Joan BaezSpeaker and Booking Agent Information

Although she started as an adult that she did not express her parents' strong religious beliefs, it is undeniable that it influenced her social conscience. During her childhood, Baez was exposed to an intellectual environment through classical music, but she eschewed piano training in favor of the guitar and rock & roll.

Her father's teaching and research roles led the family to a number of different locations in the United States and abroad. Joan and her family spent a year in Iraq when she was ten years old. There, she was exposed to the terrible and deplorable living conditions of Iraqis, which definitely influenced her later career as a singer and activist.

Baez moved on to Palo Alto High School in California, where she flourished in music more often than academics. Her family relocated to Boston, Massachusetts, shortly after Baez graduated from high school in 1958, when she developed an interest in folk music after visiting a coffee shop where amateur folk singers performed.

Joan put herself on the line numerous times during a period in our country's history when it was neither safe nor trendy, and her music reflected her life's work. From the backs of flatbed trucks to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during Rev. Dr.

Martin Luther King's March on Washington in 1963, she sang for freedom and civil rights worldwide. To protest war spending, she withheld 60% of her income tax from the IRS in 1964. She co-founded the Centre for the Study of Nonviolence near her Carmel Valley home a year later.

During a Christmas vigil in 1966, Joan Baez stood in the fields alongside Cesar Chavez and migrant agricultural workers striking for fair pay, against capital punishment at San Quentin. The next year, she focused her efforts on the anti-graft campaign.

She flew to Hanoi with the US-based Liaison Committee as the conflict in Vietnam intensified in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and helped create Amnesty International on the West Coast. A beautiful soprano supplied the soundtrack to those times, with her natural vibrato lending a tense, anxious strain to everything she sang.

Joan's repertoire evidenced a different sensibility than her peers even as an 18-year-old, introduced onstage at the first annual Newport Folk Festival in 1959, and during her apprenticeship on the Boston-Cambridge coffeehouse folk music circuit leading up to the recording of her first solo album for Vanguard Records in the summer of 1960.

There was an acknowledgment of the human condition in the classic songs she learned - underdogs in the first, racial inequality, poverty's desperation, the folly of war, romantic betrayal, unrequited love, spiritual salvation, and compassion.