Introducing Audiences to the Next Generation

Joan Baez is striking a familiar pose--helping introduce her audiences to new voices, just as she did 40 years ago, when the queen of the folk world boosted the career of a young Bob Dylan.

“It’s an adventure,” says Baez, 61, who, after similar tours with Dar Williams and Eliza Carthy, is joined on a current tour of East Coast venues by newcomers Dave Carter and Tracy Grammar. Richard Shindell, who has toured with Baez before, rounds out the ensemble.

The tour, she says, “changes as we go along and familiarize ourselves with each other’s material. If we’re successful with it, it will be a smooth sharing of stage. I’ll take a lion’s share, but not that big a lion. For me, the fun is the exchange.”

It’s a format that’s helped her as well as the younger artists, as Baez often borrows a song or two from her proteges to become part of her repertoire.

“We’ve managed to keep it fresh over these last 15 years,” Baez says of the shows. “That allows me to have something to look forward to rather than groaning.”

Her groaning ended, she says, when she “entered a deep therapeutic project that I had put off until I was 48. I got a hold of my demons by the teeth. Now my phobia is gone; the panic attacks are gone.”

Part of her survival came in learning that even as a famous former protest singer, “I didn’t have to do everything in the world that afternoon.”

Instead of flying around the world for benefits and rallies, when she’s not touring now, “I want to be home.”

There, she says, “I continue vocalizing, but I go over to my vocal coach and have a week’s input.”

What could the pro possibly still be learning?

“How to keep the vocal cords functioning properly,” she says. “And to admit where they change, and to appreciate what I have now.”

Her voice, which startled with its pristine qualities in the 1960s, is “deeper in every sense,” she reports. “The tonality is deeper, and at a certain age, gravity takes over everything--including what happened with my vocal cords. Plus, I’ve lived a considerable amount since I first sang ‘Barbara Allen.’”

Baez can easily compare her current voice to her young one, with the release of her early Vanguard albums in handsome packages with extra tracks.

“I think they did a beautiful job,” Baez says of the reissue series, which continues next month with “In Concert” in two volumes. The tale of her early career was retold in some detail in last year’s book “Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Farina and Richard Farina” (Farrar Strauss Giroux) by David Hajdu, whose previous biography of Billy Strayhorn was an award-winner.

“It seemed to me not terribly accurate,” Baez says. But, she adds, “maybe I just didn’t like looking at it all again.”

Baez took off most of last year to be with her sister, Mimi Farina, who died of cancer last July.

A country at war brings her career full circle. A presence at many a rally against the Vietnam War, Baez is uncomfortable with the U.S. presence in Afghanistan.

“There is such a feeling of impotence when we reacted so quickly and so terribly to a hideous situation,” she says. “They said, ‘We tried everything; we’re going to war.’ But we didn’t try anything. Let’s put five or 10 Nobel Peace Prize winners on CNN for a couple of days and see what they come up with.

“It is an interesting time,” she says. “It will be interesting to see what will happen if we reinstitute the draft, if that affects the general fervor of those between 18 and 24.”

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Roger Catlin is rock music critic for the Hartford Courant, a Tribune company.