AND A VOICE TO SING WITH -- A MEMOIR by Joan Baez © 1987 by Joan Baez Jacket design © 1987 Lawrence Ratzkin Jacket photographs by Matthew Rolston Printed in U.S.A. Copyright © 1987 Simon & Schuster, Inc. For Gabe While you and i have lips and voices which are for kissing and to sing with who cares if some one-eyed son of a bitch invents an instrument to measure Spring with? -- e.e. cummings Table of Contents Front Cover Preface PART ONE: "THE KINGDOM OF CHILDHOOD" 1. "My Memory's Eye" PART TWO: "RIDER, PLEASE PASS BY" 1. "Fill Thee Up My Loving Cup" 2. "Blue Jeans and Necklaces" 3. "Winds of the Old Days" PART THREE: "SHOW ME THE HORIZON" 1. "The Black Angel of Memphis" 2. "Johnny Finally Got His Gun" 3. "Hiroshima Oysters" 4. "For a While on Dreams" 5. "To Love and Music" 6. "I Will Sing to You So Sweet" PART FOUR: "HOW STARK IS THE HERE AND NOW" 1. "Lying in a Bed of Roses" 2. "Silence Is Shame" 3. "Dancing on Our Broken Chains" 4. "Where Are You Now, My Son?" 5. "Warriors of the Sun" PART FIVE: "FREE AT LAST" 1. Renaldo and Who? 2. "Love Song to a Stranger" 3. "No Nos Moveran" 4. "For Sasha" 5. "The Weary Mothers of the Earth" PART SIX: "THE MUSIC STOPPED IN MY HAND" 1. "Blessed Are the Persecuted" 2. "The Brave Will Go" 3. "Motherhood, Music, and Moog Synthesizers" 1975-1979 291 PART SEVEN: "RIPPING ALONG TOWARD MIDDLE AGE" 1. "A Test of Time" 2. "Recently I Was in France" 3. "How Brightly Glows the Past" 4. "Thalia's Ghost" 5. "Honest Lullaby" 6. "A Heartfelt Line or Two" 7. "Happy Birthday, Leonid Brezhnev" 8. "We Are the World" 9. "Gulf Winds" EPILOGUE PHOTO GALLERY Page One Page Two Page Three Page Four Page Five Page Six Page Seven Site Map AND A VOICE TO SING WITH -- A MEMOIR Front Cover: In the dressed-up 1950s, she was the dressed-down Barefoot Madonna, the Queen of Folk, an international star and Time magazine cover story at the age of eighteen. A decade later, she made headlines as the apostle of nonviolence, whose records went gold, and whose passion and energy made her a hero of the movements for civil rights in America and peace in Vietnam. When others left activism for the pleasures of the "Me Decade," she continued to take the cause of human rights to audiences around the world with her voice and her presence. And she opened -- as one of the few surviving stars of the 1960s -- the recent Live Aid extravaganza with a "Welcome, children of the eighties, this is your Woodstock." Today, at forty-six, twenty-nine years and more than thirty albums after her achingly pure soprano voice catapulted her to fame at the 1958 Newport Folk Festival, Joan Baez is still active, creative, and in her vocal prime. She has survived and grown with the times, and her name is now a part of our history. In this disarmingly frank, moving, and sometimes very funny memoir, she tells the story of her life, her loves, her beliefs, and her music. Written with an intense immediacy that comes from her mastery of the revealing detail, And a Voice to Sing With makes us feel we are there, with Joan, at the central events of our turbulent history -- from the smoke- filled coffeehouses of the 1950s folk scene, where she first performed, to the racially tense South of the early sixties, bringing support to terrorized blacks with Martin Luther King, Jr. We meet the Beatles on their first tour of the United States and go to jail with her for supporting the draft resistance. We huddle with her, terrified, in a bomb shelter in Hanoi and go on tour with her around the world -- to Woodstock, where she sang to hundreds of thousands in the middle of the night when she was six months pregnant, to France, Italy, and Spain where her concerts made headlines for the political confrontations they sparked, to a church in Poland where she sang to the brave workers of Solidarity. Whether she is recounting her stormy love affair with a young, undiscovered, and very ambitious Bob Dylan -- taking us back to the days they met in a dingy Greenwich Village hotel, or years later, backstage on Dylan's Rolling Thunder tour when they fought bitterly -- or her secret affair with a woman, or her marriage to David Harris and the pain of their breakup, Joan displays both the openness and vulnerability that have touched us in her music and the passion and integrity that have marked her politics. "I am not a saint. I am a noise," she wrote in a school essay at fifteen. And here Joan recounts how she infuriated and confounded the Daughters of the American Revolution and the IRS with her pacifism and recalls the time she