My devotion to non-violence and social change formed long before I picked up a ukulele and will go on until I fall into the grave. Her songs are nothing less than invitations to a life of social meaning, to view ourselves as part of a larger community whose fate is inextricable from our own, to make that fate better for all. The convictions that drive Joan Baez counter so many of the impulses that fuel the mythology of the artist in America. Artists are isolated, alienated and unhappy, runs one version of the myth. Another, polar opposite version of the myth insists that artists are nothing more than entertainers or celebrities, prisoners of their audience, of no more significance than the success of their last release.
Popularity is the only consequential barometer of their importance.
For Joan Baez, however, singing songs is a means of encountering her world around her and attempting to change it. She perceives her audience as differing in no essential way from herself. Neither fleeing the desires of her listeners nor pandering to them, she lives the actively engaged life more typical of artists in Europe and Latin America. Her art embraces and challenges her audience. And it is precisely that immediacy, that immersion in the moments of history that grants Baez's work its lasting power.