Joan Baez: ‘It feels good to have changed the world’
Joan Baez was 28 years old and six months pregnant when she walked out on stage to headline Woodstock in August 1969. It was late enough that Friday had become Saturday, so she greeted the tired and tripping masses with a bright: “Good morning everybody! Thank you for hanging around.” Over the next hour she held them spellbound with songs written by the likes of Willie Nelson, The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan, having helped to usher Dylan into the limelight just a few years earlier when she invited him on stage with her at Newport to duet on the protest anthem “With God on Our Side”.
Only one song, “Sweet Sir Galahad”, was a Baez original. “It’s the only song I’ve ever written that I sing anywhere outside the bathtub,” she announced over the mud. “Because I’m just smart enough to know that my writing is very mediocre.”
Baez no longer thinks her writing is mediocre, but this revelation came to the 83-year-old only recently. “I started getting more confident about three months ago,” she says, with a musical laugh that lets me see the diamond embedded in gold in one of her teeth. It’s easy to think of Baez as the original long-haired folkie,
