Joan Baez—The Pageant—St. Louis, MO—July 19, 2009
2009 is a milestone year for Joan Baez, marking the fifty-year anniversary of her first appearance at the Newport Folk Festival, a performance that jump-started her career and led to her classic 1960 debut album. (Say, why isn’t she in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame yet? Let’s take it to the streets!) Anyway, she mentioned this year’s landmark from the stage on her St. Louis stop tonight, pointing out that she started singing some of these songs fifty years ago: “Should I have lied?” she asked. “I meant fifteen years ago!” Those years have made a few inroads on her signature soprano and have smoothed out that hummingbird vibrato, but her art is no worse for it—the slightly huskier and lower-range timbre in her voice sounded superb over a sublime twenty-song set.
Behind Baez tonight was a four-piece of acoustic-instrument ringers: Dirk Powell on fiddle/banjo/mandolin/piano, Todd Phillips on upright bass, John Doyle on guitars, and Gabriel Harris (Joan’s son, a fact she didn’t mention from the stage) on percussion. The players were uniformly first-rate, playing with tremendous elegance and subtlety. And Joan is no slouch on the guitar, either, evident when the band left the stage for her three-song solo set, which showcased her adroit fingerpicking on Dylan’s “Forever Young.” It was one of three Dylan songs tonight (“Farewell Angelina” came early and was given a Nashville Skyline treatment with Powell’s swooning fiddle; “Don’t Think Twice” came late and featured the best Dylan impression by a woman I’ve ever heard, Cate Blanchett included.) The other solo songs were a singalong version of “Imagine,” which she had recorded for 1972’s Come From the Shadows LP, and an a capella “Swing Low Sweet Chariot,” Joan revisiting the high, breathy range of old, even changing keys for the last verse, and walking well away from the mic, allowing the room’s natural acoustics to carry the end of the song. (It was so quiet in the club that you could hear the toilets flush in the restrooms.)
Baez is touring behind last year’s Steve Earle-produced Day After Tomorrow, her best album in many years, and she drew the first three songs from that record for tonight’s set: Earle’s own “God is God,” one of three of his songs she covered tonight, Eliza Gilksyon’s “Rose of Sharon,” which Baez introduced as sounding like a 200-year-old folk song, and Elvis Costello’s beautiful ballad, “Scarlet Tide,” one of the evening’s early highlights. Perhaps the night’s best performance came at the midway point when Baez sang “Just the Way You Are”—not a Billy Joel tune, but a gorgeous song recently penned by bandmate Powell. I thought my heart was going to burst. She turned to her own material twice: 1972’s “Love Song to a Stranger,” which was just lovely, and a curtain-call solo reading of her minor-key masterpiece, “Diamonds and Rust.” At one point, during Earle’s “Christmas in Washington,” she invoked the spirit of Woody Guthrie, lamenting our need for him now. Tonight, however, the 68-year-old Baez, in remarkable shape and voice, proved that we still have a legend among us speaking for our better hearts and minds.
Setlist
1.Lily of the West
2.Scarlet Tide
3.God is God
4.Silver Dagger
5.Love Song to a Stranger
6.Farewell Angelina
7.Old Gospel Ship
8.Christmas in Washington
9.Joe Hill
10.Just the Way You Are
11.Rose of Sharon
12.Swing Low Sweet Chariot
13.Forever Young
14.Imagine
15.Long Black Veil
16.Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright
17.Jerusalem
encore
18.The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down
19.Angel Band
20.Diamonds and Rust
