Joan Chandos Baez 69 is an American folk singer, songwriter and activist. Baez has a distinctive vocal style, with a strong vibrato. Her recordings include many topical songs and material dealing with social issues.
Baez began her career performing in coffeehouses in the Boston-Cambridge area, and rose to fame as an unbilled performer at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival. She began her recording career in 1960, and achieved immediate success. Her first three albums, Joan Baez, Joan Baez, Vol. 2, and Joan Baez in Concert all achieved gold record status, and stayed on the charts for two years.
Joan Baez had the treehouse built -- without walls -- 20 feet high in an oak tree behind her Woodside home because she wanted to sleep with actual birds.
But the folk-singing legend, who once performed the civil-rights anthem "We Shall Overcome" before half a million people at Woodstock, was brought unceremoniously to earth Wednesday, falling as she climbed down from the platform.
Almost four decades after she earned a gold record with "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," paramedics drove the golden-throated pixie down to Stanford Hospital, where she was treated and released after it was determined she had suffered only minor injuries.
Baez, 69, was "resting comfortably" Thursday at a secure, undisclosed and presumably low-altitude location, said Nancy Lutzow, who runs Baez's Menlo Park production company.
"I sleep in a tree all summer long," Baez told an English blogger in 2008. "I climb up on a ladder, with ropes and things. The birds are right there in the morning. Sometimes they're flying so close to my head, I can feel the wind. Those things are heaven to me."
Baez was at the forefront of a musical movement that began in the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village in Manhattan during the early 1960s, performing the first cover of a song written by the then-unknown Bob Dylan, with whom she soon plunged into a tempestuous three-year romance. After their difficult parting, Dylan wrote the revenge ballad "Positively 4th Street," in which he sang to his former folkie allies, "You know as well as me. You'd rather see me paralyzed."
Baez's spokeswoman said the singer shall overcome her injuries someday -- just not tod
But the folk-singing legend, who once performed the civil-rights anthem "We Shall Overcome" before half a million people at Woodstock, was brought unceremoniously to earth Wednesday, falling as she climbed down from the platform.
Almost four decades after she earned a gold record with "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," paramedics drove the golden-throated pixie down to Stanford Hospital, where she was treated and released after it was determined she had suffered only minor injuries.
Baez, 69, was "resting comfortably" Thursday at a secure, undisclosed and presumably low-altitude location, said Nancy Lutzow, who runs Baez's Menlo Park production company.
"I sleep in a tree all summer long," Baez told an English blogger in 2008. "I climb up on a ladder, with ropes and things. The birds are right there in the morning. Sometimes they're flying so close to my head, I can feel the wind. Those things are heaven to me."
Baez was at the forefront of a musical movement that began in the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village in Manhattan during the early 1960s, performing the first cover of a song written by the then-unknown Bob Dylan, with whom she soon plunged into a tempestuous three-year romance. After their difficult parting, Dylan wrote the revenge ballad "Positively 4th Street," in which he sang to his former folkie allies, "You know as well as me. You'd rather see me paralyzed."
Baez's spokeswoman said the singer shall overcome her injuries someday -- just not tod
