Folk Singing: Sibyl with Guitar

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professor of dramatic art who migrated to the U.S. Her father was born in Mexico and was also a minister's son. He arrived in the U.S. at the age of seven when his father was sent to work with the Spanish-speaking community in New York City. The two met at Drew University, in Madison, N.J., where he discovered an interest in physics and made it his life's work. His academic career has been highly mobile, taking him to various universities and cities ranging from Los Angeles to Buffalo to Baghdad to Boston and, most recently,

Paris, where he is now a consultant for UNESCO.

Along the way, young Joan and her two sisters learned some memorable lessons in bigotry. When Dr. Baez was doing military research in Buffalo, for example, he thought it would be a pleasant experience to settle in a small and typical American town. He chose Clarence Center, N.Y. (pop. 900), where the senile old man who was their next-door neighbor scowled at Joan's dark Mexican skin and said: "Niggers." The Baezes in turn called the neighbor "Old Bogey." To keep Old Bogey confused, they sank a plug spout into a telephone pole outside his house and hung a maple-syrup bucket on it. "We knew that he would be full of contempt for our supposed ignorance of maple tapping," says Dr. Baez, "but we knew that he could not resist peeking into the bucket. We were in stitches of laughter, peeping from our window when he would come by, look around furtively, and peek into the bucket. Then we began to put things in the bucket, water and so on. He was astonished. Poor Old Bogey."

In Redlands, Calif., Joan found a situation that cut deeper than one old crank. The Mexican schoolchildren there play in separate groups from the "whites." Observably, the dominant tone of Joan's personality changed from ebullience to melancholy. Her 13th birthday came, and she said something she would repeat often: "Mummy, I don't want to grow up."

She went to high school in Palo Alto, walked barefoot on the campus, got A's in music and F's in biology, studying only what appealed to her. She bought a Sears, Roebuck guitar and also sang in the school choir, but there were no particular stirrings of a future career, least of all in folk singing. The music on the phonograph at home was Bach. Mozart, Vivaldi. Her voice at the time was. by her description, "straight as a pin." She would stand before her bathroom mirror, jiggling her Adam's apple with her forefinger, in an effort to induce a vibrato—with no idea how stunning it would be when it eventually came to her.

Resentful Stones. After she finished high school, the family moved to Boston, where her father had picked up a mosaic of jobs with Harvard, M.I.T., Encyclopaedia Britannica Films, and the Smithsonian Institution. They had scarcely settled when Dr. Baez came home one night and said, "Come, girls, I have something to show you." He took them to Tulla's Coffee Grinder, where amateur folk singers could bring their guitars and sing.

Joan was soon singing there and in similar places around Boston. She spent a month or so at Boston University studying theater—the beginning and end of college for her—and she met several semi-pro folk singers who taught her songs and guitar techniques. She never studied voice or music, or even took