Joan (Baez) and me

 It’s true that I was born and raised in the Boston area, but I hadn’t heard of Joan Baez when I returned to Boston in the fall of 1957 to get a master’s degree in education at Harvard and, subtext: (catch a husband). 

I was returning from Tacoma, Washington where I had been teaching English at a select girls boarding school. A part of that story is on my blog with the title (“A Date with Vergil Peterson.”)  As soon as I got to Cambridge I found an apartment on Boylston street, just a few blocks from Harvard Yard and appeared on Sunday morning to become a regular with the Cambridge Quakers. Since volunteering is a good way to meet people and get drawn into an organization I volunteered to teach First Day School (Sunday school) - after all, I was supposed to know something about teaching and about adolescents. There was another newish member of The Society of Friends who also  volunteered. His name was Al Baez, a mathematics professor of Mexican descent, working at M.I.T.  I learned a lot from Al’s lessons with the children, and once we went to his house for an evening meeting where I met his wife and younger daughter, Miriam, (Mimi). I don’t remember very much about any of them, but I did know that his eldest daughter, Joan, was getting a name for herself singing at local coffee houses. 

Joan Baez, Boston Coffeehouse, circa 1960

Many years later when I read her autobiography, Daybreak,  she makes a passing mention of her father: something to this effect: “My father was attending the Quaker Meeting in Cambridge and he was beginning to realize that he would either have to give up those silences or give up the work for the defense department at M.I.T.” 

It was the end of the ‘50s and protest against nuclear testing and the development of nuclear weapons was growing. So also, was the nuclear threat and a fad for fall-out shelters. A national movement to eradicate nuclear weapons was underway, with about the same intensity as the movement to build more was evolving but with a mosquito to elephant measure of the kind of resources available for the movement. The drive to create more, and larger, and more lethal nuclear weapons than anyone else appealed to the warmakers, the business community , the military and those in fear of the red peril: war with Communist countries.. 

Nuclear weapons protest, early 1960s

I had just met my husband-to be , Simon, also through the Quaker meeting, and he suggested we go to a rally for the newly formed group called SANE, an organization devoted to the sane control of nuclear weapons. SANE was the first of many such opposition, peace minded groups to come. Simon was the first real political activist I knew, and he was also much more knowledgeable about world affairs than I. The rally was held in a huge public building in Boston in November 1957 and made a great impression on me.

There were a list of speakers and “entertainers”, Pete Seeger and the local kid, Joan Baez, among them, but the featured speaker was the governor of Michigan, known as Soapy Williams. Soapy was a long-winded speaker. By the time the crowd was settled, and we had listened to one slightly famous person after another introduce the next slightly more famous person, half the evening was over and then Soapy came on. When he finished there was very little time left for the singing. Pete Seeger, by now the father of folk music and known for his support of young musicians rose, calmed the crowd, suggested Joan sing one song and then we would end the gathering by all singing the star-spangled banner together. It was a moving moment: Pete’s willingness to step aside and then the star spangled banner uniting us all, for once, and telling the world that patriotism and a safe nuclear policy were not antithetical to each other. The Star-spangled Banner is a terrible song: hard to sing, jingoistic and a glorification of war, but to hear 4000 people bellowing it out under those circumstances while Pete strummed the guitar was an uplifting moment.

Joan Baez singing we shall overcome

This was around the time of the famous concert in  Newport where the legends of folk music met the new kids with their electronic instruments.

 When I was married to Simon we listened to the music he liked. Because of my idiosyncratic childhood and adolescence at the Arnold School I had no opportunity to choose or listen to music  or to develop my own tastes, but I was delighted to have music come into my life by whatever door it chose. Simon  would be the first one up in the morning and soon the children and I  were waking to the sound of a Mozart concerto or a Bach fugue on the phonograph. I also remember some beautiful Spanish guitar, and an occasional extraordinary folk singer, mostly singing old English ballads or love songs.

Boots of Spanish Leather album

But in the early ‘70s Simon began to tear away from the family, drinking, smoking, sleeping around town, depressed and sometimes suicidal. From somewhere, probably one of my Antioch students, I came into possession of Joan Baez’s album “Any Day Now”. I listened to it over and over. “Spanish Boots of Spanish Leather” seemed to express all the feelings of rejection and longing that I was feeling, as did many of the other songs. After that I read Joan Baez’ autobiography, and followed her progress upwards as a singer and forward as a war and injustice protester. I do not  know what happened to Al Baez except that he kept the silences and gave up the weapons technology. All the world knows what happened to Joan Baez, and I am happy to have been there at a certain moment in her rise to fame.