Biografia

Played a significant role in the Live Aid (1985) concert opening the US segment of the show in Philadelphia (13 July 1985).

Once lived next door to Hunter S. Thompson.

Her son Gabriel Harris makes musical instruments.

Has recorded songs in eight languages.

Unsuccessfully sued cartoonist Al Capp for libel after parodying her as "Joanie Phoanie" in his comic strip "Li'l Abner" in 1966.

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!