Transcription by Alletta Cooper

[music: “We Shall Overcome” by Joan Baez]

Krista Tippett: She was called “the voice of a generation,” the “Queen of Folk.” A legend. An icon, the one who sang “We Shall Overcome” alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington.

[music: “We Shall Overcome” by Joan Baez]

As much as anyone, Joan Baez embodied the spirit of that decade of soaring dreams and song and dramas set in motion that echo through this world of ours. Meanwhile, her love affair with a young Minnesota singer-songwriter calling himself Bob Dylan, whose career she pivotally helped launch, is also re-entering the public imagination with a big new movie. And her classic heartbreak hit about him, “Diamonds & Rust,” is topping global charts anew.

But Joan Baez, at 83, is so much more intriguing than her projection as a legend. She grew up the daughter of a Mexican-born physicist father and a Scottish mother in a seemingly idyllic family. But even at the height of her fame, she was struggling mightily with mysterious interior demons. She and her beloved sisters finally reckoned in mid-life with a truth of abuse they had buried, even in memory, at great cost. So Joan Baez has reckoned with fracture inside herself — and been on an odyssey of wholeness.

She is frank and funny, irreverent and wise. Among other gifts, she offers a refreshing way into what it means to sing and live the reality of “overcoming,” personal and civilizational.

I spoke with Joan Baez on stage at the Chicago Humanities Festival in October 2024, and am so happy to share this conversation with you.

[applause]

Joan Baez: Hi.

Tippett: Hello. [laughs] I’m so happy to be back at the Chicago Humanities Festival and grateful to this festival for bringing me together with Joan Baez. I said to you —

Baez: It’s about time.

Tippett: [laughs] It’s about time.

Baez: It’s about time.

Tippett: I know. I said to you backstage, I’ve been inching towards you. [laughter] And when this invitation came in — I love that I get to interview you now as a published poet, which would not have been true before now. And it really — you are going to be hearing a lot from this book When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance. It is a wonderful book of poetry. And it’s really an exquisite entry point, I think, to who you are and the life you’ve lived, and this complex dance of your life between music and being human, and social activism, and love of the world, and love of life itself. As I said, I’m going to ask you to read quite a few poems, and we’ll dive in, in that way.

I’d like to start where I always start by wondering about how you think about the spiritual background of your life, of your childhood. I’m so fascinated when I just — the facts that I have: you have a Scottish mother and a Mexican-born father, you have a paternal grandfather who left the Catholic Church and became a Methodist minister, and another grandfather who was an Episcopal minister, and your family converted to Quakerism.

[laughter]

Baez: Yes.

Tippett: Well, I wonder how that imprinted you, but also, if there are other ways you’d talk about how you now look back and think about that aspect of your upbringing.

Baez: Well, I think that as kids, we all hated Quaker meeting — there was nothing to do. You sit around looking at each other waiting for some boring old Quaker to get up and talk. [laughter] That’s what it is for kids, you know? But what stayed with me in the end was the silence, and it’s been a part of my life — an important part of my life — ever since. It’s in the meditation. It’s in, where I love to be, which is just in the woods and talking to the trees and in the creek. And just meditative and quietness. That’s been a big part of my life. I have to thank my parents, whom we hated at the time because we didn’t want to be dragged off to this awful, boring hour of silence. [laughter] They finally got smart, said, “Okay, the kids can leave after 20 minutes.” We thought, “Yay, hallelujah.”

[laughter]

Tippett: So you experienced silence as a medium of spiritual life, or maybe just a medium of this ritual you had to endure. [laughter] You had this gift of a voice, of song. And I wonder — I’m so curious about your relationship with your extraordinary voice. I mean, there’s some mystery to having a voice like the one you were born with.

Baez: It’s mostly mystery. I don’t know where it came from. And I do know that now I can play the early music — listening, it’s not me. It’s really listening to somebody else because it’s this gorgeous soprano, which I don’t have at all now, so I can listen and wonder to what was. And it was the gift that I was born with.

Tippett: Even when you were young, did you perceive it in that way, as a gift?

Baez: As a gift, yeah. I didn’t know the magnitude of it, but I’ve always known it was a gift. And the second gift that went with it was the desire to use it in the ways that I’ve used it.

Tippett: Right. And you —

[applause]

Baez: Thank you.

Tippett: It wasn’t just a voice, it isn’t just a voice that was merely appreciated and beloved and moving for listeners, but really a voice of an era.

I want to talk a lot about that. I am thinking a lot these days about the echoes between the 1960s and the ’70s and now, and I think you have some wonderful wisdom for us about that.

