PBS: "Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound"

On Wednesday, Oct. 14 2009 some PBS stations premiered an “American Masters” special, “Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound”, directed by Mary Wharton (about 85 minutes). The link for the film is here.

Joan, born 1941, appears often in the film as she is today, with short hair, recalling her life. She says that her priorities were to be “a human being, a pacifist” and (only then) a “folk singer” (and songwriter, if not exactly “composer”). Political activism was her life’s work as much as music. Her relationships, including a marriage to David Harris that produced a son who appears in the film, came out of this “work”. The film contains footage of her visit to Hanoi and later the border of Cambodia, during which she learned what it was like to be in peril. It also accounts for her arrest at a draft induction center, where she met Harris. The film does cover a little of the controversy of the Vietnam era conscription.

When the government promoted the “duck and cover” campaign as part of the Cold War (the film shows a mushroom cloud), Baez refused to go home, proving that parents would not be able to get their kids to fallout shelters in time.

The film also covers her early music career, including the Newport recital.



This may sound like a bizarre recollection, but when I was a (mental health) "patient" at NIH in 1962 (the only patient on the ward who knew about the Cuban Missile Crisis) the unit's small vinyl record collection included records by Joan Baez (as well as the Kingston Trio).