Joan Baez

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Joan Baez has done so many good things that it is difficult for me to pick out any of them to share with you without feeling parochial.

Her work in the effort to stop the US's war in Viet-Nam has to be one of the best and she was also very much at the center of the civil rights fight, one of "the civil rights crowd," as Clarence Thomas puts it. I often think of her and Martin Luther King Jr. together, constantly vilified and under the threat of death.

Here are two songs in which she particularly reaches me. They are both highly compassionate and visionary. “Be Not Too Hard” helps me against self-destroying anger and bitterness toward the guys and their supporters who did all that killing and napalming and the torching of poor peoples' hooches with their cigarette lighters, smiling for newsreel photographers as they did it, supported by an ideology of doing it for their own good, and elderly poor people begging them not to do it. Hatred is so subtle, so Fiendish. “The Green Green Grass of Home” is very visionary the way she does it and allows me to imagine and to hope beyond the horror.