You did this documentary in 2023 called I Am a Noise, and I wonder — if people haven’t seen it. I absolutely recommend it. [applause] Some people have seen it.

Here was how the documentary described — here was the description, which I think is pretty good — naming what you have straddled in your life, right? “At the end of a 60-year career, legendary singer and activist Joan Baez takes an honest look back and a deep look inward as she tries to make sense of her large history-making life and the personal struggles she’s kept private.”

And this book of poetry is you further offering up and sharing how you’ve been looking inside, and what you’ve been learning, and how you’ve been growing. I actually feel like the first poem in the book, which I’m going to ask you to read, is what you call the “author’s note.”

Baez: Oh, okay.

Tippett: Yeah, “Poetry and Me.”

Baez: Okay. What page is it on?

Tippett: Oh, do you have it? Great. Okay.

Baez: Okay, yeah. This should explain my entire life to you. [laughter] Kind of.

“An Author’s Note.

“What do I want to say to you who has, by chance or design, picked up this little book?

“That it is filled with unschooled techniques, undisciplined phrasing, haphazard thoughts, and much channeling from sources residing within me and sources unknown. It’s filled with mystery and clarity, fire and darkness, blunders and eurekas, deities and demons. Some thoughts and images arrived on lightning. Some crept up from deep below the damp sod. Early drafts of many poems in this book were written between 1991 and 1997. During that time, I wrote obsessively. I was, in part, writing for many little authors, or they for me. In 1990, I began therapy that led to a diagnosis of dissociative identity disorder. That’s clinical-speak for developing multiple personalities as the way of coping with long-term trauma. Some of the poems in this collection are heavily influenced by, or in effect written by, some of the inner authors. Together, we were swept up effortlessly in a tidal wave of imagery and words and discovered what we already knew: poetry is like love—it can’t be forced. All we could do was await its birth and celebrate its arrival.”

[applause]

Tippett: So that beautiful young woman with a pure, glorious voice was wrestling with a lot of demons, or suppressing a lot of demons, in those years in which you made such an impact, an impression on, the imagination of an entire time.

I remember watching — in the documentary, you learn what’s happening as it goes on. I remember there’s a lot in the beginning of you and your sisters struggling with anxiety and phobias and trouble sleeping, and it really didn’t make sense.

Baez: Right, right, right.

Tippett: That’s what you finally had to walk towards.

Baez: Yeah, I had wonderful therapists from the age 15 on, and they helped me deal with the anxiety and the depression. I didn’t know what that was. It was just what my life had been. But they got me around and under and over issues, and helped me survive, and have some kind of quality of life. Then at a certain point, just when the poetry began, I decided I really had to bite the bullet and go down wherever it was and find what was causing all this stuff.

So it’s in the poems, I just took a deep dive — by way of hypnosis, guided imagery. I mean, this doctor was wonderful. He sent me off to dance, to throw stuff, to scream, a lot of dancing, draw, do poetry. It just kept — the stuff kept coming out, good stuff. During that time, which took a number of years, I realized I was feeling better and better. I think in the film it says, “I feel whole.” I had no way to judge that. It was just a new feeling, and I felt like a whole person instead of splits.

Tippett: Do you know the poet Naomi Shihab Nye? Are you familiar with her? She is really a beautiful teacher about writing in general. One of the things she says about writing — writing in general, but writing poetry in particular — that it brings us into conversation with the many selves inside ourselves. But for you, that was really much more literal because you found, and you realized, and you and your sisters together realized, that there had been trauma and abuse in your family with your beloved father. And that you literally — you talk about having this family of inner people. And some of these poems are attributed to specific inner people. It sounds like you became acquainted with them.

Baez: Oh, I did. Yeah. And by the way, we’re all happy to be here this evening. [laughter] When we talk about them publicly, they’re kind of like peeping around in the corner. What about me? What about me? So yes, we’re comfortable here tonight.

Yeah, sometimes — I mean before I understood this, I’d be writing, I’d be writing poetry, and I’d read the thing, “Gosh, that doesn’t seem like something I would’ve written.” Down the bottom maybe signed somebody else’s name.

Tippett: Really? You would just find the name signed?

Baez: Yeah, and that’s sometimes how I became acquainted with the person. You know, this is also insane to somebody who is first exposed to it, but by the end of the hour, you’ll probably be used to it. [laughter] It’s too crazy for me to comprehend, so stick with me.

Tippett: Yeah. [laughter] I have to say to be clear, and I do want to tease out a little bit the difference between writing poetry and writing poetry as song because you had been writing poetry all along.

Actually I have to say congratulations that “Diamonds & Rust” just hit the UK charts…

Baez: I love that.

