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Features rare performance footage and candid interviews with David Crosby, Bob Dylan, ex-husband David Harris, Reverend Jesse Jackson, Roger McGuinn, and more

Joan Baez made her debut appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959. Fifty years later she returned to that same Rhode Island stage on August 2, marking her and the festival’s 50th anniversaries. She is presently on a worldwide tour in celebration of her 50 years as a performer and in support of her Grammy-nominated CD, Day After Tomorrow.

In the first comprehensive documentary to chronicle the private life and public career of Joan Baez, American Masters examines her history as a recording artist and performer as well as her remarkable journey as the conscience of a generation in Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound, premiering nationally Wednesday, October 14, 2009 at 8 p.m. (ET) on PBS (check local listings). The film coincides with the DVD/CD release on October 13th on Razor & Tie. This DVD/CD will feature the film with bonus content and an audio CD of music from the film. The audio CD contains rare live performances and studio recordings that span her career.

“From an early age, Joan Baez had the courage of her convictions,” says Susan Lacy, series creator and executive producer of American Masters, a six-time winner of the Emmy Award for Outstanding Primetime Non-Fiction Series. “Her artistry and her commitment to human rights make her a musical and political force as relevant today as when she first started.”

Following Baez on her 2008/2009 world tour, the filmmakers captured Baez in performance as well as in intimate conversations with individuals whose lives parallel hers. From a stop in Sarajevo, Bosnia to revisit the scene of Joan’s courageous trip to that war-torn city in the middle of the 1993 siege, to Nashville, Tennessee, where she joined Steve Earle to talk about their collaboration on Joan’s 2008 Grammy-nominated album Day After Tomorrow, the film allows viewers an unprecedented level of access to Ms. Baez.

Shot in high definition with a natural, filmic look, Joan is also joined on screen by, David Crosby, Bob Dylan, Roger McGuinn and Reverend Jesse Jackson, among others, to illuminate this extraordinary life. Rich historical archival footage – Baez’ controversial visit to North Vietnam, where she is seen praying with the residents of Hanoi during the heaviest bombing of the war; Martin Luther King Jr. outside a California prison where he visited Joan to offer his support after she was jailed for staging a protest; Joan at her first Newport Folk Festival in 1959 and Joan as a teenager performing at the historic Club 47 – is woven into the story so viewers can experience scenes from Joan’s life that have never been uncovered.

The grit of the film is Baez’ power as a musician – from her tentative teenage years in the Cambridge, Mass coffee houses to her emergence onto the world stage and the 50-year career that followed – Joan Baez is a musical force of nature and this film captures her strength as a performer and the influence she has brought to bear on successive generations of artists.

Related: watch Joan Baez perform her rendition of Pete Seeger’s classic “Where Have All the Flowers Gone” for the crowd at Pete Seeger’s 90th Birthday Celebration at Madison Square Garden, presented by GREAT PERFORMANCES.

Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound is a co-production Razor & Tie Entertainment and THIRTEEN in association with WNET.ORG. The film is produced by Mark Spector and Mary Wharton and directed by Wharton. Susan Lacy is the series creator and executive producer of American Masters.

American Masters is produced for PBS by THIRTEEN. To take American Masters beyond the television broadcast and further explore the themes, stories, and personalities of masters past and present, the companion Web site (pbs.org/americanmasters) offers interviews, essays, photographs, outtakes, and other resources. American Masters is made possible by the support of the National Endowment for the Arts and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding for American Masters is provided by Rosalind P. Walter, The Blanche & Irving Laurie Foundation, Jack Rudin, Rolf and Elizabeth Rosenthal, The André and Elizabeth Kertész Foundation, and public television viewers. Additional funding for Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound is provided by The Michael & Helen Schaffer Foundation.

