Joan Baez: an Honest Lullaby

 Joan Baez could by no means be considered a "big C" creative. She wrote very few of the songs she sang, and her producers took care of most album engineering. It is not Baez's songwriting or instrumentation that are the root of her creativity, but rather how she harnesses her voice to make an impact on global issues.

Joan Baez was born to Mexican-American Quakers, and was often racially discriminated against as a child due to her dark complexion in the Summer. She spent parts of her childhood in southern California, where hostility against Mexican immigrants is high, which would have a great impact on how she viewed racism and discrimination in her adult life. She realized the gift of her voice in her teens, and began to sing for local high schools and gaining attention.

After some years of playing in Harvard Square and gaining a following after her gifted voice, Joan Baez began to climb the charts miraculously––due to the gift of a perfect high soprano voice. Although she wielded the great and overwhelming power that comes with being a celebrity, she chose to risk her career time after time for social justice and peace. To this day, Joan Baez is still extremely active in speaking to mobilize when there is need to (or a need to cease to) intervene in foreign affairs, when discrimination is occurring, when social justice is needed, or when violence must be stopped.

Joan Baez used her fame to mobilize support around racial injustice in the 1960s, becoming close with Martin Luther King Jr. and singing at the 1963 March on Washington.

Perhaps Baez's most creative work, incorporating both music and human rights campaigning, was her 1973 album Where Are You Now, My Son? An entire side of the vinyl is one compiled work of audio, recorded when she flew to Vietnam during the war to speak to the suffering Vietnamese and spread awareness in America about the horrors of violent war. She ended up spending much of the trip huddled in bomb shelters with the Vietnamese, singing traditional folk songs with them to lighten the mood. The track is incredibly compelling as well as heartbreaking, and Baez did a fantastic job of utilizing her natural talent (and lack of natural creativity) to grab attention.

Joan Baez's creative process can be connected to class material because she often devoted entire albums to a single subject: relation between a work and others. Honest Lullaby was written to her son, David's Album was written to her husband (while in jail for draft evasion), Where Are You Now, My Son was written to call for a peaceful end
of the Vietnam War, Gracias a la Vida was written (in Spanish) for the Chileans suffering under the authoritarian regime of Augusto Pinochet. The album Baptism is a masterpiece put together by Joan Baez, a gruesome collection of song and poem that provides a disturbing plea for the case of nonviolence. Baez campaigned for each cause relentlessly, most of the time by traveling to visit struggling groups and singing for them.

Although Baez is not a "big C," I would consider her a "middle C," even without writing almost any of her own songs; she strategically compiled and stood for the release of albums that were very unlikely to sell, yet brought great awareness to social issues that otherwise would not have gained such great attention. She was more or less successful in her original goals, and her perseverance is the mark of a creative person that cannot be ignored.