This video opens on Joan Baez answering a question we didn't quite catch, but was probably asking her to define her role in the world. She replied "A human being first, an activist second and an entertainer third." I have learned to mistrust "human being" as a code for "Sit properly in church", and to me Joan fails the driving test with that particular opening phrase.
Her plea for non-violence and world brotherhood may have swayed some of the biggest crowds ever assembled, but it is doubtful whether the message has filtered through to many of today's genocidal dictators or chuckling drug-barons. Still, the devil always does have the best tunes, and these will outlive her polemics by a long way.
You can listen happily to 'The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down' without questioning why she appears to be sentimentalizing the slave-owning Confederacy, while refusing to sing to segregated southern audiences. It's plain, for example, that a troubled visit to Hanoi cured her sharply of her illusions about that people's paradise behind the iron curtain - perhaps a clue to her own summing-up of her quality: 'Heart and soul and sadness'. But if it blurred her beliefs, it did nothing to touch the huge conviction with which she sang. To this day, the pitch-pure tremolo just keeps washing over us and we can forgive her anything.
Fatally beautiful, she has somehow managed to live a full love-life without alienating her lovers. Her romance with Bob Dylan - so brief, so intense - largely stimulated her move across from blues into folk, and it was a richly productive partnership. Bob talks freely about it here, as does her husband David Harris about the jail sentence he served for draft-dodging, which originally bonded them. With this whirligig background, you might expect her only child Gabe to have grown up as a problem-kid, which he hasn't at all. Mother and son actually sing a duet at the close of the programme, where the harmony between them is unmistakeable.