Sensational soprano singer/songwriter & guitarist Joan Baez turned 69 on January 9th. She's still a beauty as well as an inspiring social & political activist. The first big - and youngest - star of the late-Fifties folk revival, Baez had just one pop-radio hit (a Billboard chart #3 in 1971) with Canadian-bred Robbie Robertson's Civil War-themed ballad "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down."
Baez's cover version might not have as great an arrangement as The Band's original 1969 recording, which features a creaky rustic lead vocal by Levon Helm, but it stills give me chills. Robertson was inspired to write that brilliant, poignant song after hearing several people in Dixieland claim that 'the South will rise again.' "There's a pain here, there is a sadness here. In Americana land, it's a kind of a beautiful sadness," Robertson has said about his timeless "Dixie Down."
By the way, Baez does a devastating impression of her ex-boyfriend Bob Dylan (see Scorcese's Dylan documentary "No Direction Home"), with whom she shared many stages from 1963 (Newport Folk Festival & the historic March on Washington) to 1975-76 (the Rolling Thunder Revue tour). Maybe it's her revenge for Dylan's wisecrack that "folk music is for fat people."
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