Themes of hope and homecoming weave through Day After Tomorrow. Other songs explore the individual and collective anguish of life during wartime starting with the Tom Waits title track, “Day After Tomorrow” (introduced on his 2004 album Real Gone and reprised as the emotional closing track of Body Of War, the award-winning 2007 documentary of a paralyzed Iraq war recruit) and the haunting “Scarlet Tide” (written by Elvis Costello and T Bone Burnett for the 2003 Civil War film, Cold Mountain).

Day After Tomorrow, recorded in Nashville, is Joan’s first full-length album collaboration with Steve Earle, who produces, plays guitar and sings harmony. Earle is represented on two new compositions: “I Am A Wanderer,” written overnight before one of the sessions and the album’s opening track, “God Is God” (which has already won a place in Joan’s concert sets, along with Earle’s perennial “Christmas In Washington”—“So come back Woody Guthrie/ Come back to us now…”). A third Earle tune closes the album in a cappella form, “Jericho Road,” a song that would not be out of place on a Staples Singers record (from Earle’s most recent album, Washington Square Serenade), though Joan is careful not to characterize it as a “gospel” tune.

On two songs, Earle plays the harmonium, an unusual instrument with a curiously unique sound: “Henry Russell’s Last Words” by Diana Jones (a true account based on an American mining disaster); and Austin, Texas stalwart Eliza Gilkyson’s “Requiem,” from her 2005 album, Paradise Hotel. “Requiem” is one of two Gilkyson songs on Day After Tomorrow, along with “Rose Of Sharon” (from Eliza’s Redemption Road of 1997). “A little gem,” says Joan, “such a sweet song. If I didn’t know otherwise, I would have just assumed that it was an old English folk song.”

Earle assembled a first-rate core of Music City “A-Team” players to accompany Joan, each one a headliner in his own right: respected singer-songwriters and multi-instrumentalists Tim O’Brien (who shows up on mandolin, fiddle, and bouzouki) and Darrell Scott (guitars, dobro, banjolin, bouzouki), who frequently appear on each other’s records; bassist extraordinaire Viktor Krauss; Nashville elder statesman Kenny Malone on drums and percussion; and an occasional jingle of tambourine by the album’s veteran recording engineer Ray Kennedy (Steve Earle’s long-time producer).

Guest appearances are limited to two singers on Day After Tomorrow. Ray’s wife, Siobhan Kennedy, sings harmony on “Mary,” a Christian allegory written by Patty Griffin for her Flaming Red album of 1998. (The song took on a life of its own on the first Concerts for a Landmine Free World benefit album in 2001 and then on Willie Nelson’s Songs for Tsunami Relief benefit album in 2005.) U.K. singer/songwriter Thea Gilmore recorded her harmony vocal in Liverpool for “The Lower Road,” one of the songs on her May 2008 album Liejacker, her tenth album in ten years—though the song made its way to Joan months before.

Mary Wharton showing footage to Joan Baez in her dressing room after a shoot.

Growing up in the 1970’s, I was mostly aware of Joan Baez from her hits of that decade, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “Diamonds and Rust.” I don’t think I had any idea about her connection to Bob Dylan (I didn’t know that “Diamonds and Rust” was about him) and I was pretty much unaware of Joan’s earlier incarnation as the Queen of Folk. I do remember knowing that she was “political” and that as a kid growing up in the South during the Vietnam War, I had respect for a woman who was not afraid to speak her mind. I also remember being entranced by her exotic beauty and ethereal voice. But I can’t say that I really followed Joan’s career or knew any more than just the headlines of the Joan Baez story before I got involved with this project.

Embarking on the task of telling Joan Baez’s incredibly rich life story was daunting enough – I had much to learn about this multifaceted woman. To be a part of the widely respected American Masters series was both an honor and a source of added pressure. American Masters is the home of great films by great directors, and it was important that this piece be worthy of both the series and of it’s subject. Easier said than done.

