Hayley (Williams that is! Paramore) NEWPORT Folk Festival 2026

 I knew we liked her!

Hayley Williams and Joan Baez at the Newport Folk Festival 2026

Joan Baez played by Monica Barbaro in A Complete Unkown

 joan baez: i am a noise (2023) a

mean I know but these actors are canny folk eh?

not VERY like Joan! 

Monica Barbaro!

wot?!

 joan baez: i am a noise (2023) b

so much more than a noise IYAM!? This the woman who wrote Diamonds and Rust!

Birthdays | Happy 85th birthday to Joan Baez! | Don’s Tunes

"This vocal box has been extraordinary. It’s holding out OK and I don’t want to try and use it forever. I know some people strain to sing until they’re 100 and then drop dead on the stage, but that’s never been my vision of how I’d end the career. I like this voice. It’s nothing to do with the one I had 50 years ago, nothing at all, but I’m enjoying it and it’s also, at the same time, quite difficult to keep up.

It's hard to find something that doesn't have a long way to go. My little motto is "Little victories and big defeats." If you accept the big defeats, then everything you do as a small victory becomes real important. Or you see it as important -- as it is -- instead of trying to compare it to the big picture, which is too big and too complicated, and in many places, too awful to really want to deal with. "

 

Don's Tunes

“Bobby? . . . . . Is Bobby down there . . . . .? “

Bob Dylan and Joan Baez - It Ain’t Me Babe (live 1964)

Bob Dylan & Joan Baez Sing Together, 1965 ["DON'T LOOK BACK" OUTTAKE]

Bob Dylan & Joan Baez - Never Let Me Go (Live at Madison Square Garden) 

[Rolling Thunder Revue]

Joan Baez - "Diamonds And Rust" live (1978)

Before Bob was crowned King of Folk . . . . . . | Don’s Tunes

Long before Bob Dylan was crowned the king of folk, Joan Baez was the queen. Together, they formed a happy little relationship that changed the world forever from the unlikely foundation of bohemian disarray. They fed off each other in a whirlwind that Dylan thinks even defied reality, claiming that some of his songs weren’t written in the conventional sense; he simply found them somewhere out in the ether. For Baez, that was a little more literal sometimes.

The times were a-changing in more ways than one, and as Dylan proclaims, Joan Baez, or Joaney as he calls her, was at the cutting edge of the movement: “Joaney was at the forefront of a new dynamic in American music. She had a record out that was circulating in the folk circles, I think it was just called Joan Baez and everybody was listening to it, me included, I listened to it a lot,” he declares in the 2009 documentary Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound.

During that period, Dylan says, “She had crowds of thousands of people enthralled with her beauty and voice.” He was one of those enthralled by her, and soon they started to gravitate towards each other.

“People had told me about this incredible guy, writing these incredible songs,” and when Baez met him, she recalled he “was just scruffier than I had pictured, he was very scruffy. But, what they had said to me about the songwriting to me was true.”

He was also scruffy from a logistical perspective, writing masterpieces and then simply leaving them lying around. This was a bit of a windfall for Baez. “He was very creative during the short time that we were together, and I was going around stealing his songs,” she confessed on Desert Island Discs. “I mean, literally ‘Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word’ he wrote, dropped behind a piano somewhere and forgot about.”

She continues: “I retrieved it in my own house and learnt it. And I guess a year later was singing it, and he said, ‘Hey, that’s a great song, where’s that from?'” Dylan would ask. Baez would reply gobsmacked: “You wrote it, you dope!”

Source: Tom Taylor / Far Out

Photo by Keystone/Hulton Archive

Don's Tunes

I think we all agreed Tim Chalamet a fine job at portraying Bobby in blockbuster A Complete Unknown and that they chose someone, an equally fine an actor I believe, to portray Joan was a given but I don’t think she ever looked quite like this!?

For some reason I don’t care!

 Monica Barbaro

Unkind?

Hah!

I really just don’t care

Bob and Joan as relevant now as this Woody Guthrie song was then . . . . .

