Amazing Joan, How Sweet the Sound!

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist

It was a cold night in October of 2005. I was sitting front-row-center in the balcony of Liberty Hall, a small and ornate theatre in Lawrence, Kansas, that has been a landmark on Massachusetts Avenue since just after the Civil War. The place was packed – every-seat-full – with old codgers like me, and the doorways were crowded with the young people who worked in the theatre and stood waiting to catch a glimpse of the angelic soprano – a woman who had been an entertainment and political force in America for nearly half a century. The lights dimmed, the audience buzz quickly subsided, and the curtain went up.

And there was Joan Baez, looking much younger than her sixty-four years and resplendent in her buckskin jacket, tee shirt, and jeans. From the tip of my nose to the tip of hers could not have been over twenty-five feet. I had an unobstructed view from one of the best seats in the house! Joan was bookended by two male musicians, one probably half her age, and the other younger still. But while being simply dressed and standing in the center of a minimalist musical trio, the lady dazzled! Her pristine voice rang clear to every corner and crevice of that landmark theatre – and there actually were no bad seats!

As the curtain came up, Joan was strumming her guitar and broke into singing “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” one of her few songs that achieved substantial popular appeal. Within seconds the audience was singing along.

Joan Baez is emblematic of the 1960’s. She was a featured vocalist at Dr. Martin Luther King’s famous March on Washington in 1963 when he delivered his famous “I Have a Dream” speech, and before the decade ended she was on stage at the Woodstock Festival. Joan had been an angry and outspoken critic of the Vietnam War. At one point she was so controversial that the Daughters of the American Revolution, an organization of fascist biddies, denied her permission to perform in Constitution Hall. Joan’s husband, David Harris, was arrested for evading the draft and spent much of their brief marriage in jail.

There were two ladies from rural Kansas sitting next to me. One said that when she had been a student at a major university in the south in the early 1960s she had bought a ticket for a Joan Baez concert that was being hosted by her school. She was seated in the audience when it was announced that the show was cancelled. Joan had learned just before she was to walk on the stage that the community’s African Americans citizens had been denied access to the show, so she refused to go on. The lady said that she had been waiting over forty years to attend a Joan Baez concert.

I had been extremely fortunate in getting a good seat. I emailed a request a few weeks earlier at the exact moment tickets went on sale. Apparently there was a long line standing in the rain in Lawrence who snapped up most of the downstairs seating, and many others were trying to get tickets on line at the same time as me. The show sold out very quickly. My son, Tim, was attending graduate school at the University of Kansas in Lawrence at that time, and I had wanted to take him to the show so that he could get some sense of what the sixties had been about. But Tim, a promising playwright, had a play in rehearsal and couldn’t get away. Perhaps buying a “single” had been key to my getting the great seat.

During August of 2005 anti-war activist Cindy Sheehan and a group of war protesters had been camped out at Crawford, Texas, on the road leading to George Bush’s play ranch. The group busied themselves raising hell and attracting national media attention while the President vacationed a few miles away. Joan Baez was a regular visitor at the month-long encampment. She talked about that protest during her concert in Lawrence, sharing anecdotes about the hardships of camping out in a rustic Texas in August. She said that she had asked Cindy Sheehan about her favorite folksong, and Cindy had replied that it was “Joe Hill.” At that point, Joan began to sing the famous labor ballad to her Lawrence audience, and again, many sang along.

Joan sang hard for two hours, and then it was over. Some fans rushed forward and placed a bouquet of roses on the stage, and she graciously picked them up, thanked everyone, and said her good-nights. It had been a wonderful evening, a connection to my youth with a vibrancy that will echo in my memory for years to come.