Joan Baez, Farewell, Angelina (Vanguard, 1965, reissue 2002)
These two albums present a snapshot of the American folk music scene during the pivotal years in which the 1960s became The Sixties. The popular young American President John F. Kennedy had just been assassinated, The Beatles began the British Invasion, the Civil Rights movement reached a climax with the deaths of four schoolgirls in a church bombing in Birmingham, and the Vietnam War was beginning.
No longer content with singing just the lovely, sad ballads of the Anglo-American tradition, Joan Baez was discovering contemporary singer-songwriters such as Phil Ochs, her brother-in-law Richard Farina, Donovan, and chief among them all, her lover Bob Dylan. She even followed Dylan in adding electric guitar to her music.
To be sure, Baez kept many of her previous albums' signature elements. On 5, there are folk standards like "Stewball, "The Death of Queen Jane," "So We'll Go No More A-Roving," and "The Unquiet Grave," a foreign-language song, the Brazilian "O' Cangaceiro," an African-American song, "When You Hear Them Cuckoos Hollerin'," the old-time country of "Tramp on the Street," and the contemporary folk-country of Marijohn Wilkins' "Long Black Veil" and Johnny Cash's "I Still Miss Someone."
There's also the curious inclusion of the folk-based Villa-Lobos aria, "Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5," which Baez sings in Portuguese, backed by eight cellos, to a melody by Bach. It's interesting to hear Baez stretch her vocal chords to their capacity, and it's a beautiful piece; but it doesn't really fit, and one wonders what all those teenagers in bare feet and peasant dresses made of it.
But the traditional folk on this album is bookended by something new. Baez's 5 opens with Phil Ochs' starkly lyrical "There But for Fortune," and includes the first Dylan song on a Baez studio album, his oblique love song, "It Ain't Me Babe." Her quietly passionate rendition of Farina's "Birmingham Sunday" is the anchor of this record, a rebuke to the society in which children die in church, victims of a race war.
Dylan's influence is even more obvious on Farewell, Angelina, a powerhouse of an album. It opens with the title track, a Dylan song that its author apparently has never recorded. Baez gives it a lovely and low-key reading that emphasizes the lyric's wistful loneliness.
The record continues with two more Dylan numbers, these much more well-known: "Daddy, You've Been on my Mind," and "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue." And the original album closes with the strongest track, a seven-and-a-half minute rendition of Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall."
In between the Dylan openers and closers are the type of song Baez is now known to specialize in: traditional numbers in "Wild Mountain Thyme" and "River in the Pines;" contemporary folk in "Satisfied Mind" and Woody Guthrie's "Ranger's Command;" foreign-language songs "Pauvre Ruteboeuf," in Old English and Pete Seeger's "Where Have All the Flowers Gone" in a German translation. Donovan's "Colours" is a nice bit of folky romantic fluff to lighten the tone a bit.
The extras on this CD are truly special. Baez gives a particularly poignant performance on Dylan's "One Too Many Mornings," a majestic reading of the traditional "The Water is Wide," and an unexpected number out of left field, Bruce "Utah" Phillips' skewed love song, "Rock Salt and Nails."
Throughout, Baez is accompanied by an acoustic bass, and by Bruce Langhorne on electric guitar. The accompaniment has a hushed and distant quality to it, a production style that Dylan's blockbuster 1998 album Time Out of Mind seems to echo. It adds depth and interest to what's already a superb collection of songs, an album that reflected Baez's deep engagement with the roots of American popular culture, politics and music.
