***The Queen Of The 1960s Folk Minute- Joan Baez: How Sweet The Sound

 

DVD Review

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound, American Master series, PBS, 2009

Several years ago when I was in a nostalgic mood about the 1960s folk minute, a minute that influenced my musical tastes when I was a youth, I did a series on female folk singers titled Not Joan Baez (and also a male folk singer series with the same idea except that was titled Not Bob Dylan)to try to show that there were female folk singers around like Judy Collins, Hedy West, Carolyn Hester, Joan’s sister Mimi (who also sang with her husband Richard Farina) who had talent but kind of went by the wayside when Joan Baez sucked all the media air out of that original folk minute (as Dylan did on the male side). Joan from early on became the folk queen and a look at the old film footage provided in this American Masters production, Joan Baez: How Sweet The Sound, rather fittingly details why that was true.         

In the early 1960s many of us were looking for some new musical sensibility, some new sound once the beautiful days of rock and roll hit a dry spot. Some of us were also looking for roots, roots music in this case, in those amorphous live-for-the-moment-red scare cold war times. And starting out Joan Baez spoke to those sentiments providing all the pathos necessary from the traditional ballads and songs (many Child ballads so especially filled with pathos) as she made her claim to fame on the coffeehouse circuit starting in Cambridge at the old Cub 47 back in the day. And that sound, that almost operatic soprano sound, combined with those ballads were many time rendered by her with intense haunting beauty as the old footage here demonstrates. But the folk minute also encompassed song-writing, new songs, and not just any song-writing but songs written with meaning for a section of a generation looking for some political direction and that is where the fortuitous if short collaboration between Baez and Dylan drowned all the other contenders for the media-driven role of king and queen of folk music. And culminating in places like the Newport Folk Festival the pair rode the wave.

However like all cultural waves tastes change, people move on, or in Baez’s case she was driven as much if not more by the political struggles of the times, black civil rights in the south and the fight against the military draft and the expanding war in Vietnam, the  defining events of our generation for many of us. Dylan however could not go, did not want to go in on that road, or for matter playing second fiddle to anyone and so they split (the details on this are very sketchy as are the remarks by Baez and Dylan on the subject). Baez does spend a fair amount of time trying to express the balance between her music and her social activism. For most musicians this is not a quandary as music dominates but in her case as the tensions in society exacerbated she was drawn to the political side especially draft resistance where she met her future husband, David Harris, and father of her child, Gabriel. Those tensions followed her throughout her careers.  

This documentary like all American Masters productions is filled with footage and with “talking heads” to round out the portrayal. Especially good is the home movie footage from Baez’s childhood (with scenes with sister Mimi an added attraction),the classic folk scenes at Club 47 and Newport, her early duos with Dylan, her work with Doctor King for civil rights down South, her increasing involvement in draft resistance and her dramatic trip to Vietnam in 1972 when the American government tried (once again) to bomb that country back to the Stone Age, and her dramatic trip to Sarajevo in the 1990s while the bombs were raining  down on the civilian population there by the Serbs. As for “talking heads” the civilized conversation about their marriage with David Harris, the input of son Gabriel, the comments of Roger McGuinn David Crosby deserve notice. What was not memorable were the spoken words of Mister Bob Dylan.  What else is new from the king of the folk minute. If you want to get a small slice of flavor of the 1960s from the viewpoint of one of the better partisans of that moment then this is a worthwhile couple of hours.