Tippett: …again, in 2024.

[applause and cheers]

Baez: That was so crazy.

Tippett: Just in the last couple of days. And that was about your relationship with Bob Dylan. Knowing that I was going to speak with you, I went back and listened to it, and it is such a poem. It is such a sung poem.

I am just going to read some of the lines. It starts with,

“Well, I’ll be damned

Here comes your ghost again …

Here I sit

Hand on the telephone

Hearing a voice I’d known

A couple of light years ago

Heading straight for a fall …

Now you’re telling me

You’re not nostalgic

Then give me another word for it

You who are so good with words

And at keeping things vague
‘Cause I need some of that vagueness now

It’s all come back too clearly

Yes, I loved you dearly

And if you’re offering me diamonds and rust

I’ve already paid.”

Baez: I’m still waiting for the diamonds, by the way. [laughter] Not going to happen.

Tippett: And then there’s this, “As I remember your eyes were bluer than robin’s eggs. My poetry was lousy, you said.” So he was wrong.

Baez: He was wrong.

[laughter]

Tippett: I wonder if you would read the first poem in the book, which is called “Goodbye to the Black and White Ball,” which also tells some of this story you’ve been talking about. On page 21.

But what I’d like you to do is just, it’s a long poem, and I’d like you to read half of it. And then we’ll come back to the rest of it later. So read up to, “It might be diamonds.”

Baez: [laughs] Okay.

Tippett: If you don’t mind doing that, splitting the poem in half.

Baez: It’s fine. Okay.

“I used to think the alternative to black and white
must be gray. To avoid living a dull life,
I dressed in black and white,
I thought in black and white—
not just good or bad, mind you,
but perfect or damned
gifted or worthless
ethereal or demonic
emblazoned or cast out. 

“I scoffed at anything average
and avoided middle ground—
you know, The Gray Area.
As a result, I let slip most of my life.

“I was chronically anxious, insomniac,
promiscuous, multiphobic, depressed,
hypervigilant, and, luckily, immensely talented.

“I had antennae that could turn corners ahead of me,
protect me from the mortal danger of, say,
eating dinner in a restaurant
or making a new friend—
you know, The Gray Area.

“When I was half a century old, I tore off the antennae
and turned my life over
to a power greater than myself—
which by that point could have been
a toothpick.

“I pitched myself into a sea of memories
and headed blindly like a hoodwinked shark
for the marrow of the inner core me;
I pictured pustules of venom but
my therapist suggested it might be diamonds.”

Tippett: There are diamonds again.

Poetry’s become really important in my work, and it took me by surprise. I didn’t see it coming. I think my interest is in the human condition, and I’m always looking — I think that is what underlies things that we analyze in political terms and economic terms and sociological terms. And what I’ve experienced across the years is that poetry has a way of giving voice to things that other forms of words simply cannot. And I guess I’m so curious about where poetry comes from in us, and what it works in us that is distinctive. I just wonder how you’ve thought about that, how you sense that.

Baez: I don’t know how to answer questions like that because I didn’t think about any of it. I just started it. It’s the way I’ve done the drawings and the paintings, and the way I did the music. It just kind of came out that way. I mean, out of my mom, just on output, on creative output. And I never questioned — I think I never questioned how I was doing any of it, or I wouldn’t have done a book of upside-down drawings if I had tried to figure that out. What a bore. I guess I just do it, and I don’t think about it.

Tippett: But I do sense that you feel like these particular insights and truths could only have come out — could only have found expression through the form of words that is poetry. Or at least right now.

Baez: Well, I don’t know because whatever happens when I get in the art studio and start painting, just another form of letting it rip. I mean, I never studied any of it. The best advice I got from a painter friend of mine when I said, “If you had one thing to say to an aspiring artist like myself, what would you say?” And she said, “Make as many mistakes as you can.” And so, I’m painting a portrait and it gets really too picky, or I’m trying to make it look too carefully like somebody, I drop it in the swimming pool and pull it out. [laughter] If that isn’t bad enough, I dunk it again. And depending on how wet the paint was to begin with, you get different possibilities. But it all transforms. It transforms the painting and, in my opinion, in my experience, gives it a new life. That’s not something that’s really explainable.

Tippett: Was the experience — did it feel different from when you were writing songs decades ago?

Baez: I think they’re very different things. One would assume that if I had written a good poem, oh, I’d be able to put that into music. And that was not my experience at all. And most of the singer-songwriter friends I have said: It doesn’t work that way. You can’t just grab a poem and make it into a song. I was relieved to hear that. I thought it was just me, but it’s pretty much accepted.

