<p>Staring at a collage that I had made to freeze a very special, once-in-a-lifetime experience took me back to the day I had met Joan Baez. This collage has pictures and a caricature of JB, a tiny guitar, imprints of a dandelion, and her song list of that memorable event bordering the collage in different fonts. </p>.<p>Fifty-five years ago I heard of JB for the first ever time and fell in love with the lyrics of her songs. Don’t sing love songs, you’ll wake my mother/ She’s sleeping here, right by my side / And in her right hand a silver dagger/ She says, I can’t be your bride, sang my sister, imitating a guy, who in turn, was imitating JB. All JB songs that I began singing in the late sixties were imitations of imitations.</p>.<p>Then Woodstock happened in 1969, and the documentary of this musical event came to our Galaxy theatre in Bangalore (now Bengaluru) in 1971. Many local bands performed before the screening. Central College’s very own ‘Bob Dylan’ with long hair, dark sun glasses, with a harmonica secure in a clasp around his neck, and a guitar in hand, sang Blowing In The Wind. That day, for the first time, I saw and heard Joan Baez. Her looks, her voice, and her guitar plucking had me swooning. </p>.<p>My working years in Delhi in the 1970s saw me at Radio Shack in Connaught Place, where I indulged in Joan Baez LPs. My room at the YWCA would reverberate with her songs.</p>.<p>Years later. It had been a real long haul with a baby in arms and a five-year-old, from Ghaziabad to Palam to Paris on Christmas Eve 1980. The husband was already in France many months ahead of us; he had planned for us to attend midnight mass at Notre Dame, just a five-minute walk from our hotel. I hadn’t slept in 48 hours, and I chose to skip church only to learn from an English newspaper a couple of days later that Joan Baez had sung at Notre Dame that night. Lost an opportunity to see her live!</p>.<p>Then, forty years after I first heard of her, I was at the Stern Grove festival in San Francisco, and, sitting at a vantage point, through my binoculars I could touch her. Her playlist of songs was like they had been specially chosen for me. I sang along. As the show ended, armed with her autobiography, A Voice To Sing With, I requested for an audience with Joan Baez. Granted! Book signed! Photograph taken! A dream came true.</p>
<p>Staring at a collage that I had made to freeze a very special, once-in-a-lifetime experience took me back to the day I had met Joan Baez. This collage has pictures and a caricature of JB, a tiny guitar, imprints of a dandelion, and her song list of that memorable event bordering the collage in different fonts. </p>.<p>Fifty-five years ago I heard of JB for the first ever time and fell in love with the lyrics of her songs. Don’t sing love songs, you’ll wake my mother/ She’s sleeping here, right by my side / And in her right hand a silver dagger/ She says, I can’t be your bride, sang my sister, imitating a guy, who in turn, was imitating JB. All JB songs that I began singing in the late sixties were imitations of imitations.</p>.<p>Then Woodstock happened in 1969, and the documentary of this musical event came to our Galaxy theatre in Bangalore (now Bengaluru) in 1971. Many local bands performed before the screening. Central College’s very own ‘Bob Dylan’ with long hair, dark sun glasses, with a harmonica secure in a clasp around his neck, and a guitar in hand, sang Blowing In The Wind. That day, for the first time, I saw and heard Joan Baez. Her looks, her voice, and her guitar plucking had me swooning. </p>.<p>My working years in Delhi in the 1970s saw me at Radio Shack in Connaught Place, where I indulged in Joan Baez LPs. My room at the YWCA would reverberate with her songs.</p>.<p>Years later. It had been a real long haul with a baby in arms and a five-year-old, from Ghaziabad to Palam to Paris on Christmas Eve 1980. The husband was already in France many months ahead of us; he had planned for us to attend midnight mass at Notre Dame, just a five-minute walk from our hotel. I hadn’t slept in 48 hours, and I chose to skip church only to learn from an English newspaper a couple of days later that Joan Baez had sung at Notre Dame that night. Lost an opportunity to see her live!</p>.<p>Then, forty years after I first heard of her, I was at the Stern Grove festival in San Francisco, and, sitting at a vantage point, through my binoculars I could touch her. Her playlist of songs was like they had been specially chosen for me. I sang along. As the show ended, armed with her autobiography, A Voice To Sing With, I requested for an audience with Joan Baez. Granted! Book signed! Photograph taken! A dream came true.</p>
