Joan Baez, still in exquisite voice and recently championing a new generation of folk songwriters such as Dar Williams, performs Saturday at the Hemmens Cultural Center in Elgin. Here is a review by Claudia Cassidy of an early performance by Baez from folk music’s heyday:
One of Joan Baez’ several microphone voices has a pale, frail, fluting sound, with a high vibrato that might be the beating wings of a small, lost bird. It is a haunting sound with a special affinity for folk songs of unrequited or lost love, and the number of young men in the audience that filled even the stage of Orchestra hall Saturday night reminded me of an older one much experienced in such matters who once said, “No one ever fell in love with a woman when she was laughing.”
Even when she unsheaths a stiletto on the foibles of folk song, Miss Baez’ laughter, like her bow, is a flick of warmth in passing. A tall girl in the simplest skirt and blouse and flat slippers, a fall of dark hair and a dark oval face, she hides behind microphones, which seems to me a pity, but then without the microphone she might have no voice at all. It plucks that pale vibrato out of nowhere, deepens the dark low voice, and carries her joyously when she starts swinging.
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It might surprise her to know she has a style, the instinctive kind born of shyness outside and serenity inside the music, of a purity and freshness that clear the listening air. To see her draw that attractive young audience, and to hear it sing softly with her — only when she asks it to — is as reassuring as to share the pin-drop silence when that vulnerable voice sings such a quiet, unstressed refrain of sadness as “I was nothing at all to him/And he was the world to me.”