Chronicles - Bob Dylan [102]
Whatever I heard people say was irrelevant — both good or bad — didn’t get caught up in it. I had no preconditioned audience anyway. What I had to do was keep straight ahead and I did that. The road ahead had always been encumbered with shadowy forms that had to be dealt with in one way or another. Now there was another one. I knew Jack was up there someplace and I hadn’t missed what Pankake had said about him. It was true. Jack was the King of the Folksingers.
The “Queen of the Folksingers,” that would have to be Joan Baez. Joan was born the same year as me and our futures would be linked, but at this time to even think about it would be preposterous. She had one record out on the Vanguard label called Joan Baez and I’d seen her on TV. She’d been on a folk music program broadcast nationwide on CBS out of New York. There were other performers on the show including Cisco Houston, Josh White, Lightnin’ Hopkins. Joan sang some ballads on her own and then sat side by side with Lightnin’ and sang a few things with him. I couldn’t stop looking at her, didn’t want to blink. 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. A voice that drove out bad spirits. It was like she’d come down from another planet.
She sold a lot of records and it was easy to understand why. The women singers in folk music were performers like Peggy Seeger, Jean Ritchie and Barbara Dane, and they didn’t translate well to a modern crowd. Joan was nothing like any of them. There was no one like her. It would be a few years before Judy Collins or Joni Mitchell would come on the scene. I liked the older women singers — Aunt Molly Jackson and Jeanie Robinson — but they didn’t have the piercing quality that Joan had. I’d been listening to a few of the female blues singers a lot, like Memphis Minnie and Ma Rainey, and Joan was in some kind of way more like them. There was nothing girlish about them and there was nothing girlish about Joan, either. Both Scot and Mex, she looked like a religious icon, like somebody you’d sacrifice yourself for and she sang in a voice straight to God…also was an exceptionally good instrumentalist.
The Vanguard record was no phony baloney. It was almost frightening — an impeccable repertoire of songs, all hard-core traditional. She seemed very mature, seductive, intense, magical. Nothing she did didn’t work. That she was the same age as me almost made me feel useless. However illogical it might have seemed, something told me that she was my counterpart — that she was the one that my voice could find perfect harmony with. At the time there was nothing but distance and worlds and big divides between her and me. I was still stuck in the boondocks. Yet some strange feeling told me that we would inevitably meet up. I didn’t know much about Joan Baez. I had no idea that she’d always been a true loner, kind of like me, but she’d been bounced around a lot and lived in places from Baghdad to San Jose. She had experienced a whole lot more of the world than I did. Even so, to think that she was probably more like me than me would have seemed a little excessive.
There was no clue from her records that she was interested in social change or any of that. I considered her lucky, lucky to get involved in the right kind of folk music early on, get up to her eyeballs in it — learn how to play and sing it in an expert way, beyond criticism, beyond category. There was no one in her class. She was far