Joan Baez
b. Joan Chandos Baez, 9 January 1941, Staten Island, New York, USA. The often used cliché the queen of folk to Bob Dylan's king, Joan's sweeping soprano is one of popular music's most distinctive voices. An impressive appearance at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival followed the singer's early performances throughout the Boston/New England club scene and established Baez as a vibrant interpreter of traditional material. Joan's first four albums featured ballads drawn from American and British sources, but as the civil rights campaign intensified, so the artist became increasingly identified with the protest movement. Her reading of We Shall Overcome, first released on JOAN BAEZ IN CONCERT, PART 2, achieved an anthem-like quality. This album also featured Dylan's, Don't Think Twice, It's All Right and Baez then took the emergent singer on tour and their well-documented romance blossomed. Over the years she would interpret many of his songs, several of which, including Farewell Angelina and Love Is Just A Four Letter Word, Dylan would not officially record. In the '60s she founded the Institute for the Study Of Nonviolence. Baez also featured early work by other contemporary writers, including Phil Ochs, brother-in-law Richard Farina, Tim Hardin and Donovan, and by the late '60s was composing her own material. The period was also marked by the singer's increasing commitment to non-violence and she was jailed on two occasions for participation in anti-war rallies. In 1968 Baez married David Harris, a peace activist who was later imprisoned for several years for draft resistance. The couple were divorced in 1972. 
Although a version of the Band song, The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down, gave Joan a hit single in 1971, she found it hard to maintain a consistent commercial profile. Her devotion to politics continued as before and a 1973 release, WHERE ARE YOU NOW MY SON, included recordings the singer made in North Vietnam. A 1975 collection, DIAMONDS AND RUST, brought a measure of mainstream success. The title track remains her own strongest song. The story of her relationship with Dylan, it presaged their reunion, after ten years apart, in the legendary Rolling Thunder Revue. That in turn inspired her one entirely self-penned album, GULF WINDS, in which her songwriting continued to develop, often in new and unexpected directions. In 1989, she released an album celebrating 30 years of performing—SPEAKING OF DREAMS, which found her duetting with her old friends Paul Simon and Jackson Browne and, surprisingly, with the Gipsy Kings in a rumba-flamenco cover of My Way. However, Joan has preferred to concentrate her energies on humanitarian work rather than recording. In 1979 she founded Humanitas International, a rapid-response human rights group who first persuaded the US President Carter to send the Seventh Fleet to rescue Boat People. She has received numerous awards and honourary doctorates for her work. In the '80s and '90s Baez continued to divide her time between social activism and singing. She found a new audience among the young socially aware Europeans—The Children Of The Eighties, as she dubbed them in song. She retains a deserved respect for her early, highly influential releases. At the end of 1992 PLAY ME BACKWARDS was released to universal acclaim, this smooth rock album put Baez very much in the same bracket as Mary-Chapin Carpenter. Baez sounded confident flirting with rock and country.