Customer Reviews
Great listening!
Listening to that exquisite voice brought back a rush of pure nostalgia. I was thrilled to recieve the Joan Baez CD. . . and the recording is sheer pleasure. . . . thank you very much indeed!.
Joan Baez, a first meeting
I was completely captivated. This was my first encounter with Joan Baez, back in the 70s. The purity and range of her voice, the quality of the songs and the simple guitar backing, all provided a very rich experience. "What have they done to the rain?" took my breath away, coming at a time when the nuclear debate was spreading world-wide. The contrast between the beauty of the melody and voice with the grimness of the meaning was very powerful. Time has not dimmed that first reaction.
Joan Baez at her very best. Buy It
It is entirely appropriate that Joan did these live albums so early in her career, as there is just something very right about hearing folksongs, both old and new in the presence of a live audience, as that is easily the most important point of folksongs, before they were mutated into the singer / songwriter product. `Joan Baez in Concert Parts 1 and 2' may have been the very first Joan Baez albums I heard, back in 1963, just a few months after having gotten my spiffy new portable record player for my small bedroom, and at least a year before I took to the Beatles and at least three years before I took to Bob Dylan.
As the performances are so simple and the only real job of the soundman is to faithfully pick up Ms. Baez' voice and guitar, these albums are as good or better than her first two albums, both done in the studio. They are doubly valuable in that, unlike so many pop live albums, these repeat none of the material on her first two albums.
One thing that makes these better albums is that they mix several contemporary or at least recent songs from American sources in with the traditional English folk stuff.
It's fun to reflect, from the safe distance of 43 years from the performance and over 65 years from the writing, on the failure of logic in some `protest' songs such as Woody Guthrie's famous `Pretty Boy Floyd' the performance of which Ms. Baez dedicates to Pete Seeger. One has no trouble believing that this bank robber never took a house from a family, until you think of what his robbery may have done to the savings of townspeople in pre-FDIC 1930s depression days. To Guthrie's piece she adds Malvina Reynolds' sweet `What Have They Done to the Rain' and Bob Dylan's powerful `With God on Our Side' and `Don't Think Twice, It's All Right'. The most powerful selection may be the end of Part 2, which closes with the `Battle Hymn of the Republic'. Put into context, this may be the second most powerful example of musical / political theatre I have heard, outdone only by my seeing Pete Seeger, live, performing the `Internationale' in the mid-1980s on a suburban American music festival stage.
Of the traditional stuff, Ms. Baez easily outdoes Fairport Convention's performance of Matty Groves. Her versions of the lyrics are slightly different from the Brits, but the performance stands head and shoulders above Fairport Convention's renditions. On the other hand, Ms. Baez is outdone by a fair distance by Mick Jagger on the singing of `Long Black Veil' which Mr. J does on an album of the same name with The Chieftains.
Most of this is quibbling though, as the overall impression of the album is super high quality, with Ms. Baez easily at the top of her game and in her moment in history. I saw her perform live in the early nineties and her voice was simply not what it once was, and there seemed to be less energy there.
If you want to experience Joan Baez, I strongly recommend her earliest albums such as these two.
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. You can see a complete list of all Joan Baez discography, or go back to the Joan Baez tabs
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