Joan Baez almost changed her name before her first concert
Designing a poster for her first club show in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a teenage Joan Baez weighed billing herself as Rachel Sandperl or Maria. She kept Baez, worried people would think she was hiding a Spanish surname. Within a year a barefoot appearance at Newport had launched a career spanning more than 60 years.
Baez was born on Staten Island on 9 January 1941. Her father Albert, born in Puebla, Mexico, earned a Stanford PhD in physics in 1950 and went on to help invent the X-ray microscope. His work with UNESCO kept the family moving, from towns across the United States to England, Switzerland, Spain, Canada and Iraq. The family became Quakers when she was small, which shaped her lifelong pacifism, and racial slurs aimed at her Mexican heritage pushed her toward activism early. She later refused to play segregated white venues on Southern tours.
Her memoir opens with the line that she was born gifted, a voice she says she can take no credit for. A ukulele and four chords got her playing rhythm and blues, which alarmed her parents. At 13 an aunt took her to hear Pete Seeger, and she began learning his songs. After high school in Palo Alto, her father took a post at MIT, placing her in Boston just as its folk scene was taking off; she lasted about six weeks at Boston University.
Bob Gibson invited her to sing duets with him at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival, and critics raved about the barefoot Madonna with the otherworldly voice. Vanguard then recorded her debut album in four days in a New York hotel ballroom. Her first three records all went gold. After her sold-out Town Hall concert in 1961, she read SRO in a clipping and assumed it meant sold right out.
In the early 1960s she introduced audiences to a little-known Bob Dylan, recording his songs early on, and artists including Joni Mitchell and Emmylou Harris followed her example. She sang fourteen songs at Woodstock in 1969, earned a 2017 place among Rock and Roll Hall of Fame honourees, and after leaving the stage in 2019 turned to painting portraits.
Source: Joan Baez
