"I'm sorry. You have to have gray hair to be seated here," joked an usher at Joan Baez's Richmond show Friday night. "She's been at it for 53 years, you know."
The beginning of those 53 years places Baez at the dawn of the folk-music boom that surged up to the mid-'60s British Invasion that forced further evolution of the genre. She was one of the few early folk artists who rose to sustained national prominence, and the rare member of that group to maintain an ongoing recording career.
The passage of the decades since Baez first made her name hasn't diminished the admiration of her fans. She has lost none of her credibility as a supporter of causes for which she is passionate, and it would be no stretch to picture her alongside Rage Against The Machine's Tom Morello during a protest performance or amid an ensemble version of Bright Eyes for a more relaxed setting along the lines of Bob Dylan's Rolling Thunder Revue of the mid-'70s.
For her Richmond show, Baez shone as much as an interpreter of other artists' songs as much as a performer of her own, as she has throughout her career.
The work of a number of peers was represented. Dylan's "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" elicited a round of laughter when Baez approximated Dylan's voice for the last few lines. She also looked toward Donovan with "Catch The Wind," Steve Earle's "Jerusalem" and Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne," and referenced Johnny Cash while leading into "Long Black Veil," a song that Cash had notably covered.
As Baez mentioned the "99 percent" protesters, a member of the audience shouted out that they represented Norfolk's faction. Upon acknowledging the vocal 99 percent attendee, she moved into "Joe Hill," about the Swedish-American labor activist, and her introduction of "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" referred to it as a key song of the civil-rights movement.
Ably accompanied throughout the show by talented multi-instrumentalist Dirk Powell, Baez included performances of some of her best-known songs, including Phil Ochs' "There But For Fortune." The show closed with Baez's "Diamonds and Rust," The Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" (which she turned into a top-five hit in 1971), and John Lennon's "Imagine."
At this stage of her career, Baez is as striking a performer as ever, and her renditions of these songs drove home how deeply she is connected with some of music's most stirring creations, and how sometimes it takes a certain voice to lend a song the impact that its writer intended.
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