Citations

You don't get to choose how you're going to die, or when. You can only decide how you're going to live. Now.

It seems to me that those songs that have been any good, I have nothing much to do with the writing of them. The words have just crawled down my sleeve and come out on the page.

[interview in Time magazine, 11/23/62] Anything called a hootenanny ought to be shot on sight, but the whole country is having one. A hootenanny is to folk singing what a jam session is to jazz, and all over the U.S. there is a great reverberate twang. Guitars and banjos akimbo, folk singers inhabit smoky metropolitan crawl space; they sprawl on the floors of college rooms; near the foot of ski trails, they keep time to the wheeze and sputter of burning logs; they sing homely lyrics to the combers of the Pacific. They are everybody and anybody. A civil engineer performs in his off-hours in the folk bins of the Midwest. So do débutantes, university students, even a refugee from an Eastern girl's-school choir. Everywhere, there are bearded pop singers and clean-cut dilettantes. There are gifted amateurs and serious musicians. New York, Boston, Chicago, Minneapolis, Denver and San Francisco all have shoals of tiny coffee shops, all loud with basic folk sound--a pinched and studied wail that is intended to suggest flinty hills or clumpy prairies.

On truth: Hypothetical questions get hypothetical answers.

The fact is I can't sing most of these early folk ballads any more, because I've lost that high register. When I do sing them I have to take them down a few semitones. I'm much more comfortable singing songs by Steve Earle or Natalie Merchant or Ryan Adams, where I'm in a different zone. My voice is much lower these days, and I prefer it. There's also a lot less vibrato, because the ends of the vocal cords start to calcify. You do hear some people my age who shouldn't still be singing, where the vibrato is very wide and out of control and not very attractive. I try to avoid that!

I think I wrote one spectacular song ['Diamonds and Rust'] and a bunch of A-minuses or B-s, and that's it. I think that's just how it is and that's fine.

The era in which I came on the scene was a ten-year period of exceptional talent. I mean, nobody could top Dylan; they've been trying for years. Nobody can really top John Lennon. So what what we're looking for - what people in general are looking for and longing for - are the universal songs that bring us together, and that are of really high quality. But those are hard to find. I know that the Occupy movement was looking for the right songs and they ended up singing 'We Shall Overcome' and 'Blowin' in the Wind' because the songs that the group was looking for didn't exist.

[on appearing at the Woodstock Music Festival, 1969] Woodstock? Hell, I was already pushing my luck. I'd been on the music scene for ten years and I still didn't take dope or use a backup band. But Woodstock was also me - Joan Baez, the square, six months pregnant, the wife of a draft-resister, endlessly proselytizing about the war - I had my place there. I was of the '60s, and I was already a survivor.