Joan Baez - vocals, acoustic guitar, acoustic piano
This performance is close to the majority of concerts Joan Baez has given over the years. Performing with only an acoustic guitar and piano, Baez excels during this show with her strong and clear voice. While she is also a gifted guitarist and songwriter, it's her high soprano that has been the driving force of her nearly five-decade-long career.
Emerging from the modern American folk movement, Joan Baez became the Queen of protest music with a career that overshadowed her main contemporary, Judy Collins. In her early days on Vanguard Records, she discovered an up and coming New York-based folk singer/songwriter named Bob Dylan. She quickly took him under her wing, allowing him to appear with her at many landmark shows, including the 1962 and 1963 Newport Folk Festivals. Eventually, she developed a romantic but stormy relationship with Dylan. However, she never stopped performing his songs in her show, and even had a pop hit with "Love Is Just A Four Letter Word."
At this concert, which included extensive talk with the audience, she opens with the Kris Kristofferson classic, "Me and Bobby McGee." She performs Dylan's "Forever Young" and "A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall" and John Lennon's "Imagine." She introduces new material with "Happy Birthday, Leonid Brezhnev" and "Children of the 80s" and offers some unique covers with the R&B classic, "Do Right Woman, Do Right Man" and Paul Simon's "The Boxer."
Near the end of the set, she performs several of her standard hits, "Sweet Sir Galahad," "Joe Hill" (the historical folk ballad about the man who launched the labor movement in America); her 1975 hit, "Diamonds and Rust" and the traditional hymn "Amazing Grace," which closes the show.