Joan Baez - The Birth of a Folk Legend (2017)

This collection, capturing folk legend Joan Baez at her career's beginning, offers a glimpse of the early development of an important artist and the musical period in which she made her name. Baez was born on Staten Island, New York, on January 9, 1941. In the late 1950s, the family moved near to Cambridge, Massachusetts. Boston and Cambridge had a busy folk scene, centered on coffee houses and small clubs and Baez began performing for small audiences in a Cambridge folk club. With other local artists, she recorded an independently produced album entitled "Folk Singers 'Round Harvard Square." Later tracks in this collection, drawn from that album, show Baez in a formative stage, right before her big breakthrough. In 1959, Bob Gibson, a star of the folk scene, invited Baez to play with him at the Newport Folk Festival. That festival was a mecca for young, beatnick-y folk enthusiasts, and when Baez sang with Gibson, she was launched as a new folk star. Baez's appeal to the Newport crowd is perfectly captured in this collection. Her singing involved a dramatic soprano, heavy on vibrato yet also delicate, that seemed to match neatly both the traditional, often tragic storytelling in such old English songs as "Silver Dagger" and the mournful expressiveness of African-American songs like "All My Trials." In 1960, Baez signed a recording contract with Vanguard Records. The first album, "Joan Baez," was recorded in four days in New York; the first thirteen tracks here are drawn from that album. Soon she would begin reconnecting her politics to her music, and by the end of the decade, the name Joan Baez had become synonymous with anti-war and civil rights protests.

Tracklist:

01. Joan Baez - Silver Dagger
02. Joan Baez - East Virginia
03. Joan Baez - Fare Thee Well
04. Joan Baez - House of the Rising Sun
05. Joan Baez - All My Trials
06. Joan Baez - Wildwood Flower
07. Joan Baez - Donna Donna
08. Joan Baez - John Riley
09. Joan Baez - Rake and Rambling Boy
10. Joan Baez - Little Moses
11. Joan Baez - Mary Hamilton
12. Joan Baez - Henry Martin
13. Joan Baez - El Preso Numero Nueve
14. Joan Baez - On the Banks of the Ohio
15. Joan Baez - O What a Beautiful City
16. Joan Baez - So Soon in the Morning
17. Joan Baez - Lowlands
18. Joan Baez - Kitty
19. Joan Baez - Black Is the Color
20. Joan Baez - What You Gonna Call Your Pretty Little Baby
21. Joan Baez - Don't Weep After Me
22. Joan Baez - Careless Love
23. Joan Baez - Sail Away Ladies