the spirit of folk, and the revolutionary lesbianism of joan baez's music

Joan Baez has always stood in Bob Dylan’s colossal shadow, despite kickstarting his career, inspiring many of his most famous songs, and having her own long-ranging, poignant and legendary career in music. In this essay, I will discuss the Queen of Folk, and the potent political implications of her covers when listened to through a sapphic lens.

At the start of January of this year, I fell for folk music in a big way. I was in the midst of the worst hangover anxiety of my life, almost paralysed by the thoughts, and my mum was trying to show me a song—Guantanamera by Pete Seeger. I found it soothing, and finally, I fell asleep. When I woke up, pure golden light seemed to be emanating from my phone. Maybe it was simply the manifestation of relief from the terrible day I had had, of my painstaking dissection of every embarrassing thing I had done last night, that I had done in my whole life. But, despite my committed atheism, it felt to me like a direct message from God, my own version of Kerouac's vision of the cross in Big Sur. 

It was Joan Baez. There was something about her voice—so angelic, so clear, so strong, so mournful, so sure. It dragged me right out of my self pity into this new state of incredible dreamy ecstasy. Hearing Baby Blue, Don’t Think Twice, It Ain’t Me Babe, Love Minus Zero/No Limit and Daddy, You’ve Been On my Mind for the first time will stay with me forever. There's no other way I can describe it. I’m not being hyperbolic when I say it was the stuff of angels.

I proceeded to listen to mostly Joan for the next six months, branching out to Bob Dylan and other folk singers for context and variety. But for me, it was always her. It was always Joan Baez. I remember being on the bus to uni, listening to Sweet Sir Galahad, and at the lines But, oh was I born too late/And do you think I'll fail at every single thing I try, bursting into silent tears. Melodramatic, perhaps. But she had this total hold on me. She understood me completely, in the way I couldn't achieve with any friend, or therapist.

Joan Baez is an American singer, songwriter and activist born in 1941.  Her success was immediate in the folk music scene—she began performing at folk music clubs when she was just seventeen, and played at Newport Folk Festival a year later, in 1959. Two years later, she met Bob Dylan. In 1962, at the age of 21, she was on the cover on Time Magazine.

It was Baez’s prolific reputation and talent that gave Dylan the legitimacy he needed to be catapulted into fame. For three years they shared an intense, tumultuous and heavily publicized relationship. This was on the level of Rimbaud and Verlaine. They were legends, and they were barely out of their teenage years. And that's not even beginning to mention the songs we got after the unceremonious break-up in 1965.  Diamonds and Rust. Visions of Johanna. Winds of the Old Days. Love is Just a Four Letter Word. This is Voyager Golden Record level songwriting.

She reminded me of Sinead O'Connor, with her intense, startling beauty and her unrepentant political fervor. As Dylan described her in Chronicles:

“She was wicked looking—shiny black hair that hung down over the curve of slender hips, drooping lashes, partly raised, no Raggedy Ann Doll. The sight of her made me high. All that and then there was her voice."

“She looked like a religious icon, like somebody you'd sacrifice yourself for and she sang in a voice straight to God.”

“There was no one like her… She seemed very mature, seductive, intense, magical… However illogical it seemed, something told me that she was my counterpart… some strange feeling told me that we would inevitably meet up...There was no one in her class."

I agreed. She felt like a saint to me. Like a divine hand reaching out, guiding me forward. Like a lover.

So when I went to look for her fan community online, I was shocked that I could hardly find anything, apart from the usual music magazines, one extremely thorough retrospective/love letter to her career, a cursory mention in Pitch Perfect 3, and a few staunch Tumblr blogs. People know about her, of course. She's Joan Baez. She's a legend. It feels patronising to even say. But for all her great fame, prolific career and multiple documentaries, there seemed to be hardly anything on her on the Internet as I knew it, except her and Lana's performance of Diamonds and Rust. It was pure injustice. How had the TikTok femcels not discovered Girl of Constant Sorrow? 

I knew the much-anticipated Timothée Chalamet Dylan biopic was coming out soon, and that would change everything for sure. But still, I was honestly astounded. It was like Kate Bush all over again, but a hundred times worse.

I never questioned why I came back to her music so often. It was her voice, her clarity of emotion, pure and simple. I had been stuck in an almost constant depression throughout my teenage years that worsened tenfold with the pandemic, my brain fog made it impossible to think, and I was failing my first year of uni. Her music reassured me, stopped me worrying about how far I felt I was behind my peers. The characters in her songs seemed far realer than any of the lifemaxxing influencers I scrolled past: they whispered from windows to scold serenading men, they were imprisoned for illegal immigration, they mourned their murdered lovers, they were hanged at the gallows.

But I think there was something else as well, something that I felt connected us, a perfect throughline from 60s America to 2024 London, though I knew it wasn't purposeful.

Much of Baez's best known discography consists of covers of male folk singers, but usually she keeps the lyrics the same, not changing pronouns on either end. This results in a lot of songs that become, seemingly, pretty gay. There was something about this woman singing of her passionate love of women in the 1960s and 70s that switched on my brain as a young queer woman. I could understand these ballads of love and loss far greater than I could relate to the queer pop on the radio—I didn't want to “feel the rush”. I was depressed. I was lonely, bordering on anchorite. And though I knew it was that she was simply singing the songs as they were written, it meant a lot to me. It felt revolutionary, in the same way Ripley from Alien was revolutionary. Hell, it was far beyond that. It was a Mexican-American woman singing in the 1960s about lesbian relationships and affairs as though it was the easiest thing in the world. It was punk rock, in the purest sense.

