Joan Baez ( b3 )

Consequently, she became involved with a variety of social causes early in her career. She declined to play in any white student venues that were segregated, which meant that when she toured the Southern states, she would play only at black colleges.

Due to her father's work with UNESCO, their family moved many times, living in towns across the U.S, as well as in England, France, Switzerland, Spain, Canada, and the Middle East, including Iraq. Joan Baez became involved with a variety of social causes early in her career, including civil rights and non-violence. Social justice, she stated in the PBS series American Masters, is the true core of her life, "looming larger than music". Baez spent much of her formative years living in the San Francisco Bay area, where she graduated from Palo Alto High School in 1958.

Music career

The opening line of Baez's memoir And a Voice to Sing With is "I was born gifted" (referencing her singing voice, which she explained was given to her and for which she can take no credit). A friend of Joan's father gave her a ukulele. She learned four chords, which enabled her to play rhythm and blues, the music she was listening to at the time. Her parents, however, were fearful that the music would lead her into a life of drug addiction. When Baez was 13, her aunt and her aunt's boyfriend took her to a concert by folk musician Pete Seeger, and Baez found herself strongly moved by his music. She soon began practicing the songs of his repertoire and performing them publicly. One of her very earliest public performances was at a retreat in Saratoga, California, for a youth group from Temple Beth Jacob, a Redwood City, California, Jewish congregation. A few years later in 1957, Baez bought her first Gibson acoustic guitar.

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