Tippett: Yeah. You lived a lot of life straddling your, as that description said, your “history-making life and your personal struggles that you kept hidden.” You waited a few decades to excavate that. And also your social activism, which was also such a huge part of who you were, and such a huge part of your legacy, was very distracting, right? I mean, nobly distracting.

Baez: [laughter] That’s a nice way to put it. “Nobly distracting.”

Tippett: From this personal work.

Baez: In a way not really.

Tippett: No?

Baez: In a way, no. When people used to say or still say, “You really have to get yourself healed before you can heal somebody else,” and I haven’t found that to be true because you just can’t. You have to do it all at the same time. So when I was doing all of that stuff — I mean, that particular therapist was smart enough to say, “Go on the road, just get out of here,” whereas the other style was, “We need you five days a week on the couch.” We both knew that wasn’t going to fly, so I went out there and did everything all at once. I tried to, anyway.

Tippett: And the songs you sang and wrote about, and the context in which you operated, were really often very hard, dramatic edges of American and global reality. Singing “We Shall Overcome” at the 1963 March on Washington, or “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” or “Birmingham Sunday,” which is an absolutely hauntingly beautiful, soft song about the murder of those four little girls at the 16th Street Baptist church.

As I said a minute ago, I’m really thinking a lot these days at this time in the life of the world about the 1960s, and how this loop of time, of meaning and searching, and how what we think we know about movement building and social change and activism comes from that time, and yet we’re formed as much by what was left undone as what was accomplished.

Baez: Well, and also the ridiculous stage has been set now for what’s going on now. Because back in the day, nobody could have written or thought up.

Tippett: Could have written what?

Baez: What’s going on now. There wasn’t anything in the vocabulary.

[applause]

Tippett: Yeah, I’m talking more about the racial reckoning, which — and yes, and so much was accomplished, and so much was left for us to rise to, for future generations to complete, and that hasn’t been completed.

Baez: Well, that’s assuming there’ll be future generations. [laughter] I mean, seriously.

Tippett: Well, that’s a whole other conversation. [laughter]

Baez: Kind of, but it’s all in the context of that. Our backdrop is global warming. Everything that we do, we get angst about and we do it — that is the backdrop, is we don’t know how long we’re going to be here. Certainly not as long as we thought we would. So I think that’s important to put in the picture. It changes the way you think and act, maybe makes your life more vital in some ways, and not to be dragged down. I mean, I think it’s really important to live in denial. [laughter] Live in denial 95% of the time so you can breathe and have a life, and then 5% of the time go make some good trouble, go do stuff.

[applause]

Tippett: And I think by “live in denial,” you also mean — It’s so hard. Now we’re so inundated with so many sources of information and so many vivid images of terrible things that we can’t touch. And so are you also talking about a kind of discipline of attending to what you can do?

Baez: I heard somebody say, “Hope is a muscle.” That made sense to me because I don’t have a whole lot of hope naturally, but I think — I was also very pessimistic, and people assume that I’m an optimist. And I heard somebody, I don’t know what the context was, saying to be optimistic can be silly, being pessimistic is a waste of time. I found that very helpful.

[laughter]

Tippett: I want to say also, the activism that you were engaged in then was also very intimate and organic to you. You were integrating schools in Mississippi, and you also had an experience growing up of being part Mexican and experiencing racism. The drama of that time, the Vietnam War, that foreign policy drama, both you and your husband, David Harris, were arrested. I mean, you were about revolution, right?

As I was getting ready for this, I came across this interview on CBS in 1965, which was like calmly hostile.

Baez: Exactly.

Tippett: Maybe that happened —

Baez: They weren’t supposed to notice it was hostile.

[laughter]

Tippett: They weren’t? He was basically calling you “seditious” and “treasonable” in these very measured tones, and you were so young. You were actually quite calm back. I remember he wanted to talk to you about — he said something like, “Don’t you believe what we believe in this country, that communism is a threat?” Do you remember what you said?

Baez: No.

Tippett: You said, again with great serenity, “I think that boogeyman is not communism or any -ism. It’s hatred.”

[applause]

Yeah, and you said —

Baez: I was clever once.

[laughter]

Tippett: You were. It was very impressive. You said, “If you believe that men can change, then there’s hope.” You said, “What is treasonable? Killing people is treasonable.”

Baez: Yeah. That was always very clear to me. The other thing that I got from Quaker meeting was the discussions about non-violence, violence from the time I was eight on. I heard that discussion about what’s really important in the world — the life of a person, turf, land, what are we really fighting for? And that the human being should be the most important of all those things. And it’s not how it works out at the moment.

Tippett: You’ve also written about and spoken about realizing later that you were, I think you said, addicted to activism. You talk about saving the world as a kind of double-edged sword.