 Bob Dylan & Joan Baez | Deportee | Woody Guthrie Cover | 1976

Bob Dylan on modern Music! Interview Rolling Stone Issue 394 1986

 Toby Creswell: You have said recently that you didn't think rock & roll still existed in its pure form, that it was no longer viable. Would you put yourself in with that?

Bob Dylan: I don't think I put myself in that category. I'm not coming up anymore, you know what I mean? I probably was speaking about the industry itself. I listen to it but mostly I don't pay much attention to modern music. It's everywhere, in places that maybe it shouldn't be. There comes a time to shut off the radio, there's a time to turn off the tube, but the way it's projected into society there's not much of a chance that you can get to do that. There are very few people I know who play the real old-style music. When it first appeared, as I remember it, it was an escape from everything that was going on, which was mainly lies, so when music came it was a direction to pull you in that was out of this myth. But now nobody wants to get pulled out of the myth because they don't recognise it as being a myth. That's what it's like here anyway. They like where they're at, they like what's going on, and music is just an extension of that, so they like it, too. It's nothing different, it doesn't pull you anywhere. 

TC: So what's the solution? 

Bob Dylan: Turn it off. It's a decision people have to make. That's what the Sixties and the Fifties were all about. There are other ways to operate, to survive. There's got to be some type of light, some type of brightness outside of everything that you're given on a mass consumer level. What I can see is the mass monster. I don't know what it's like in Australia, but in America it's everywhere. It's invaded your home, your bed, it's in your closet. It's come real close to kicking over life itself. Unless you're able to go into the woods, the back country, and even there it reaches you. It seems to want to make everybody the same. People who are different are looked at as being a little bit crazy or a little bit odd. It's hard to stand outside of all that and remain sane. Even outrageousness gets to be in fashion. Anything you can think of to do, someone is going to come along and market it. I think it's going to change. I don't think it can stay like this forever, that's for sure. I think it's going to change but for the moment it's hard to find anything that's really hot. 

Toby Creswell Interview  Rolling Stone Issue 394 , January 16, 1986 

Photo: Jerry Schatzberg - Bob Dylan, Thumb and Eye, 1965,

Don's Tunes

Maybe only Joan could get away with this!?

 (what we would call making ‘long bacon’ = sticking your tongue out!) 

- Rolling Thunder Review

The original vagabond . . . . . Joan Baez - Diamonds & Rust 1975

 Joan Baez - Diamonds & Rust

and yes we have had this before . . . . . . . but it is the revisers side to Yo La Tengo’s Bucthie’s Tune and this is what it was like to be on the end of rejection from love . . . . . . . 

Joan Baez - BBC Sessions - In Concert - Dominion Theatre London UK 1993 | Albums That Should Exist

 

Joan Baez - BBC Sessions, Volume 3: In Concert, Dominion Theatre, London, Britain, 5-22-1993

Paul says : When I posted a "BBC Sessions, Volume 2" album by Joan Baez a few weeks ago, I noted that I probably was missing some other BBC concerts she did. That's still true, but at least I found this one since then. It took place in 1993. 

When I've thought about Baez, I've generally considered her a folk singer in her 1960s and 1970s heyday. But after listening to this, plus another BBC concert I've found from the 1990s, I'm more impressed with her later material. She didn't start out a songwriter, but she eventually grew into being a pretty good one. For instance, her big 1975 hit "Diamonds and Rust" was written by her. And she had good taste in cover versions. So although I wasn't familiar with most of these songs, I thought they were pretty good.

This remains officially unreleased. The sound quality is solid, although this was sourced from relatively low quality mp3s. I edited them a bit, but I couldn't improve things much.

This album is 53 minutes long.

01 Love Is Just a Four-Letter Word 
02 talk 
03 Isaac and Abraham
04 talk 
05 Amsterdam 
06 talk 
07 Play Me Backwards 
08 talk 
09 Strange Rivers 
10 talk
11 Welcome Me
12 There but for Fortune 
13 talk
14 Edge of Glory 
15 Diamonds and Rust
16 talk 
17 I'm with You 
18 talk 
19 Forever Young 

 

'Hard Rain' Bob Dylan Fort Collins 1976

 NEW VERY LOW GENERATION 

OFF MASTER

Deportees!