Joan Baez’s 2008 tour had been set up with stops in places that played a part in Joan’s story. Her manager, Mark Spector, served as a producer on the film and it was his idea to film Joan in those places and reconnect her with people from her past. His thinking was that these scenes would resonate in the film in a more powerful way than a typical interview.  Some of these situations worked out better than others, but Mark’s instincts were correct. The shoots that were successful turned out to be some of the most emotional moments in the film.

Everyone who has seen the film remarks about the strength of the scene where Baez sits down with her ex-husband David Harris. I think that’s because it’s rare to see two people be honest with each other about what drew them together and what drove them apart. If the two people were simply interviewed and that footage was intercut in a “he said, she said” exchange, you would miss the power of the look in their eyes as they confront their bygone relationship face to face.

What’s not spelled out in the film is that the scene was shot at Struggle Mountain, the northern California commune where Joan and David lived together while they were married. It’s hard to say if the conversation would have been different if we had shot it somewhere else, but I believe that the immediacy of the location allowed a certain openness in the conversation that would have felt stilted and false in a television studio or some other hired location.

Another location that had a definite power over the film was Sarajevo.  Although we were only in Sarajevo for a few days as we followed the Joan Baez tour from Bosnia to Slovakia, the experience of being in Sarajevo and the people I met there will stay with me forever.

Vedran Smailovic, Anthony Decurtis and myself at the site of our shoot in Sarajevo. He is telling us about the massacre that he witnessed there during the war.  You can see some holes in the building from shrapnel. In Sarajevo today, buildings are still riddled with bullet holes and the scars of explosions.

Planning a shoot in Sarajevo was not without risk. When you’re making a documentary, you always run the risk that you’ll start shooting and not capture anything compelling, or that something compelling is happening, but you aren’t able to capture it because of timing, technical difficulties, or any number of different reasons. But when you spend a lot of time and money just to get to a place and then you only have a few days there to get what you need for the film, the pressure increases.

We knew that the story of Joan’s trip to Sarajevo during the siege in 1993 was compelling – we had the archival footage of that trip – anyone could see that this was a great piece of Joan Baez’s history.  Mark managed to track down Vedran Smailovic, who Joan had met when she was there, and arranged for him to meet us in Sarajevo for the shoot.

Vedran Smailovic was once a cellist for the Sarajevo Opera who had witnessed a horrific massacre during the war. In response, he did the only thing he could think to do – he played his cello. Every day for 22 days, in honor of the 22 people who were killed in the massacre, Vedran went into the street in his tuxedo with his cello. In an extraordinary act of bravery, he risked being shot by snipers or killed in an explosion so that he could play the same piece of music every day – Albinoni’s Adagio. (Read about Vedran’s experience in this New York Times article from 1992).

When Joan went to Sarajevo in 1993, she was taken to meet this man – at the site of the massacre, where he was performing. You can see in the archival footage that Joan is wearing a bulletproof vest. In some shots, you can hear sniper fire and explosions. We did not add any sound effects to this part of the film. Anything you hear is actual gunfire and explosions from the real footage of Sarajevo at that time. It was a difficult and dangerous time to go to Sarajevo. It is estimated that an average of 15 people were killed and 44 wounded every day during the siege. The airport was closed; roads into the city were barricaded. But that didn’t stop Joan Baez. She was told that she could help the people there, and so she dropped everything and she went.

During the siege, normal people were trapped in Sarajevo. Serbian forces took up positions in the hills surrounding the city and kept up a constant assault with rocket-launched aircraft bombs, heavy machine guns and random sniper fire. Shipments of medical supplies, food, and heating oil were cut off. People were starving, freezing in winter, and cut off from outside news. Many lived in underground shelters to stay out of the line of fire. This went on for almost 4 years.  Joan Baez’s visit was the first tangible sign to the people of Sarajevo that the outside world was even paying attention to their plight.

