You’re late to the thread! Hello_Again’s “ignorance” has been successfully fought.
What a great opportunity to recommend* Noël*, Baez’s Christmas album, recorded early in her career and now availableremastered–with a few more songs. I’ve loved the album for many years, but didn’t know that Peter Schickele, discoverer of PDQ Bach, wrote the very non-folky arrangments.
This is some seriously beautiful music.
What a coincidence- I was just looking for an online edition of Time Rag last night. Does anyone know where one might listen to that song online?
I did find a live version done a cappella on the Tonight Show on You Tube.
The one thing I always found kind of sad about Joan Biaz was that, IMO, she appeared on the music scene at the most unfortunate time possible.
She specialized in singking folk songs - very often from the point of view of oppressed workers. But she appeared at almost the exact moment when that kind of music was at it’s tail end. It was very popular at one time (I guess you could call that “pre-Beatles”) but as soon as The Beatles appeared, it seems to me that kind of music just stopped being popular and no one wanted to listen to it anymore.
My recollection is that she was well-loved by many of the greates folk singers of her day - such like Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Richie Havens and many others. But if my recollection is correct, her career was very unfortunate because of the timing in which she appeared and also, I seem to recall there was some kind of tragic accident that affected her personally (maybe her husband was injured in an accident?)
I do recall that most people who liked Joan Biaz also seemed to like Laura Brannigan and the people who had Joan Biaz albums also seemed to have a number of Laura Brannigan albums.
Please: it’s Baez. 
She was one of the major voices of the 60s anti-war movement, so I think her timing was just fine, and she made a lot of money doing it. She didn’t have the staying power of Bob Dylan, but then neither did Bob Dylan, and both have continued to tour and release albums over the years. There was no tragedy that I’m aware of, other than her sister dying in 2001 and her husband going to prison for his anti-war activities.
Yes. Her husband going to prison. I think that is what I was thinking of. I remember her once appearring in a concert and discussing the hardships her family had to endure because the authorities were being very hard on her and she thought it was on account of their anti-government sentiments.
As far as her timing goes, I’m sure you are correct about her making a lot of money but at the time of Woodstock (1969) I remember that she didn’t have hardly any popular albums on the charts and hadn’t had any for a at least a few years beforehand.
So, I could be mistaken about the timing. But I recall growing up around the time The Beatles first came to North America and in college all the kids had lots of albums by Dylan, The Doors, The Beatles, The Who and others. But I can’t recall anyone having any Joan Baez albums (thank you for the correction on the spelling of her name).
In any case, she is a great artist and has a great voice. We surely don’t have any disagreement about what a great artist she was and hopefully she continues to be.
I’m a little late with this comment, obviously, but comment I must.
What it meant when Joan Baez recorded “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” was that she knew a commercial-sounding melody when she heard it and was looking for a hit record (and she succeeded).
The happy-go-lucky musical arrangement her version of this song was given, and the number of lyrics she got horribly wrong, indicate that the actual meaning and intent of the song was the furthest thing from her mind.
I can’t think of another example in popular music of a cover version that so completely misses the point of the original.
It was hard for me then to be sympathetic for her plight, since I was in the military at the time. Her husband was in jail for defying the law and she was pregnant. Both of these things were self-inflicted. The government was looking at her very hard because of her anti-war and anti-government stances, as well as her condemnation of civil rights abuses and defense of womens’ issues. Baez never saw a cause she didn’t like and all that attention, good and bad, was brought on by nobody but herself. While she was being so miserable, she managed to put out “Dixie”, an atrocious rendition that was probably her biggest hit and capitalize on her husband’s incarceration by releasing an album in his honor.
You may be thinking of her brother-in-law, Richard Fariña, who was also a singer, and who was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1966.