On September 4, Joan Baez appeared at the Y for an in-depth talk with music journalist Anthony DeCurtis. She played 3 songs, including the title track from her new album Day After Tomorrow, on the same stage of her New York debut in 1960. In the video clip above, she talks about songwriters of the ‘60s and plays an early favorite, “There But For Fortune” by Phil Ochs.
Not surprisingly, a lot of the talk was about the ‘60s. She talked about Dylan, about her brother-in-law Richard Farina and her sister Mimi, about traveling to Hanoi and practicing nonviolence in the civil rights era.
She choked up when she began telling the story of seeing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speak when she was 16 years old, and asked the interviewer to move on to another question. But she later talked about King again, saying he was a funny, laid-back man.
She talked of riding to dinner in a car with King, Jesse Jackson and other civil rights leaders on the eve of a protest. She thought she’d have the privilege of hearing them plan a march. Instead, they told jokes the whole time and King indulged himself with a second piece of apple pie for dessert. When she later told one of the men she’d expected to hear plans laid for the march, he replied, “You did.”