I think about that — I’m 20 years younger than you, but I do think that that kind of call in the mid to late 20th century — that we were raised to save the world — that did as much damage. I’m not saying that you did damage, but I think that that was a slippery slope.

Baez: Well, I had the great good fortune of having the people around me knock some common sense into me periodically. One of the things that was really important was to understand that “We Shall Overcome” didn’t mean world peace forever. We shall overcome, now if we can still think of it as small victories, we can overcome this, we can overcome that. Because all we can do now. That’s all we can do. Unless somehow or other there was another movement and whatever — however the stars have to line up so the music is right and the activism is right — and at the moment it isn’t. It isn’t. We’re all trying to find our way and how best to be heard or make a dent or do something empathetic and decent that doesn’t get lost in the abyss.

I just encourage people to keep trying that. The odds are just so enormously against us, which just means you just have to try a little bit harder.

Tippett: You also straddled this experience of fame. Even when I read about you, and you’re called an icon and the “Queen of Folk” and a legend, I mean, that’s stressful, right? You’re on the cover of Time Magazine in 1962. I mean, how old were you? Twenty?

Baez: I was 19 or 20.

Tippett: Nineteen or 20. And you had this experience of being torn between being an icon and being a mother. And I find some of the poems in here that are so moving are about this kind of reckoning you’ve done internally, and also a lot of healing that’s taken place.

I wondered if you would read maybe the poem “Gabe at Three,” which is page 49. And then there’s another one, “Big Sur for Gabe at 24,” and that’s page 89.

Baez: Okay. First I have to read his contribution to this, which is I heard him say, or he said to me, and I wrote it down, age three, “Mom, you know what I’m going to do sometime? I’m going to get a bucket and attach it to a string and fill the bucket with snow and hide there. And then when somebody comes along, I’ll let go and the bucket’ll drop on the head. Isn’t that funny?”

[laughter]

Okay, but this is called “Gabe at Three.”

“I brought you here
to this banquet of life
but neglected to give you
a plate, a fork, a knife—
the implements
you would need
in order to be . . .

“But there you are at three, small body
top heavy
under immense headphones,
facing the picture window
and the wild roses.
The roses,

“and all the earth’s beauty
and all the earth’s beauty
within you,
as you listen dreamily
to John Denver sing
Take me home, country roads . . .”

Tippett: Say a little bit about your relationship to Gabe and the reflecting and the feeling that you did about that as time went on.

Baez: Yeah, a couple of things. First one is that lo and behold, he’s 54. He made it. [laughter] We have an extraordinary relationship, and if we hit a snag, we get ourselves to a therapist really fast. We need to, and that takes care of it.

I kind of joke about, when I talk to a public, I say something about, I didn’t think I was a good enough mom. All these heads are going like that. I was going to start a bad mothers club [laughter] because there’s so many people. I just wasn’t there enough. I didn’t do enough. And then I was dealing with this stuff with my therapist, and I could forgive everybody. You know, I could forgive this, forgive that, my mother, my father, but I couldn’t forgive myself. I went on about how I couldn’t forgive myself. And he finally said, “What makes you so special? [laughs] Other people do this.”

I don’t know where that started, about Gabe and guilt? Oh yes, I just want to say that about bad mothers club because we all go through it to one degree or another.

It was tough because before I knew these splits in me, my behavior was dictated by unhappiness within me. And so — I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand why I’d throw an ashtray across the room. Why did I do that? Well, in the end, it almost as though, well, somebody else in here had to do that to get it off our chest. And then I would get to know that person and we would discuss the ashtray that he’d just wrecked. But you can’t say, “I didn’t do that. Tommy did it.” It just doesn’t work that way. [laughter]

Anyway, don’t know where we left off.

Tippett: In the documentary, he speaks with great compassion, though, about that and about —

Baez: Gabe.

Tippett: …towards you.

Baez: Gosh, yeah. I just am so grateful for the way he dealt with the questions and the kindness. He has all the kindness and compassion that I may not have like that. He’s just made that way. He’s a forgiving — so I’ve had to work at it. I had to work on it.

Tippett: Would you read “Big Sur for Gabe at 24”? It’s page 89.

Baez: Yeah. 89, yeah.

“Big Sur

for Gabe at 24.”

“Here is a cruel beauty.
Here is thunder and flying mist,
craggy granite beds
of tiny wildflowers
and mother of pearl tears
glistening down the fierce cheeks
of red clay ghosts.
Here is the sound of wind
like a forsaken witch
sobbing along the crow fly cliffs,
lost in the nether sky,
defeated by the coast’s brutal beauty.

