Joan Chandos Baez

Joan Chandos Baez is an American folk singer, songwriter, and political activist whose three-octave soprano and guitar arrangements of traditional ballads made her one of the central figures of the early-1960s American folk revival and a leading voice of the civil-rights and antiwar movements. She was born on January 9, 1941, in Staten Island, New York, to the Mexican-born physicist Albert Baez, co-inventor of the X-ray reflection microscope, and the Scottish-Irish drama teacher Joan Bridge.

Raised in a Quaker household that moved frequently for her father's academic posts, she taught herself ukulele and later guitar in her teens. Her appearance at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival, when she was 18, brought her an immediate Vanguard Records contract; her self-titled 1960 debut album reached the Billboard chart and stayed there for more than two years. Through the early 1960s she introduced an almost-unknown Bob Dylan to her audiences, recorded his songs before he had a national hit, and was for a time his romantic partner.

She sang "We Shall Overcome" at the 1963 March on Washington, paid the Internal Revenue Service the portion of her income taxes she calculated as supporting the military, was jailed twice in 1967 for blocking induction into the Vietnam War, and traveled to Hanoi during the Christmas bombing of 1972. Her album Diamonds & Rust (1975) — whose title song reflected on her relationship with Dylan — was her most commercially successful. She founded Humanitas International in 1979 and Amnesty International USA shortly afterward.

She was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2017, received the Kennedy Center Honors in 2021, and gave her farewell concert in Madrid on July 28, 2019. She continues to paint and to publish poetry from her home in Woodside, California.

Her name Joan is the medieval English form of the Old French Jehanne, ultimately from the Hebrew Yôḥānān meaning "Yahweh is gracious" — the feminine counterpart to John. Most heavily used in English-speaking countries between 1900 and 1940, the name was carried by both her mother and grandmother; she received the middle name Chandos, an unusual English surname-style middle name, from family tradition on her mother's side.