Born on January 9, 1941, on Staten Island in New York City, Joan Baez grew up there and in other Eastern cities and, after graduation from high school, moved with her family to Boston. She attended Boston University briefly and then began singing in coffeehouses in Boston and Cambridge. Her strong, direct renditions of traditional folk songs and ballads, backed by her simple but sure guitar playing, soon attracted a considerable local following, and in 1959, after an appearance in Chicago, she was invited to sing at the Folk Festival in Newport, Rhode Island. The audience there received her enthusiastically, and she returned for the festival in 1960.
A recording contract resulted, and her first album, titled simply Joan Baez, was a great success, as were the many that followed. Drawing her repertoire from old English ballads, Southern and country music, and increasingly from the modern canon of protest songs, she made a concert tour in 1961 that evoked high praise from audiences and critics for her clear soprano voice and her straightforward manner. Other tours╤of Europe and Japan, and of campuses and concert halls across the United States╤increased her popularity, and she soon ranked with Bob Dylan at the top of her field.
Baez became deeply involved in civil rights activities during the early 1960s. In the later 1960s she became involved in the opposition to the Vietnam War and was in particular a supporter of the movement resisting the military draft. In 1964 she refused to pay the sixty percent of her federal taxes destined for defense spending, and in 1965 she founded an institute for the study of nonviolence. In her concert and television appearances she continued to mix performing with pleas for nonviolent opposition to war and injustice, although in later years her music took on more personal concerns as well. She was a member of the National Advisory Council of Amnesty International from 1979 to 1992.
In 1978 she appeared in Renaldo and Clara, a film produced by Bob Dylan. Her later recordings include Diamonds and Rust, 1975, Gulf Wind, her one entirely self-penned album, 1976, Honest Lullaby, 1979, European Tour, 1981, Live Europe 83, 1983, Very Early Joan, 1983, Recently, 1988, Diamonds and Rust in the Bullring, performed live in Spain, 1989, Speaking of Dreams, 1989, and Play Me Backwards, 1992.
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