28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Raw, romantic and radical: Joan Baez's 20 greatest songs – ranked!
As with a lot of her 60s peers, Joan Baez seemed slightly out of place in the 80s. She only released two studio albums that decade but came out swinging on Recently. It's a steely rebuttal of her ex-husband's memoir, which was downbeat about both their marriage and 60s radicalism: 'You could say we failed … but I prefer remembering the way we were.'
Most of the Gulf Winds album leaned towards commerciality and a sound that would now be called yacht rock, but the 10-minute title track is something else: Baez alone with her guitar, singing a potent, moving reflection upon her childhood, her Mexican heritage, her father's idealism and her parents' divorce.
The sound of Fishing is standard-issue late-90s post-grunge US rock, but it's a melodically powerful song: moreover, the barely contained fury with which Baez sings folk singer Richard Shindell's sharp lyrics – about an undocumented Latin American migrant facing a US immigration officer – is quite something to behold.
A perfect early example of what Langston Hughes called Baez's 'transmutation into self': her ability to impose her own character on to traditional material. Samuel Pepys wrote of singing Barbara Allen on New Year's Eve 1665; it seems unlikely his version was as spellbinding as the one Baez recorded.
There's something depressing about the fact that Baez's final album returned her to the territory of 1964's Birmingham Sunday, about the 16th Street Baptist church bombing: 44 years on, another protest song about another racist atrocity in a Black church, this time the 2015 Charleston shootings. Written by Zoe Mulford, it's an incredible song; Baez's reading lends it a stately dignity and power.
A departure for Baez, possibly influenced by Joni Mitchell. Children and All That Jazz is, as its title suggests, a witty, charming meditation on motherhood ('go to bed now – it's quarter to nine, I'm tired') recorded with jazz pianist Hampton Hawes. The latter's solo is fantastic, as is Baez's dramatic, triple-tracked vocal.
Amid the Joan album's covers of Lennon and McCartney, Tim Hardin and Jacques Brel, North stood out: it featured an early co-writing credit for Baez and a lovely, heart-rending melody. Peter Schickele's arrangement, meanwhile, is perfect: subtle, sympathetic, amping up the melancholy by way of strings and – very occasionally – glockenspiel.
Baez's name is most closely associated with that of Bob Dylan, but she also recorded the definitive version of Dylan's friend and rival Phil Ochs' most celebrated song, turning it into a UK Top 10 hit in the process. It's a beautiful performance that amplifies the lyric's empathy for societal outcasts, and the anti-war message of its final verse.
On which Baez, who came out as bisexual in 1973, offers a piano-backed and beautifully drawn portrait of two strangers meeting in a gay bar, which gradually turns into a rallying call. It was released in the year that American singer Anita Bryant began a virulent and widely publicised anti-gay campaign called Save Our Children.
In a sense, Baez's take on Silver Dagger is bowdlerised – other versions feature the lovers reacting to parental disapproval with a suicide pact – but no matter. The opening track of her eponymous debut album revealed listeners were in the presence of someone special, her guitar-picking intricate but urgent, her voice pure but affecting.
Both the previous year's Attica Prison uprising and her husband David Harris's imprisonment for refusing the Vietnam draft seem to hang over Prison Trilogy. It presses Nashville musicians into a pedal steel-decorated song, with a lovely tune that nevertheless carries an uncompromising message: 'Help us raze the prisons to the ground.'
A ubiquitous protest song of the 60s and beyond, yet Baez's version is arguably the most iconic: partly because she sang it during the 1963 march on Washington, but mostly because it perfectly balances tenderness and steely determination. She later called the song 'trite', but she sounds like she believes every word.
Apparently the first song Baez wrote alone, Sweet Sir Galahad sweetly details her widowed sister's romance with music producer Milan Melvin, setting the story of their courtship to the kind of melody that sounds as though it's always existed. Performing it at Woodstock, she called it 'mediocre'. It definitely isn't.
Baez's 1971 recording of the Band's American civil war epic was her biggest hit, but you'll need to root through bootleg recordings of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Tour to hear her best versions: far beefier-sounding than the studio version, amped up by the raw power of Dylan's backing band.
The psychology behind some of Baez's Dylan covers can give you pause – Farewell Angelina could be about her, or Dylan's departure from the folk scene, or both. She sang it at the Newport folk festival at which he 'went electric', and the result is sad magic: her voice cuts through to the song's emotional core.
In 2008, Joni Mitchell claimed she and Baez were frenemies – 'she would have broken my leg if she could' – but you wouldn't have known from this duet: their voices swoop around each other, the effect as warm as the sunlit room Baez stands in on the cover of Diamonds and Rust.
Baez performed many Dylan songs, but Love Is Just a Four Letter Word is definitively hers: Dylan has never recorded or played the song live. Lyrically and melodically, it's fantastic, clearly a product of his songwriting zenith: if the sitar on the studio recording proves a period detail too far, there's a great 1976 live version.
Written by Baez's brother-in-law Richard Fariña, about the Ku Klux Klan church bombing that also inspired John Coltrane's Alabama, Baez's performance is more lamentation than protest. It's a masterclass in the power of restraint, as if she has taken the line about singing 'so softly it'll do no one wrong' to heart.
Come From the Shadows was a political album – it featured a song admonishing Dylan for his lack of engagement – but it also contained one of Baez's most beautiful love songs, about the restorative powers of a one-night stand. Or as she puts it: 'Passionate strangers who rescue each other from a lifetime of cares.'
It's one of the great ironies of Baez's career: she is too often unfairly presented in pop history as merely an adjunct to Dylan's rise, yet the song you would present as incontrovertible proof of her greatness as a writer is about … Dylan. But for all its scattering of historical details, Diamonds and Rust could be about anyone: its cocktail of tender nostalgia, weariness ('here comes your ghost again') and simmering anger provoked by encountering an old flame with whom things ended badly is perfectly fixed, universally applicable and delivers an emotional gut punch.