playfully dared the saintly Thomas Merton to flee his monastery as they ate hamburgers in a field. She tells us about her principled clash with Jane Fonda over human rights abuses in Vietnam, how she chided Sakharov about disarmament after singing sweetly to him on the phone, how she intervened personally with Jimmy Carter to have the Seventh Fleet help the Boat People, and had the time of her life flirting recklessly with Don Johnson at Live Aid. With the perspective that comes from being a single mother in middle age, she looks back fondly on the young girl with the million-dollar smile. She tells how she successfully overcame the melancholic introspection that was so much a part of her early life and how she has found joy in her deeply loving relationships with her family and most of all with her son, Gabriel. Joan is candid about her struggle to remain fresh as a performer and writes about how, as tastes in music and politics change, she has held to her childhood conviction that violence must be stopped and continues to put her career in the service of her beliefs. Joan Baez is an extraordinary woman who has led an eventful and fascinating life. Her superbly written autobiography is as honest, unpretentious, and courageous as she is, and will stand as the testament of one of the most celebrated performers and activists of our time. Site Map AND A VOICE TO SING WITH -- A MEMOIR PREFACE God respects me when I work. He loves me when I sing. -- Tagore I was born gifted. I can speak of my gifts with little or no modesty, but with tremendous gratitude, precisely because they are gifts, and not things which I created, or actions about which I might be proud. My greatest gift, given to me by forces which confound genetics, environment, race, Or ambition, is a singing voice. My second greatest gift, without which I would be an entirely different person with an entirely different story to tell, is a desire to share that voice, and the bounties it has heaped upon me, with others. From that combination of gifts has developed an immeasurable wealth-a wealth of adventures, of friendships, and of plain joys. Over a period of nearly three decades I have sung from hundreds of concert stages, all over the world: Eastern and Western Europe, Japan, Australia, Northern Africa, South, Central, and North America, Canada, the Middle East, the Far East. I sang in the bomb shelters of Hanoi during the Vietnam War; in the Laotian refugee camps in Thailand; in the makeshift settlements of the boat people in Malaysia. I have had the privilege of meeting some extraordinary citizens of the world,· both renowned and unsung: Andrei Sakharov and Elena Bonner; The Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina, Mairead Corrigan in Belfast, Bertrand Russell, Cezar Chavez, Orlando Letelier; Bishop Tutu, Lech Walesa; Presidents Corazon Aquino, Francois Mitterrand, Jimmy Carter, and Giscard d'Estaing; the King of Sweden. Through Amnesty International I have met political prisoners who have endured repression and tortures under both right- and left-wing governments and who have astounded me with their humor, good cheer, and courage. And, of course, Martin Luther King, Jr., more than any other public figure helped to solidify my ideas and inspired me to act upon them. The music business has brought me into contact with some of the most creative artists of our time, from Bob Dylan and the Beatles to Luciano Pavarotti. But the last six or seven years have been difficult for me musically, though I enjoy a distant respect from the music industry. But distant respect does not pay the bills. My music has suffered more of an identity crisis in the United States than in the other countries where I am known, and as a result I have often felt something of a dissident in my own land. My personal life has also been complicated-and public-though I am beginning to find more of a sense of peace and self- cceptance than I ever thought possible. Once I wanted to be married and have heaps of kids scrambling around me, licking cake mix off eggbeaters and riding Saint Bernards through the kitchen while I cooked stew over an open fire. Alas, those images bore no relation to my areas of competence, and since my marriage to David Harris dissolved in January of 1974 I have lived mainly alone, with occasional romantic interludes, the best of which are magical and splendidly impractical. The last was with a Frenchman half my age who entered my life on horseback one misty afternoon and kept my spirit aglow for four years.