Devotion Post: Joan Baez

There were maybe five or six albums in my collection in my first year of college in 1966. The Mamas and The Papas’ “All the Leaves are Brown” album was the soundtrack of the long and isolating winter at Central Michigan University. Once September passed, campus was always cold, the wind impossible, every morning a moral battle to get up, shower, dress, go down to breakfast and get to class by 8:00 a.m. I hardly ever made it. But when I did, it was Mama Cass who put the tiny spark in my drab, self-pitying self.

If The Mamas and The Papas were my breakfast club, Joan Baez was my church.

Darkness came early that first long winter in Mt. Pleasant. I’d go down to dinner and then retreat to my room. I’d smoke Kool cigarettes, cranking open the old windows to let the smoke escape and toss the ashes, and I’d listen to Joan Baez’s album. I remember, in the most cellular way, “It Ain’t Me Babe,” “The Death of Queen Jane,” “Go Away from My Window,” and “I Still Miss Someone,” which I surely did because my beautiful boyfriend was home in Detroit, his letters infrequent and calls even rarer.

Those were the heartache songs, for sure.

But the Joan Baez songs from that college album that have stuck with me, all these dozens and dozens of years, and shaped the small shred of religion I have are “There but for Fortune,” written by Phil Ochs, and “Tramp on the Street,” written by Hank Williams. It doesn’t happen often, but sometimes when I’m stopped at a light and looking about at the people making their way in the world, all the people, happy and suffering, I will sing and sing loud, “Only a tramp was Lazarus sad fate, He who lay down at the rich man’s gate, He begged for crumbs from the rich man to eat, But they left him to die like a tramp on the street.” And these lines, which I love so much, ” He was some mother’s darling, He was some mother’s son, Once he was fair and once he was young, And some mother rocked him, her darling to sleep, But they left him to die like a tramp on the street.“

Anyway, all this goes by way of saying, I watched an amazing film last night called Joan Baez: I am a Noise. It was extraordinary. Beautifully constructed, full of family movies, letters, drawings, music, concert video, protest newsreels, and, best, Joan Baez talking so plainly and honestly about her lifetime struggle with terrible and often paralyzing mental illness. I love Joan Baez because she sang to me all through that long, frozen winter in Mt. Pleasant when I was so depressed and so lonely and also because her songs, in a funny, weird way, became my core.

At the end of the film, she is walking with her dog on a dirt road with nothing but fields around. She stops and tells her dog, “Mama’s gonna dance now.” And she dances in the most lithe and joyful way, as if all the terrible times and gone loves, mistakes, and beautiful music gave her wings only she could see. It was lovely. You should watch if you can.