Joan Baez – Bowery Songs

Come back Joan Baez, come back to us now. She may have been omitted from Steve Earle’s invocations in “Christmas In Washington”, but when she sings that song, it’s as if she’s watched her own life’s work crumble and she’s come back to redeem it — the fallen unions, the common people’s voice in politics, all of it.

In a way, she has. Recorded at the Bowery Ballroom in New York, two days after the last presidential election, Bowery Songs finds Baez singing to rally the masses. She opens with a moving call for peace among nations, sung a cappella to the tune of Sibelieus’ “Finlandia”. Long a fan favorite in her live performances, the song had not previously been released. Nor had her version of Earle’s “Jerusalem”, which has been earning standing ovations at her live shows the past couple of years.

“Christmas In Washington” is one of three selections here that appeared on her 2003 album Dark Chords On A Big Guitar, along with Greg Brown’s aching and antique-sounding “Rexroth’s Daughter” and Natalie Merchant’s wounded “Motherland”. Bowery Songs also features her first recording of Bob Dylan’s “Seven Curses”, among other Dylan tunes, and a handful of the traditional ballads on which she built her early career.

But the cues that she’s returned to the barricades are in her resurrection of “Joe Hill” (he never died, she reminds us about the gunned-down union hero), and in Woody Guthrie’s again timely “Deportees”: “Is this the best way we can grow our big orchards?” Baez is back, delivering messages as resonant as her incomparable voice.