 As Facebook’s Alan Bershaw so wisely points out "Woody Guthrie wrote these lyrics 74 years ago and this penetrating performance is from 48 years ago, yet the song couldn't be more relevant today. "You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane. All they will call you will be deportees."

Joan Baez Diamonds & Rust, April 1975 | O My Soul [again . . . . . ] RADIO FOUR ‘SOUL MUSIC’ selection 12/10/2024

don’t think I will ever NOT post this haunting heartbroken song . . . . ..  it resonates 

O My Soul

Joan Baez Diamonds & Rust, April 1975.

and as by sheer coincidence this morning Radio 4  (BBC) has featured it in their series Soul Music

here . . .

Listen now

Diamonds and Rust

Soul Music

“Well, I'll be damned,
Here comes your ghost again…”

Joan Baez, also known as the "Queen of Folk", is halfway through writing a song one day when she gets a call from Bob Dylan. It’s 1974; almost 10 years after their relationship ended. The song went on to become the iconic ‘Diamonds and Rust’, an outpouring of memories from their time together in the early sixties.

Music writer Kevin EG Perry tells the story behind Baez and Dylan’s relationship, how they shaped each other’s worlds, and how this song came into being a decade later. Folk legend Judy Collins, also a good friend of Joan Baez, shares old memories of Newport Folk Festival alongside more recent memories of performing ‘Diamonds and Rust’ with Baez at her 80th birthday. And we hear from people whose lives have been touched by the song. Classicist Edith Hall listened to ‘Diamonds and Rust’ on repeat when she ended her first marriage, on the night that the Berlin Wall fell. And writer John Stewart looks back on a heady relationship from his early twenties, which was always bound up with the lyrics of this song. Decades later, this formative time in his life continues to resonate with diamonds, rust, and gratitude. 

Producer: Becky Ripley

Classic Songs revisited! | JOAN BAEZ - The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

 Joan Baez - The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down

Dylan of the Day :

 

Bob Dylan & Joan Baez — Wild Mountain Thyme The Savoy Hotel (Don’t Look Back footage 1965)

Someone posted this on the Facebook BD Fan page and here’s the whole song with the little clip they post included towards the end . . . . . it’s about the song not the people, well its about the people singing the song!

Lovely harmonies and don’t ever tell me otherwise . . . . . . . 

Bit clearer (louder?) +

Song of The Day | Diamonds and Rust - Joan Baez

 The most heart aching sad song from our Joanie!

while we were contemplating Joan’s birthday just lately and thinking that one of the first singles I bought was by her (from the bargain bins) ‘There But For Fortune’ [a Phil Ochs’ song] this came up and reminded me what a heartfelt superb piece of writing this is about heartbreak and long distance relationships whether separated by distance or time. It is assumed it is about her relationship with Bob . . . . . 

This song always haunts me . . . . . .. . 

 As it was Joan Baez’s birthday this past couple of days ago [ 9 January 1941 (age 83 years)]. . . . . . . someone posted this on Facebook

Photo of Joan Baez and Bob Dylan (1963)

“Strange it is to be beside you

Many years the tables turned

You'd probably not believe me 

If I told you all I've learned

And it is very, very weird indeed

To hear words like "forever", fleets

Of ships run through my mind, I cannot cheat

It's like looking in the teacher's face complete

I can say nothing to you, but repeat 

What I heard

That love is just a four-letter word.”

Bob Dylan and Joan Baez are photographed by Ken Regan during rehearsals for the Rolling Thunder Revue in October 1975 in New York City.

Sisters - Joan Baez & Mimi Baez-Fariña | circa 1960s

Saturday first song of the day : Joan Baez - Farewell Angelina

O My Soul

Farewell, Angelina - Joan Baez

JOAN BAEZ 82nd Birthday!