After the siege had ended, Vedran got out of town as soon as he could and had not returned – except for one quick return trip to rescue his cello. But he agreed to come back “For Joan,” and asked us to send him money to cover his travel expenses.  We wired him the money, with some trepidation. Not knowing if his Bosnian accent would prevent American viewers from understanding what he said, or if the reunion with Joan would be as powerful as the original meeting in the archival footage had been, or even if he’d really show up. But we took a leap of faith and hoped we had made the right decision.

We decided to travel with only the key members of the crew, to save money, and hire local crews wherever we went (Again, not without an element of risk – would the crew be any good? Would they speak English?). We narrowed down the traveling crew to just myself, the director of photography, James Fideler, and Anthony Decurtis, the respected music writer who had signed on to the film to help guide the conversations and conduct interviews. Mark would be traveling with Joan on her tour bus and we’d join the tour in Sarajevo.

After some 20 hours of travel, with stops in London and Budapest, James, Anthony and I arrived in Sarajevo. (By the way, if you’re ever stuck in the Budapest airport, the local brew that they serve in the bar is actually quite tasty and helps to wile away the hours…) It was late at night when we finally arrived at our destination – but one of our two cameras did not make the journey.

The airport baggage office told us the equipment had missed the flight from New York to London, and had been re-routed to Atlanta for another flight that would supposedly connect with the next flight into Sarajevo – the next day. We were scheduled to shoot the next day and I knew that even in a best-case scenario – the 2nd camera would not arrive in time.  I called our fabulous associate producer, Joyeux Noel, back in New York to ask her to find us another camera. Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to track down a high-definition digital video camera in Sarajevo on a moments notice, but I was worried that it would be impossible. I didn’t sleep much that night.

Vedran met us in the morning for breakfast at our hotel. He arrived like an angel of darkness, dressed head to toe in black leather, with silver skull necklaces around his neck, smoking like a house on fire.

Vedran Smailovic enjoying his breakfast of coffee and cigarettes.

After breakfast, Vedran took us to the shoot location – the street where he and Joan had first met. But now, instead of a war-torn bombing site – it was a busy shopping street, with bustling cafes and shops, like one would see in any modern European city.  Worried that the actual spot of the bombing would be too noisy and hectic, I made arrangements with a nearby café to shoot there if it didn’t work out with the street scene.

Then Vedran insisted that he take us to a nearby café / bar that was decorated like a little curio box. It was gorgeous – every nook and cranny crammed with antiques and interesting objects. We met an old friend of Vedran’s there, who was so enthusiastic when he made a toast to Vedran that his wine glass shattered and the entire contents emptied onto my head and shoulders. I just sat there for one of those moments that feel like an eternity, until I saw a look of horror on Vedran’s face as he asked me, “Are you bleeding?” But it was just red wine, dripping down my face as I sat there in a state of shock.

So then it was back to the hotel, to change out of my wine-soaked clothes, and check in with Joyeux back at the office to find out what progress she had made with the camera. Our camera was still lost in transit, but we were told that it was scheduled to go on a flight to Vienna and would be routed to Sarajevo. I wondered if it would even make it there before we had to leave town. In the meanwhile, Joyeux had made arrangements for the local crew to bring another camera that was similar to what we were using, but not the right model. It would have to do.

When we all converged again on the street scene, it was even busier and noisier than it had been in the morning. In order for me to stay out of the sightline of the two cameras, I had to stand so far back from Joan and Vedran that I could barely hear what was said. Since their on-camera reunion only took about 5 minutes, I asked them to go over the story of their meeting again at the café, as a safety, because I wasn’t really sure that they had covered everything that I would need to tell the story.

Here I am asking Joan if we can do it again at the café, as Vedran looks on.

When it was all said and done, I really didn’t know if this footage was going to work. I knew that the two cameras would never match exactly and I was concerned about how bad the audio would be with all the background noise. But I knew we had to try to make it work.