That's not to disregard Baez's actual history of queerness.  Baez is bisexual, and the early ‘60s she had a relationship with a woman named Kimmie for two years, who she talks about in her 2023 documentary I am a Noise:

“She was great. She could out-drink anybody on the coast and she served for seven hours at a time and all this wonderful stuff that I didn't do. She was more feral than I was, didn't have any consciousness of rules and regulations. We were tearing around town in boots and cutoffs and suspenders and weird hair and headbands. Just ruffians. We ended up together. It was a major turn. What it gave me was another whole angle on love, another whole angle on sex. A couple of years it lasted, a nice couple of years. I think, probably soothing after men.”

Take I Dream of Jeannie/Danny Boy - Medley, for example, which combines “Jeannie”, a 1854 song by American composer Stephen Foster, with “Danny Boy” a 1913 Irish ballad and funeral dirge by Frederick Weatherly.

Jeannie was originally written as a song from a husband to his wife who has left him. He pines for his lost lover, singing how he thinks of her hair, of her songs, how he is “nevermore to find her where the deep waters flow.”  But when Baez sings Jeannie together with Danny Boy, (a song for a lover, or a son, who has left home) it is recontextualised with sudden mournful bisexuality—first a wife has left her, then a husband. Or, perhaps even sadder, a woman whose wife has left her, as well as her son.

Her cover of If I Was a Carpenter seems to detail the tale of a lesbian singing to her girlfriend, asking her if she would still love her if she was working class, and her girlfriend was rich. This new take calls upon butch-femme dynamics, as well as inter-class relationships.

Long Black Veil is made even more excruciating when thought of through this lens—the singer is wrongly accused of murder, but cannot give an alibi, as at the time she was “in the arms of my best friend's wife”—touching not just on the betrayal of her best friend, and of the crime of adultery, but also of the homophobic reaction that would likely occur in response to such a reality at the time. The singer is hanged for the crime, and her lover is forced to mourn her in private—”The scaffold is high, and eternity nears/She stood in the crowd and shed not a tear/But sometimes at night when the cold wind mourns/In a long black veil, she cries over my bones”. This devastating verse could easily become an allegory for closeting, especially posthumous closeting. To me, it recalls the evils of the AIDS epidemic—how many men were forced to watch their lovers and friends die in silence, for fear of outing themselves.

East Virginia practically screams lesbianism at you. “Her hair was of brightsome colour/And her lips of ruby red/On her breast she wore white lilies/There I longed to lay my head”? Like, are you kidding me? And here: “I'd rather be in some dark holler/Where the sun refuse to shine/Than to see you be another man's darlin'/And to know that you'll never be mine”. That right there is the paranoia every sapphic woman knows as soon as she gets into a relationship: the fear that your partner will leave you for a man, whether due to compulsive heterosexuality, or heteronormativity, or purely just bad luck. The whole song is littered with lesbian overtones. Here, in the fifth verse: “Just the thought of you, my darlin'/Sends aching pains all through my breast”. Of course, (in cisgender terms) the writer Buell Kazee was referring to a man's breast. But you barely even have to think to change that to a woman's one instead. And again, you find almost the same remark in Lily of the West—”Her rosy cheeks, her ruby lips, like arrows pierced my breast”. What sapphic woman hasn't felt these exact feelings? And here, just a few lines later: “I courted lovely Flora, some pleasure there to find/But she turned unto another man which sore distressed my mind”. Pure sapphic anguish. As the song continues, the singer is driven to madness to see her lover with another man, and she stabs him in the chest, for which she is imprisoned. I know personally the will to violence during this sort of heartbreak, though obviously I wouldn’t act on it. But the unequal juxtaposition of heterosexuality as opposed to homosexuality in a cultural context, and especially considering Baez was singing this song in 1960, makes the rage of the character even more potent. 

There are plenty more songs I could talk about. Love Minus Zero/No Limit. Mary Call. Angeline. It Ain't Me Babe. Don't Think Twice. But I think I've got my point across.

I find it heartening to see the spirit of the folk movement reemerging again, in these strange times. After all, there's only so much exploitation people can take before they start making art, before they start fighting back. I never seemed to be able to connect to modern white folk-adjacent indie music, and I was never quite sure why. I know now, though. It's apoliticism scared me. I could not relate to Lana's vision of womanhood, and it called upon politics that I could not align myself behind. Time and time again, we idolise these deliberately apolitical white celebrities, playing music associated with famously political genres, and are suprised when their politics don't align with our own. Hozier can be the exception to the rule, but I refuse to dismiss his Irish Irishness as an important factor in his political plight.

And then, I got it. It's still the spirit of folk, even if it sounds a little different now. It had been transmuted into a different genre, one with just as much forthrightedness and potential for unification as folk. I felt it when I watched Childish Gambino's This is America. I felt it when I saw Ren's Money Game Part 1, 2 and 3. Honestly, you could take one of Ren's songs, remove the backing music and replace it with a folk guitar rhythm and then you'd have a classic folk anthem. Politicam hiphop had taken up the torch, and I'm glad for it. It's what we desperately need right now. Galvanising voices from the left, making new art to make people angry about their situation, to spur them to protest, and rebellion. To my fellow chronically online Gen Z, I beg you, you have seen what's going on. You'd have to be purpisely ignoring it at this point. Watching TikToks to keeps updated with world events is all well and good, but what we need right now is direct action. Use your phones to organise, to protest, to riot. I know for certain that Joan Baez would be the first person to support that sort of action.

aghhhh omg if u got this far, thank you!!! i think this is probably the proudest i've been of anything in my life. i'm so happy i'm not depressed anymore and i can actually write all the shit i've been thinking. i promise i’ll put in proper citations and bibliography in the morning, but it's getting late now, and i’ve been writing this since 6AM. If you enjoyed it, please let me know, i will love u forever <33

sonny xxx