Joan Baez is not just a musician she is also a political icon. The artistry of her music comes second to her political conscience. Joan Baez employs music to communicate and advertise important political values. She could be identified as the mother of female singer songwriters she was one of the first women to have the songs that she wrote taken seriously and put to use by her peers.
Her 1st album called simply Joan Baez was released on the Vanguard label in 1960. It was released after her fantastic performance at the Newport Festival the previous year. Incredibly, it took only 4 days to record that album with some tunes being put down in just one take.
Joan Baez Volume 2, released in 1961, was the album that definitely lit a fire under her career. On that album her crisp and clear soprano singing voice reinterpreted traditional folk melodies accompanied only by an acoustic guitar. The album got onto the best seller list and made Baez a minor celebrity; it climbed to No. 13 on the Billboard album chart. It was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Contemporary Folk Performance category. The Greenbriar Boys played on a couple of of the tracks on the album.
Joan Baez Volume 5 (1965) is the album with which she publicised the message of the Greenwich Village Movement. The album had far less traditional folk tunes on it than her earlier albums. At this point Joan Baez grew to become the poster girl for protest tracks, sad to say this lead to her writing very little non-protest related work during the next few years. However, when you consider that folk music has for generations recorded the challenges of ordinary people Joan Baez during that period of time was being true to the origins of folk music.
Even now Joan Baez is politically very active, but is less public about it. However, she is very supportive of other artists, especially new ones who want to use music to support their fight for justice and fairness in the world.
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