JUSTIN KANEPS FOR ROLLING STONE

Happy 82nd birthday to Joan Baez! 

“She was something else, almost too much to take,” Dylan said. “Her voice was like that of a siren from off some Greek island. Just the sound of it could put you into a spell. She was an enchantress. ... She’d make you forget who you were.”

Joan: "You can always kid yourself, and just say your work is important. Whether it is or not, it has to be to you. It has to be real to you. There’s something sort of cosmic about that. If that’s real to you, then in some way it’s out there as a little piece of reality in the face of all of this terrible stuff we’re in. And if you stay true to yourself, and true to your art, it’s got to mean something.”

with Bobby . . . . . 

 I bought this when a 7” single and the Phil Ochs song stayed with me forever . . . . . . . . . 

Joan Baez - There But For Fortune [Phil Ochs]

Joan Baez - Love is Just a Four Letter Word

Bobby and Joan - It Ain’t Me Babe! . . . . . . . Newport

Joan Baez - Diamonds and Rust

Photo: Ralph Crane. Joan Baez in 1962 sitting on the beach with her guitar near her home in Carmel, California.

Still in touch today

Song of The Day - Passing Through - Various artists (Leonard Cohen and Joan Baez)

this cover of “Passing Through” was recorded for the 1975 album the Earl Scruggs revue anniversary special. the track, arranged by Leonard Cohen, features Joan Baez, Cohen, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and the Pointer Sisters; also Joan Baez’s Bob Dylan impersonation is both spot on and totally hilarious

O My Soul

Tell the people that you saw me passing through . . . . . . . 

"I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night . . . . . " the story behind the song

Bruce Springsteen - Joe Hill (live)

 JOE HILL

More on Joe Hill after ZeroGsounds posted the album and these were explored by comment contributor Feilimid O'Broin 

Joe Hill

"According to Gibb Smith's book "Joe Hill", two people were shot and killed, a grocer who was a former policeman and his son, on January 20, 1914. The grocer, John G. Morrison, and two of his sons, Merlin and Arling, were in the process of closing Morrison's store at 10 p.m. when two armed, masked men entered, "We have got you now." His son Arling was also killed. The police believed that after his father was shot in the back, his son Arling took his father’s gun and shot one of the robbers.

At 11:30 p.m., Hill appeared at a doctor's office with a gunshot wound. Reportedly he told the doctor, "Doctor, I've been shot. I got in a stew with a friend of mine who thought I insulted his wife. When he told me I insulted his wife, I knocked him down, but he got up and pulled a gun and shot me. I have walked a way up here so I guess it ain't serious because this fellow that shot me didn't really know what he was doing, I want to have nothing said about it. If there's a chance to get over it, it will be O.K. with my friend."

Hill was armed according to the doctor but denied it and subsequently offered no explanation for why he was armed. However, according to Hill, when Merlin Morrison, the sole survivor of the gunfight, was brought to confirm Hill's identity as one of the men in the store, he said, "No, that's not the man at all. The ones I saw were shorter and heavier set."

When arraigned, Hill entered a plea of Not Guilty and rejected counsel on the grounds that he couldn't afford it. In all likelihood he didn't want a public defender because public defenders were employed by the same judicial system that was trying to convict him. Hill wanted to present a Pro Se defense. Hill was to be charged for only one of the murders, that of the grocer. Shortly after the preliminary hearing, an attorney visited Hill and informed Hill that he was a stranger in town who was interested in the case. Hill accepted his offer to handle Hills case free of charge. The attorney became a partner in Hill’s defense with another attorney. 

Hill’s behavior in court was unusual. He discharged his attorneys in open court and stated that they were in league with the district attorney and he could present a pro defense that was better than anything they could do. However, the judge instructed them to remain and assist Hill in his defense and Hill subsequently stated that they could remain but he would represent himself. According to one of Hill’s attorneys in a statement in August 1915, the jury’s foreman and some members of the jury informed him that they though the defense counsel convincing and leaned towards finding Hill innocent, but decided that his outburst and charge that his attorneys were working for the state were signs of his guilt. Moreover, when the Wobblies offered to assist Hill, he told them he did not want the union involved and thought he would be found not guilty and released. Notwithstanding, the Wobblies did organized a defense fund for hill.