“A pure white heron,
the king of Castle Rock,
preens above silhouettes
of hunching brown herons
lined up like nuns along the rocks
and down to the raging sea.

“I thought I saw the reef of jade
dancing in a renegade
shaft of sunlight, too,
and chunks of broken rocks
strewn like emeralds
all along the sand.

“And then I saw my son,
my only son, my red clay son, —”

Let’s see, what are we?

“my soulmate son,
as he was crouched birdlike
high atop a massive rock,
high above the deafening sea.
And as I watched him prayerfully,
he spread his arms,
reached for the shaft of sunlight,
then looked down and smiled at me
the smile of a thousand suns.

“Sun of heavens,
pierce the sky
and shine upon
my only boy,
who radiates
like you, today.

“My son’s a thousand sons in one.
And I am neither witch, nor nun,
nor heron white, nor blue nor brown,
I am the Mom, the only one:
the mother of my only son.”

Tippett: Thank you.

[applause]

Baez: Thank you.

Tippett: You have a granddaughter now, too.

Baez: I do. I have a 20-year-old granddaughter.

Tippett: Twenty-year-old?

Baez: She’s a singer-songwriter, and all of a sudden said, “I think I want to go to law school.” I said, “Okay.” [laughter] Entertainment, law. She has all the genes that my son and I both missed.

Tippett: The practical genes, or what?

Baez: Well, first of all, she has the bubbling, cheerful, expressing joy that neither Gabe nor I have. She has it all. And she’s bubbling, bright, straight A’s, goes to parties. I don’t know how she does it all. I don’t.

But this last one, she said, “I think I want to be a lawyer.” I thought, “Oh my God, is there anything left for others?”

[laughter]

Tippett: I thought what you said a minute ago about “We Shall Overcome” and what that really means — that it is a bit at a time, that it’s not some kind of dramatic resolution.

I wonder also, just thinking about being a grandmother, and something like the word “peace,” which was a big word in the ’60s. I mean it’s an important word at all times, but I wonder if there’s — I don’t know, what connotations does the call for peace have for you now that it maybe didn’t then?

Baez: Well, the problem with the word “peace” is that it’s static, and the only way to even approach peace is through peace, through what you do.

I remember my ex David saying, “What you have at the end of the day is what you did that day. It doesn’t really matter what you talk about. It is what you do.” And so thinking we’re somehow going to have peace by adding another day of bombing each other, it doesn’t work that way. I was never keen on the word “peace.”

[applause]

Tippett: Because — for this reason, that it was too simple?

Baez: China dropped bombs for peace. Over the army or Marines or whatever, “we’re for peace,” “Marines for peace.” It doesn’t make any sense at all. I think we want it to. We have glorious ideas of what peace is — obviously, clearly it’s not just the absence of war. But hey, I’d settle for that right now.

Tippett: Yeah.

[applause]

Tippett: There’s a lot of bird imagery in that “Gabe at 24” poem.

Baez: What is it? A bird —

Tippett: A lot of bird imagery. I do want to circle back to your reference a while ago about this backdrop, this underpinning of our time, or our consciousness, our planet, of the planet itself being in such distress. It seems to me that, of course, birds are a part of the natural world who sing. They’re that—

Baez: They’re my other family.

Tippett: And what?

Baez: They’re my other family.

Tippett: They’re your other family, yeah. They seem emblematic for you of an emotional connection to the ecological crisis.

Baez: They’re — very. One of my practices that I work hard at — because it’s not easy with the terror of global warming — and is how do I deal with the birds, which caused the most sadness to me. Years ago, there’s a canyon below my house, and it used to be just a cacophony of bird song in the morning starting at dawn. And I’d go down there. I’d make tapes of it with my little cassette recorder. And then a number of years ago, I went home. I thought, “I’m going to go down, listen to the birds,” and there weren’t that many birds. And then more recently, there is nothing. There’s an epp and a peep of that, though I call them “the hosannas” in the book.

What do I do to be able to bear it? I try to — we have lots of birds on the property because we also have rats and mice because I insist on filling the bird feeders. This stuff all drops down and everybody — It’s a heyday, all the animals. I try to listen to a bird sing, and appreciate the beauty of the song, and not wait for the chorus.

[applause]

Tippett: Would you read your poem “Bird Song”? It’s on page 102.

Baez: Yeah. 102, okay.

Yeah. We used to sleep. We had two decks, and I used to always sleep outside. I still do as much as I can. But so, I was on the deck.

“I lay out on the porch in the dark
in my warm and rumpled sheets

“awakened by the moon-sliver
casting glimmers on the hibiscus.