When I came back to start editing the film, I requested news footage from the siege of Sarajevo to help illustrate the story. I was surprised to find home video footage of the actual massacre that Vedran had described to me. I recognized the street because the buildings all looked the same except that in the footage, the windows were broken. But the street itself looked completely different from the place that I had been. Everywhere were dead and wounded victims of the bombing, and the street was literally a river of blood. It was the most horrific scene I have ever seen in my life. We used only the most tolerable moments in the film, and still it is harrowing.

As many times as I’ve seen it, the Sarajevo section of our film affects me every time. Just as the power of Joan’s voice, when she sings “Amazing Grace,” cuts through the other noise in that footage, the things that can sometimes get in the way of appreciating archival footage – bad video quality, background noise that sometimes overpowers what you really want to hear – are not a barrier here. Somehow the emotion of the scene overpowers the technical problems and it is incredibly moving. To me, this is one of the most important moments in the film.

When we first began this project, it was really important to me to show that Joan Baez has stayed true to her non-violent beliefs to this very day.  When all the rest of the flower children cut their hair and became yuppies, Joan continued to fight for what she believed in, regardless of if was trendy or not and without regard to her reputation or even her own safety. Her trip to Sarajevo is by no means the only example of her ongoing commitment to human rights, but it certainly is a good illustration of the lengths that she has gone to further the cause of non-violence.

I entered into this project with respect for Joan as an artist and an activist. I ended it with a new hero. I can only hope that when I get to be her age that I look half as beautiful as she still does, and that I can maintain a creative career for as long as she has and still remain true to the reason that we both chose our respective careers in the first place – so that we could communicate with people. It feels pretentious to include myself in the same sentence as Joan Baez; I certainly don’t see myself as an artist on her level. But we are both storytellers, and the fact that I was given the honor of telling her story lets me put myself, if not on the same stage as her, as least in the building. I was there. This is what I saw. I hope that other people who watch the film will come away with as much love and respect for Joan Baez as I gained in the making of it.

A stunning soprano, Joan’s natural vibrato lent a taut, nervous tension to everything she sang. Yet even as an 18-year old, introduced onstage at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959, her repertoire reflected a different sensibility from her peers. In the traditional songs she mastered, there was an acknowledgment of the human condition.

She recorded her first solo LP for Vanguard Records in the summer of 1960, the beginning of a prolific 14-album, 12-year association with the label. Her earliest records, with their mix of traditional ballads, blues, lullabies, Carter Family, Weavers and Woody Guthrie songs, cowboy tunes, ethnic folk staples of American and non-American vintage, and much more—won strong followings in the U.S. and abroad.

Among the songs she introduced on her earliest albums that would find their ways into the repertoire of 60’s rock stalwarts were “House Of the Rising Sun” (the Animals), “John Riley” (the Byrds), “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” (Led Zeppelin), “What Have They Done To the Rain” (the Searchers), “Jackaroe” (Grateful Dead), and “Long Black Veil” (the Band), to name a few. “Geordie,” “House Carpenter” and “Matty Groves” inspired a multitude of British acts who trace their origins to Fairport Convention, Pentangle, and Steeleye Span.

In 1963, Joan began touring with Bob Dylan and recording his songs, a bond that came to symbolize the folk music movement for the next two years. At the same time, Joan began her lifelong role of introducing songs from a host of contemporary singer-songwriters starting with Phil Ochs, Richard Fariña, Leonard Cohen, Tim Hardin, Paul Simon, and others. Her repertoire grew to include songs by Jacques Brel, Lennon-McCartney, Johnny Cash and his Nashville peers, and South American composers Nascimento, Bonfa, Villa-Lobos, and others.

