Joan Baez and the Discipline of Nonviolence
By Colman McCarthy
Her timbered voice is more sonorous now than sopranic. Her hair, once night-black and tressed, is graying and clipped. On the stage, where she once sang alone, she performs with a band—five kids really, up-and-coming folkies strumming and drumming electrically. At 61, the Joan Baez we thought was forever young is tumbling into mortality, like the rest of us who go back with her a few decades.
No lamentations, please. Having just spent herself into half-numbness on a seven week bus-riding concert tour with 29 dates, Baez endures as the bracing artist she has always been and as fully committed to the politics and ideals of nonviolence as she was when marching with Martin Luther King, Jr., in Mississippi or comforting political prisoners in the dungeons of global despots.
At her Washington concert, a doting audience was given a mix of ageless songs—“Joe Hill,” “Deportees,” “Gracias a la Vida”—and such new ones as Richard Shindell’s antiwar “Reuniion Hill.”
In between, Baez crowns the evening with lighthearted stories. References to issues and causes are minimal. No need for that. Her stances, unwavering, are known. No need to give a sermon when you are one. Her credo of self-giving is on view in her 1987 autobiography “And a Voice To Sing With”: walking to the concert stage, “I remind myself that everyone in that hall counts, and that my job is to move them, to treat them with tenderness and extreme care. My job is to sing my heart out, as though it were my last concert, because it might be for all I know, and they must leave the hall having laughed, cried, sung, and found out something new or had a timid suspicion confirmed.”
After the Washington concert—the first of two on successive nights—Baez, to unwind, invites in some pals for a few moments of catching up. I came to know her in the early 1970s. She was helping Amnesty International, less than 10 years old then, get footing in the United States. When singing in Washington, she would come by to ask if I had time to write about the cases of political prisoners she learned about in Latin America, Eastern Europe or Asia. Our friendship deepened.
In 1982, I invited her to speak to my students at a District of Columbia high school where I was teaching courses on nonviolence and using her enduring peace essay, “What Would You Do If?” Instead of coming to the school, she had a better idea: bring the class to the concert. She sent over $3,000 worth of front row seat, along with backstage passes for a post-show seminar on social justice and pacifism. There’ll be free food, too.
Along with a dozen or so gate-crashing and usher-bribing parents—Old Lefties still helping Michael row his 1960s boat ashore—the kids piled in. Baez told of her Quaker childhood, of protesting air raid drills at Palo Alto High School, of cowering in Hanoi bomb shelters in Christmas 1972 as U.S. pilots delivered death from above.
During the Q&A, a light moment came. Students, especially some deep thinkers hot to go deeper, had been asking Baez to expound on the differences between the early Gandhi, the middle Gandhi and the late Gandhi. Heavy stuff. After 20 or so minutes of it, a purpled-haired and wild-eyed boy in the back, wearing an anarchist t-shirt, metal chains around his neck and steel-heeled boots ready to stomp any capitalist pig who dared wander in, raised his hand. Everyone tensed. Here comes a rant: a verbal manifesto on why the world absolutely sucks.
“Joanie,” he began, the salutation already well over the line, “I have a question.” Half the class looked as if it wanted to muzzle him right then, with the other half twitching their faces at Baez to let her know that, well, this kid is the school’s El Supremo Punk Rocker, so don’t get ticked. “I’m sitting in the front row tonight,” he goes on. “I was watching you close. Real close. What I need to know is this: When you’re up there singing and all those hot lights are on you, how come you don’t sweat. I do when I perform.”
Joan cackled with delight. She lept up, bounded to the back and gave the lad a tight hug. Finally, a real-world question!
I forget the answer, but I remember the student. A musician who had his own band, he went on to open an immensely popular night club in downtown Washington—the Black Cat-- and is now a thriving capitalist nearing 40.
A few years later, in 1985, I arranged for Baez to give a Fall afternoon outdoor concert on the quad at American University, and then speak to my evening class for a few hours. It was mostly questions from the audience. Innately modest, she came on not as a dispenser of Earth Mother wisdom but as a person committed to nonviolence and who asked the students to consider it as an option in their own lives.
“The difficulty with introducing nonviolence is that it is so young,” she told a Lebanese student whose country had been shelled by U.S. bombs two years before. “…It begins with the concept that we can no longer solve problems in any realistic way with violence. I would say just the opposite from what most people say to me, ‘But you’re unrealistic to talk about nonviolence.’ I would say to them, ‘You’ve been unrealistic for 8,000 years.”
She spoke of the prevailing double standard: “You take nonviolent warfare somewhere in the world and people go at it through strikes and boycotts for a two week period. At the end of the two weeks if five people get killed, the reaction is, ‘I told you it wouldn’t work.’ But if you take armed struggle—when you feel as though you’re defending yourself because you have those conventional weapons—and you fight in the streets for two weeks, at the end of the two week 20,000 people are dead. Nobody says, ‘I told you it wouldn’t work.’ They say, ‘That’s a war.”
On that trip, Joan, on the way to visit her son at a boarding school in Boston, stayed with my family for a couple of days. Every afternoon, she holed up in the third floor guest room singing the musical scales. For hours. I wondered: after nearly three decades of countless concerts and dozens of albums, she is still practicing?
You need to do it, her voice coach had told her. Otherwise the pipes rust. Keep them in good condition and they stay diamonds.