“It is time for the most beautiful music to begin.
Heart awaiting, every nerve listening.

“But by dawn’s light, we heard it not
and my breath grew silent, but we heard it not.

“I was perched in a nightdress
at the edge of the veranda in anticipation.

“But we heard it not. Yes, today was
the day the birdsong suddenly stops.

“Last year it was on the fifteenth of June,
so I’d hoped I had more time.

“But when I could distinctly make out
tree against tree on the mountain across the canyon,

“I knew it was true: there was no flood, no chorus.
Only cheeps and peeps, chirps, squawks, and eeps.

“But the ringing of hundreds of silver throats would not
come again until spring—if they ever come at all.

“I told myself, ‘It is nature . . . the birds
have business . . . or are tired.’ I held my breath.

“I can barely stand the inevitable turning
of the seasons and the remnants and shadows

“of the hosannas that filled the canyon
only yesterday.”

[applause]

Baez: I think we should have one light one in here.

[laughter]

Tippett: Okay.

Baez: “This Little Piggy”

“This little piggy played the violin,
this little piggy played drums,
this little piggy played sticks and bells,
this little piggy played none.

“The last little piggy ran and ran [and ran] all the way home,
hearing the lovely trio in his head,
but got so excited he wet himself . . .
which is where the WEE! WEE! WEE! comes from.

[laughter]

“Soon thereafter, he taught himself to play piccolo
and stay dry.”

[applause and laughter]

Tippett: Thank you. I wanted to just touch down before we close also on this matter of living for a while in a body, which is also called aging.

Baez: What?

[laughter]

Tippett: I think that that ability to just find that kind of peace, and to be still enough to commune with a tree, is also something that gets easier as we get older.

Baez: Yeah, we accept our own looniness better as we get older. [laughter] We do these things more easily or more automatically, yeah.

But aging is a tricky business. There’s the wondrous side of it, and then there’s a side where I don’t walk straight and it’s nothing I can do about it. I’m just not as coordinated as I was. I go to a physical therapist and say, “I don’t want to fall. What do I do?” And so I work constantly to keep ahead of the game, the physical game. And I would encourage you to work faithfully because it doesn’t help to go to the physical therapist and get a bunch of things to do and not do them.

[laughter]

No, nothing’s going to happen unless you repeat this stuff, mercilessly. Chase down your own health, I think.

Tippett: You used the word wholeness a little while ago, that you’ve had this experience of becoming whole. I think in my life of conversation, I’ve interviewed a lot of people who lead wise and graceful lives. And a quality of that, I have found, is — I think that our culture, we have this desire to resolve and fix and perfect. But actually what I see in people who grow wiser and not just older — because the two don’t necessarily go together — is this integration of everything that happens, and everything that is learned, and the integration of what has gone wrong, or what the wounds are, into the wholeness that one achieves. I feel like you embody that, too.

Baez: Well, I wonder if — “integration” is the word they used for all the inner people. You’re supposed to all get together in a big clump. I always hated the word “integration” because I felt as though I was killing off one or two of them by trying to bunch everybody together. A therapist said, “Well, no, we need to tried everything to make it look interesting.” Saying, “Oh, no, just look at your personalities as the chorus, and then you would be the diva.” I said, “You know what? I still don’t want it.”

The only way I started letting these people go was one of them knocked on my head one day and said, “I want out.” I was so hurt. I was hurt. [laughs] And so we began a process of — quote — “letting people go” so that I’m not hurting them, and sometimes they have their own lives.

Tippett: Where did they go?

Baez: Well, it was an interesting one. They all went to different places. Some of them wanted to go into heaven and be with the Phantom of the Opera because to us, it didn’t make any difference who he killed. He was just this guy, this magical guy. Some people wanted to go to the bottom of the ocean. Some wanted to remain with other people from in there.

But Yasha — it was a Jewish kid who was one of the best writers in the book — and I checked in recently, which I don’t often do. So Yasha, whom I knew as a 12-year-old, is now 19 or 20. He’s gay. He has his boyfriend with him, and they have their school books together, and they’re going to an Ivy League school. So it happens. They grow up.

Tippett: Actually, would you read another fun one I think that you have — but also serious, given what you said about staying ahead of the physical game — is the “Low-Low Impact Class” poem?

Baez: What page is it?

Tippett: Page 107.

Baez: I love that poem. I almost memorized it once, but not quite enough to — okay. Keep in mind, this was written 40 years ago so now it’s a different story.

“Low-low impact class.”

