alongside the banjo player and guitarist Bob Gibson—Joan Baez has been electrifying eager crowds with her elegance and ferocity. Baez was central to both the folk revival and the civil-rights movement of the nineteen-sixties; her protest songs, delivered in a vivid, warbly soprano, felt both defiant and gently maternal.
The book has such a great dedication: “To everyone who has ever made me laugh.” Is there someone or something in your life that has reliably made you smile?. When my sister Amy and I lived in Belmont, outside of Boston, she was struggling through school. I was pretending I was going to college, which was just awful. We were unhappy all the time. We would call Bobby Neuwirth, and he would come up there and make us laugh. He was just totally reliable. It was refreshing and renewed our lives.
From “Am I Pretty When I Fly?” by Joan Baez. Copyright 2023 by the author and used with permission of Godine. What a way to go out! In the same introduction, you say that sometimes you write words backwards “as a form of therapy when I need to get to the root of a blockage or calm the buzzing heat of a panic attack.” Have you always had to manage panic attacks?
Your father studied mathematics and physics, eventually earned a Ph.D. from Stanford, and became a professor. Did you learn anything about performance from watching these men in your life preach, either to a congregation or a classroom? We are. I wouldn’t try to talk yourself down too much, because then you’d be lying. It’s worse than anything I could have imagined. It really is. And the rate, the speed. It’s about propaganda, it’s about lying, it’s about business, it’s about money, it’s about power. [The linguist and cognitive scientist] George Lakoff wrote a whole book about how liberals don’t know how to talk. “Build a wall,” “lock her up”—three words, and you remember them.
When little children are being shot and killed at school, you think, How could this not be it? How could this not be the glue?Was that young man referring to protest songs specifically, when he brought up the idea of glue? Well, I was always disciplined when I was younger. I would tell myself to lighten up, but you can’t when you’re going from panic attack to panic attack. When I was light, it was wonderful; I had great capacity for silliness and enjoyment. But it couldn’t sustain itself. I can say this—I was living from one panic attack to another, always thinking, This could be the last one. I could be O.K. from here on out.