ALBUM: blessed are … (1971)
MVC Rating: 3.0/$$
Joan Baez, a double-album. That’s just one breath for Joan. OK, that may be an exaggeration, but she can hold a note through an entire album side, I’m pretty sure.
With one of the most distinctive singing voices of all time, Joan is an iconic figure from the 1960s-70s anti-Viet Nam and civil rights scenes. She wrote some songs in her career but more often, it seems, performed other people’s songs. On this double-disc she covers the Beatles’ ‘Let it Be,’ the Band’s ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,’ and Kris Kristofferson’s ‘Help Me Make It Through the Night.’
Her sister, Mimi Farina, who lived north of San Francisco in Marin County, died of cancer in 2001. She, though overshadowed by Joan, was an excellent singer in her own right. As a Marin resident myself at the time, I read the local press and learned a lot about Joan and Mimi, including great charity work through Bread and Roses. At that time I was at the Oakland Tribune and Contra Costa Times. Paul Liberatore is an excellent columnist for the Marin Independent Journal (which later became our sister paper), He, was Mimi’s significant other.
That’s my shaky six degrees of separation from Joan Baez.
But to be honest after listening again to this I am mostly struck by her voice and the earnestness behind it, which is not quite the compliment it sounds. Maybe what I’m saying is I don’t need Joan Baez singing ‘Let it Be.’ The Beatles did a nice job with that.
That said, her life is certainly one of positive energy and activism.
And that voice.
Anyone besides me like to see her and Melanie in a singing showdown?
Counting my 678 vinyl records down before I die of brain disease.