“At the 6:00 a.m. low-low impact class in my local gym
the crepe-skinned ladies
with nets over their pin curls,

“small humps on their backs,
soft webs at the elbow bend,
and no bottoms to speak of,

“do the power walk,
knee bends, and surprisingly confident
leg lifts to the pulsing beat of

“‘I Will Survive,’ music thoughtfully chosen by
the smiling twenty-three-year-old instructor whose skin is
tight and lustrous and whose head is full of dry leaves,

“who chides Come on, ladies! Come on, ladies!
[and] the old girls push on,
stay the course, and last a full hour.

“Afterwards, they have a lovely steam bath
and a shower, dry off, powder their parts, then
maneuver their bodies into street clothes.

“They take out pin curls and comb up,
apply cheeks, lips, and eyes,
pack wet towels into fluorescent gym bags,

“and with endorphin counts that would
put their middle-aged kids to shame,
head rosily out to greet the rising winter sun.”

[applause]

Thank you.

Tippett: So I know that this is a short list. You could make a much longer list, and a more intimate list. But I think about this life you’ve lived, and this span of time, and how hard it would’ve been to imagine that “Diamonds & Rust” would be on the UK charts in 2024, or that Bob Dylan would be a Nobel Prize winner. And that you’ve stayed in a relationship with your parents, and that you have this reconciled, loving relationship with your son.

Before we close, I want to ask you to read the end of “Goodbye to the Black and White Ball.”

Baez: Oh, okay.

Tippett: But first, I want to thank you on behalf of myself and all of us for — thank you for your voice, and for raising your voice, in all the ways you’ve shared it.

[applause]

Baez: [singing] “Wade in the water, wade in the water, children. Wade in the water, God’s gonna trouble the waters. Wade in the water, Wade in the water, children. Wade in the water, God’s gonna trouble the waters.”

[applause]

Thank you.

Tippett: Thank you so much for that. Let’s hear a little bit of your poetic voice now to close.

Baez: Okay, where was it? This is which one?

Tippett: Oh, “Black and White Ball” you read to —

Baez: “Diamond.”

Tippett: “I pitched myself into a sea of memories / and headed blindly like a hoodwinked / shark for the marrow of the inner core me; / I pictured pustules of venom but / my therapist suggested it might be diamonds.”

Baez: “For months, I thrashed about,
recording dreams, grasping for clues,
fighting for my life and the life of my son.
When I came up for air from my flailing,
I began to see shards of color.

“Slowly, I began to see my life was
sanctified, matchless,
and I would trade it for no other.
I should not have been shocked to find that
a diamond was in fact the core of me.

“I continued to scrape off tenacious parasites.
I discovered that sorrow is an ocean,
fury is blue, pain is my companion,
but love had not been smashed to bits
so badly as to not be mendable,
like a gypsy violin
crushed beneath a Nazi boot.

“I needed patience and an artisan.
My therapists became my artisans.

“People around me
unearthed the gems I had been promised
and held my heart
in their cradling hands
as I split up into a hundred pieces,
a hundred bright souls
sorting out their places in a dazzling necklace
taking in and reflecting sunlight,
working to mend me,
to help me survive my deliverance
and transcend my survival.”

[applause]

Baez: Thank you. Thanks, Krista.

[applause and cheers]

[music: “Eventide” by Gautam Srikishan]

Tippett: Joan Baez has released more than 30 albums across the last 60 years. Her book of poetry is, When You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance. The documentary we mentioned, about her and her family is Joan Baez, I Am a Noise.

Special thanks to Michael Green and the entire staff at the Chicago Humanities Festival, and the Athenaeum Center for Thought & Culture, for bringing me together with Joan.

The On Being Project is: Chris Heagle, Laurén Drommerhausen, Eddie Gonzalez, Lucas Johnson, Zack Rose, Julie Siple, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Gautam Srikishan, Cameron Mussar, Kayla Edwards, Tiffany Champion, Andrea Prevost, and Carla Zanoni.

On Being is an independent nonprofit production of The On Being Project. We are located on Dakota land. Our lovely theme music is provided and composed by Zoë Keating. Our closing music was composed by Gautam Srikishan. And the last voice that you hear singing at the end of our show is Cameron Kinghorn.

Our funding partners include:

The Hearthland Foundation. Helping to build a more just, equitable and connected America—one creative act at a time.

The Fetzer Institute, supporting a movement of organizations that are applying spiritual solutions to society’s toughest problems. Find them at fetzer.org.

Kalliopeia Foundation, Dedicated to cultivating the connections between ecology, culture, and spirituality. Supporting initiatives and organizations that uphold sacred relationships with the living Earth. Learn more at kalliopeia-dot-org.

And, the Osprey Foundation, a catalyst for empowered, healthy, and fulfilled lives.