Joan Chandos Báez (born January 9, 1941) is an American folk singer and songwriter known for her highly individual vocal style. She is a soprano with a three-octave range and a distinctive throat vibrato. In addition, she is noted for her activism in the areas of nonviolence, civil and human rights and, in more recent years, the environment.

Biography

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Joan Baez, was born on Staten Island, New York, to a Quaker family of Mexican, English and Scottish descent. Her father Albert Baez, a physicist (co-inventor of the x-ray microscope and author of one of the most widely used physics textbooks in the U.S.), refused lucrative defense industry jobs during the height of the Cold War, probably influencing Joan's political activism in the American and international civil rights and peace movements of the 1960s to the present. The family, frequently having to move by reason of his work, lived in different towns across the United States, in France, Switzerland, Italy, the Middle East, and Iraq, where they stayed in 1951. Baez, at the time only ten years old, was deeply influenced by the poverty and inhumane treatment suffered by the local population in Baghdad. In the late 1950s, Dr. Baez accepted a faculty position at MIT, and moved his family to the Boston area, at the time the center of the up-and-coming folk music scene, and Joan began busking locally in the Boston/Cambridge area also performing in clubs, and attending Boston University. Her most noted venue was the Club 47 Mount Auburn, in Cambridge, where she performed twice a week for $20 per show. It was with other performers from the same club that she recorded her first album, Folksingers 'Round Harvard Square.

Baez' true professional career began at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival and she recorded "Joan Baez", her first album for a major company, the following year on Vanguard Records. The collection of traditional folk ballads, blues and laments sung to her own guitar accompaniment sold moderately well. Her second release, Joan Baez, Vol. 2 in 1961 went gold, as did Joan Baez in Concert, Parts 1 and 2 (released in 1962 and 1963, respectively). From the early to mid-1960's, Baez emerged at the forefront of the American roots revival, where she introduced her audiences to the then-unknown Bob Dylan (the two became romantically involved in late 1962, remaining together through early 1965), and was emulated by artists such as Joni Mitchell and Bonnie Raitt.

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