The other story of Joan Baez…
Joan Baez is an icon of 1960s American folk music and a civil rights activist. She sang at the March on Washington in 1963, protested with Cesar Chavez in California, demonstrated against the Vietnam War, and performed at Woodstock in 1969.
In her six-decade-long career, she has put out more than 30 albums and inspired many artists, including The Beatles and Lana Del Rey. She retired from touring in 2019, then turned to painting, drawing, and publishing books.
Now she’s out with When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance: Poems. She wrote the collection of poems in the 1990s, while processing child abuse.
The book title is also the title of one of the poems, which describes Baez’s mother as a young woman. The musician and writer tells KCRW that her mom loved classical music, particularly the work of Jussi Björling, a Swedish tenor.
“[The poem is] the story of my mom meeting Björling at this imaginary dance. And my hand took off writing this thing. So it’s a fantasy, but it’s coming out of real-life feelings of my mom [for Björling], and we imagine in the poem that the feelings were reciprocal.”
Leave a Reply