The district attorney had stated outright that the state's evidence against Hill was only circumstantial and he would not prove directly that Hill had killed Morrison, but would instead submit a chain of circumstances from which guilt would be inferred.

Virginia Snow Stephen, the daughter of late Latter Day Saints (LDS) Church President Lorenzo Snow and an art professor at the University of Utah, was convinced that Hill was innocent and contacted a well-known labor attorney in Denver, who had been representing union members in high-profile cases for years. Hilton wasn't able to join Hill's team and recruited a local attorney sit in on the trial and handle an appeal, if one was needed.

Critics of Hill's conviction and execution note that Hill had no motive for the killing, the prosecution was based nearly solely on the fact he was shot that same night, and there was no reliable identification of him as one of the killers although Arling Morrison disputed Hill’s statement that he, Morrison, had failed to identify him as one of the killers. Under cross-examination, Arling admitted that the two men were masked and he could not identify Hill. Critics also contend that Hill's attorneys were incompetent. However, Hill did not testify and disclose any details of his alibi and was uncooperative with his counsel. 

One of the policeman who was at the scene of the crime testified that the police could not prove that Arling had in fact fired Morrison’s gun. Obviously if no shot was fired then Hill could not have been wounded by that gun. Yet the defense abruptly concluded its presentation and did not put Hill on the stand. Specifically the attorney recruited by the labor attorney advised Hill not to testify even though Hill has previously stated he would do so. The jury may have assumed that Hill’s failure to testify after saying he would was also a sign of his guilt.

Hill was undoubtedly innocent; however, he received poor advice from counsel and did not testify on his own behalf to explain the circumstances of his being shot. They also inexplicably concluded their presentation at a point in the trial when Hills testimony and further cross-examination of the witnesses might have been persuasive to the jury. Also, Hill’s outburst and accusations against his counsel probably swayed the jury to convict him even though no witness could definitively identify him. At best they could say that one of the gunmen was of similar height. Clearly, the governor acted unfairly and based on political bias. In fact, the Salt Lake Herald-Republican reported that the "Governor turns deaf ear to Wilson's appeal; Hillstrom to be shot to death this morning." The Salt Lake Telegram's headline read: "I.W.W.'s must leave Utah, says … [governor]."

Whether Hill could have received a fair trial is questionable because he was a transient and a Wobbly. However, despite the lyrics of a famous song about him, there’s no evidence that the copper bosses or state government officials conspired to have him tried and convicted. What is clear is that the governor was obdurate in the face of domestic and international protest and wanted a Wobbly-free Utah. As you note, with hours to go before Hill's scheduled execution, President Woodrow Wilson sent a telegram to Utah’s governor asking for a postponement so the Swedish minister; that is, the minister of Hill’s native country, could have time to examine the case. The governor reluctantly agreed, but when the stay expired shortly after Hill's 36th birthday, he refused Wilson's second request, and Hill was executed.

In brief, like the songs about Sacco and Vanzetti, the songs about Joe Hill ignore some of the actual facts concerning the defendants, such as carrying guns at the approximate time of the crime or when apprehended, in order to present a sanitized martyr. All three should be remembered as victims of unfair verdicts who were executed despite international outcry and the pleas of prominent citizens in the United States. Above all, all three should be remembered for being human beings with the virtues and flaws we all have who believed strongly in anarchism and were executed in large part because of their radical political beliefs. As political prisoners, they died with dignity under brutal circumstances and their executions exposed the gross inequities and need for change of the U. S. justice system. That justice system is still problematic as reflected in the disparities between sentences for white Americans and those of blacks, Hispanics, and American Indians. "

Feilimid O'Broin 

I Dreamed I saw Joe Hill Last Night - Joan Baez

Joe Hill - Songs of Labour Songwriter previous entry here . . .