In the fall of 1962 and again a year later, the Vanguard label did a strange and wonderful thing. It followed 1961's chart success of Joan Baez's first two albums with another two. But these were live recordings, and they contained none of the songs from her first two studio releases. Maynard Solomon, Vanguard's cofounder and one of the guiding hands behind Baez's career, had begun recording the folk phenomenon's concerts as early as 1961, and by the next year had decided to release a live album.

Now, 40 years later, these two gems have joined her first studio albums, Joan Baez and Joan Baez Volume 2, and her 1965 Christmas album in Vanguard's "Original Master Series," the planned reissuing of all of Baez's Vanguard albums in more or less chronological order.

In the 1970s, the live album became a pawn in the game of the music industry. It usually signaled either that the artist's career had played out but the label wanted to milk the cash cow one more time before putting it out to pasture, or that the artist was on hiatus or in rehab (or dead), or had moved to another label. It wasn't unusual for a live album to consist largely of rehashes of a group's hits, in a cynical attempt to grub more money from the faithful fans without the effort of producing new material or the expense of studio time. These early Baez live albums, thankfully, don't fall into any of those categories.

A big part of Baez's magic was her ability to connect with an audience. In fact, it still is, as she demonstrated in her summer 2002 tour of the U.S. Solomon was wise enough to see this, and to begin capturing that magic. It soon became apparent that Baez had an astonishing repertoire that continued to grow as she toured and sang and listened and learned.

Although both discs draw from gigs across the three-year period of 1961 through 1963, the performances still were chosen at least partly chronologically. Just as her first two studio albums documented Baez's rapid maturation as a singer and interpreter of folk songs, In Concert and Part 2 document her growth as a performer.

In the 1962 disc, we see the early Joan Baez, her repertoire largely drawn from the great songbook of Anglo-American ballads, the so-called Child Ballads and others from the Appalachian traditions. "Geordie," "Black is the Color of My True Love's Hair," "House Carpenter," "Lady Mary" and "Matty Groves" all come from these sources. Others, such as "My Lord What a Morning" and "Kumbaya" come from the African-American tradition. There's the Carter Family's "Gospel Ship," the cowboy ballad "Streets of Laredo," and Woody Guthrie's "Pretty Boy Floyd." And there's the white blues, "Babe I'm Gonna Leave You," the moonshiner ballad "Copper Kettle," and the lovely Brazilian folk song, "Ate Amanha," maintaining her tradition of having at least one foreign-language song on each album.

We get a glimmer of what's to come, though, with the inclusion here of "What Have They Done to the Rain," an oblique anti-nuclear protest song written by Malvina Reynolds, whose "Little Boxes" was a hit for Pete Seeger, one of Baez's mentors.

And we also see a side of Joan that was mostly absent from her early studio albums: her sense of humor. One of the three bonus tracks, "My Good Old Man," is a darkly humorous bit of banter between a voluble woman and her monosyllabic husband.The song and Baez's deadpan delivery draw peals of laughter from the crowd, and you can hear the shy young singer drawing strength and confidence from the audience's response. The other two bonus tracks are "Laredo" and "My Lord."

Solomon's original liner notes, particularly his track-by-track discussion of each song's provenance, are enlightening and educational, as are the reissue's liner notes by Arthur Levy, which in the case of both releases set the songs and the albums in their historical context.

Baez's transformation from interpreter of traditional folk songs to full-fledged modern troubadour is clearly seen and heard in Part 2. The catalyst was Bob Dylan and his relationship with Baez, which is expertly documented in David Hajdu's 2001 biography Positively 4th Street. The results are clear in the song selection, which includes Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," "Tomorrow is a Long Time," and the album's centerpiece, Baez's quiet yet steely rendition of "With God on Our Side," which in 2002 has suddenly become topical once again. Other moving moments include sing-alongs of "Battle Hymn of the Republic," and especially "We Shall Overcome," recorded in front of a racially mixed audience at Miles College in Birmingham, Alabama. It's hard to remember but impossible to overstate the impact such songs had on crowds of young people in the U.S. Civil Rights movement of the early 1960s.

It's not all protest songs though -- not yet, anyway. There are still plenty of traditional ballads, including "Jackaroe," "Queen of Hearts," "Hush Little Baby," and "When First Unto This Country a Stranger I Came." And some modern folk, including "Once I Had a Sweetheart," written by Bert Jansch and John Renbourn in pre-Pentangle days, and the mournful "Portland Town" by Derroll Adams, the lanky Oregon banjo-picker (and erstwhile companion of Ramblin' Jack Elliott) who himself is the subject of a 2002 tribute record.

Part 2 has a great wealth of bonus tracks, which push the collection to over an hour in length. They include the American folk ballads "Rambler Gambler" and "Railroad Bill," which on some secondary pressings of the original album were substituted for "With God on Our Side," Dylan's "Tomorrow," and a ballad of the "Death of Emmett Till," which predated Dylan's. What's sorely missed here, as Levy points out, is Solomon's commentary on the songs. This was Baez's first album without this feature. Instead, a lengthy Dylan poem is substituted.

These two live albums are, perhaps even more so than Baez's first two studio releases, important historic and artistic documents of a major voice at a crucial moment in the 20th century in America.

[Gary Whitehouse]