At a time in our country’s history when it was neither safe nor fashionable, Joan put herself on the line countless times, and her life’s work was mirrored in her music. She sang about freedom and Civil Rights everywhere, from the backs of flatbed trucks in Mississippi to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s March on Washington in 1963. In 1964, she withheld 60% of her income tax from the IRS to protest military spending and participated in the birth of the Free Speech movement at UC Berkeley. A year later she co-founded the Institute For The Study Of Nonviolence near her home in Carmel Valley. In 1966, Joan Baez stood in the fields alongside Cesar Chavez and migrant farm workers striking for fair wages and opposed capital punishment at San Quentin during a Christmas vigil. The following year she turned her attention to the draft resistance movement. In 1968, she recorded an album of country standards for her then-husband David Harris. He was later taken into custody by Federal marshals in July 1969 and imprisoned for 20 months for refusing induction and organizing draft resistance against the Vietnam war. As the war escalated, Joan traveled to Hanoi with the U.S.-based Liaison Committee and helped establish Amnesty International on the West Coast.

In the wake of the Beatles, the definition of folk music—a singer with an acoustic guitar—broadened and liberated many artists. Rather than following the pack into amplified folk-rock, Joan recorded three remarkable LPs with classical instrumentation. Later, as the 60’s turned into the 70’s, she began recording in Nashville. The “A-Team” of Nashville’s session musicians backed Joan on her last four LPs for Vanguard Records (including her biggest career single, a cover of the Band’s “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” in 1971) and her first two releases on A&M.

Within the context of those albums and the approaching end of hostilities in Southeast Asia, Joan turned to the suffering of those living in Chile under the rule of Augusto Pinochet. To those people she dedicated her first album sung entirely in Spanish, a record that inspired Linda Ronstadt, later in the 80’s, to begin recording the Spanish songs of her heritage. One of the songs Joan sang on that album, “No Nos Moveran” (We Shall Not Be Moved) had been banned from public singing in Spain for more than 40 years under Generalissimo Franco’s rule and was excised from copies of the LP sold there. Joan became the first major artist to sing the song publicly when she performed it on a controversial television appearance in Madrid in 1977, three years after the dictator’s death.

In 1975, Joan’s self-penned “Diamonds & Rust” became the title song of an LP with songs by Jackson Browne, Janis Ian, John Prine, Stevie Wonder & Syreeta, Dickey Betts of the Allman Brothers Band—and Bob Dylan. His Rolling Thunder Revues of late 75 and 76 (and resulting movie Renaldo & Clara, released in 1978) co-starred Joan Baez.

In 1978, she traveled to Northern Ireland and marched with the Irish Peace People, calling for an end to violence. She appeared at rallies on behalf of the nuclear freeze movement and performed at benefit concerts to defeat California’s Proposition 6 (Briggs Initiative), legislation that would have banned openly gay people from teaching in public schools. Joan received the American Civil Liberties Union’s Earl Warren Award for her commitment to human and civil rights issues and founded Humanitas International Human Rights Committee, which she headed for 13 years. She won the San Francisco Bay Area Music Award (BAMMY) award as top female vocalist in 1978 and 1979. A number of film, video and live recordings released in Europe and the U.S. documented her travels and concerts into the ’80s.

In 1983, she performed on the Grammy awards telecast for the first time (singing Bob Dylan’s “Blowin’ In the Wind”). In the summer of 1985, after opening the U.S. segment of the worldwide Live Aid telecast, she later appeared at the revived Newport Folk Festival, the first gathering there since 1969. In 1986, Joan joined Peter Gabriel, Sting and others on Amnesty International’s Conspiracy of Hope tour; her subsequent album was influenced by the tour, as it acknowledged artists and groups whose lives in turn were influenced by her, with songs from Gabriel, U2, Dire Straits, Johnny Clegg, and others. Later in 1986, however, she was chosen to perform The People’s Summit concert in Iceland at the time of the historic meeting between U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Soviet General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Joan’s 1989 concert in Czechoslovakia was attended by many of that country’s dissidents including President Vaclav Havel who cited her as a great influence in the so-called Velvet Revolution.

After attending an early Indigo Girls concert in 1990 (the year after their major label album debut), Joan teamed with the duo and Mary Chapin Carpenter (as Four Voices) for a series of benefit performances. The experience reinforced Joan’s belief in the new generation of songwriters’ ability to speak to her. When her album, Play Me Backwards, was released in 1992, it featured songs by Carpenter, John Hiatt, John Stewart, and others.

