the Louvin Brothers album. Hey, that’s kind of neat. This seems to have been before the song-writing trend really took off in folk, back when it was all about being an interpretive artist and being “authentic” and such nonsense. All well and good but somewhat limiting. Then again, can Joan Baez even write? I don’t know – but she does fine singing these tunes and it’d probably be best if I focused on that a bit more. And hey, she slips in a few Spanish-American ditties too, which is only appropriate given her last name and gives the album a little something to make it stand-out amidst all the more resolutely blues-oriented stuff. The fact that "El Preso Numero Nueve" is actually pretty great is just the icing on the cake. Honestly, she gets angry and I fall in love a little.

But, like I said, there’s not much to say. On the one hand, this is groundbreaking stuff – it doesn’t sound like the 50s at all. Baez puts her stamp across everything, thoroughly updating some rather elderly tunes. “The 60s” have definitely arrived. Clear, clean production and a dynamic approach which is just sort of.. different. The results are, quite frankly, fucking amazing. I mean, look at a song like "The House of Rising Sun", which by a simple switch of gender pronouns turns from being a poor me story about debauching into a harrowing tale of girls trapped in prostitution. That's impressive And yet through the whole album we are mercifully spared overt politicising, with Baez instead couching her criticisms within the simple humanistic stories of the folk tradition. That's one of the things I've always like about folk and gospel music. But on the other hand, so many people have followed in her footsteps that close analysis seems almost irrelevant. Although having said that, as much as Sandy Denny owes to Joan Baez the two don’t really sound much alike.

Anyway, I’m not sure what I’m even talking about anymore. This is a very good, very beautiful album. As an interpreter of songs, you’d be hard-pressed to find many better. At turns eerie, funny, sad and just sort of there (in a good way). And then you have haunting and delicate tunes like "Mary Hamilton". Oh god, and the part where she sings "HE shall turn robber" in "Henry Martin". It's a song to send chills down your spine, her voice doing little tumbles like a trapeze artist.

Oh great now I have a crush on Joan Baez.

8.5

Download: Joan Baez - Silver Dagger MP3

Download: Joan Baez - Henry Martin MP3
Download: Joan Baez - El Preso Numero Neueve MP3