In 1993, Joan became the first major artist to perform in Sarajevo since the outbreak of the civil war as she traveled to war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina at the invitation of Refugees International. The next year, she sang in honor of Pete Seeger at the Kennedy Center Honors Gala in Washington, D.C. Also in 1994, Joan and Janis Ian sang for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s Fight the Right fundraising event in San Francisco.

In 1995, Joan received her third BAMMY as Outstanding Female Vocalist. Joan’s nurturing support of other singer-songwriters came full circle with her next album, Ring Them Bells. This idea of collaborative mentoring was expanded on 1997’s Gone From Danger, where Joan was revealed as a lightning rod for young songwriting talent, with compositions from Dar Williams, Sinead Lohan, Kerrville Music Festival newcomer Betty Elders, Austin’s The Borrowers, and Richard Shindell (who went on to tour extensively with Joan over the years).

In August 2001, Vanguard Records began the most extensive chronological CD reissue program ever devoted to one artist in the company’s history. Expanded editions (with bonus tracks and newly commissioned liner notes) were released of her debut solo album of 1960, Joan Baez, and Joan Baez Vol. 2 (1961). The six-year campaign went on to encompass every original LP she recorded while under contract to the label from 1960 to 1972. In 2003, spurred by Vanguard’s lead, Universal Music Enterprises gathered Joan’s six complete A&M albums released from 1972 to 1976 into a mini-boxed set of four CDs with bonus material and extensive liner notes.

The release of Dark Chords On a Big Guitar in September 2003 was supported with a 22-city U.S. tour. On October 3, Grammy Award-winning classical guitarist Sharon Isbin presented her debut performance of The Joan Baez Suite, Opus 144. Written for Isbin by John Duarte and commissioned by the Augustine Foundation, the piece featured songs from Joan’s earliest days in folk music.

On the night of February 11, 2007, at the 49th annual Grammy Awards telecast viewed by more than a billion people worldwide, it was announced that Joan Baez had received the highly prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award, the greatest honor that the Recording Academy can bestow. In turn, she introduced the live performance of “Not Ready To Make Nice” by dark horse nominees the Dixie Chicks. It was an ironic moment, as Joan’s “lifetime” of activism resonated in sync with the trio. They had been blacklisted by country radio and the Academy Of Country Music (ACM) when they criticized the president and the impending war in Iraq back in March 2003.

On Saturday, June 28, 2008, Joan was seen by countless TV viewers worldwide at the 46664 event in London’s Hyde Park, celebrating Nelson Mandela’s 90th birthday. After appearing with Johnny Clegg and the Soweto Gospel Choir singing “Asimbonanga,” Joan later stood center stage behind Mandela when he addressed the assembled crowd of 46,664 people. The event coincided with the annual Glastonbury Music Festival that same weekend, where Joan was also performing.

Most recently, on September 4th, in advance of Day After Tomorrow’s release, Joan launches the new 2008-2009 lecture season at New York City’s 92nd Street Y (where she made her official NY concert debut in 1960). The event will be an in-depth conversation with Rolling Stone contributing editor Anthony DeCurtis at the 900-seat Kaufmann Concert Hall.

Later, on September 18th, Joan receives the Spirit of Americana Free Speech Award at the Americana Music Association’s 7th annual awards show in Nashville. The honor “recognizes and celebrates artists who have ignited discussion and challenged the status quo through their music and actions.” Past recipients include Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Judy Collins, Mavis Staples and Steve Earle, who presents the award to Joan.

“All of us are survivors,” Joan Baez wrote, “but how many of us transcend survival?” 50 years on, she continues to show renewed vitality and passion in her concerts and records, and is more comfortable than ever inside her own skin. In this troubled world, to paraphrase “Wings,” she will always continue to seek “a place where they can hear me when I sing.”

—Arthur Levy