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Ronald Bailey tells the matriarch of modern folk music, "You're no Buffy Sainte-Marie."
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|11.4.04 @ 6:02PM|#
Now that's really disturbing. She should be slapped.
|11.4.04 @ 6:04PM|#
All these years we've been misspelling "Joan Biased".
|11.4.04 @ 6:18PM|#
Just damn. That is one whack beeyotch.
Aside: I've never heard her sing "Diamonds and Rust" but I kind of like the version by Judas Priest.
|11.4.04 @ 6:29PM|#
Um, is it just me, or does it seem that if someone like, say, Ted Nugent, or other outspoken conservative celebrity, did this very thing they'd be lambasted as racists by the media and those same "liberals" that enjoyed Baez's bit of stereotyping?
Why is this OK for her and not for someone else?
|11.4.04 @ 6:33PM|#
Chris: "Why is this OK for her and not for someone else?"
Because White liberals are allegedly "paying homage" to the way "real" salt-of-the-earth folks talk. To be fair though, this practice is indirectly encouraged by many Black authors (like Toni Morrison) who write books with large passages in such nonsense.
|11.4.04 @ 7:36PM|#
Are you sure you don't have it backwards? Associating folk speech with negatives.
|11.4.04 @ 7:57PM|#
Joan Baez seems unhinged. It is unfortunate because her human rights work in the 70s-80s was pretty cleareyed as to the problems of communist vietnam for a hippie.
http://archives.cbc.ca/400d.asp?id=1-69-524-2706&wm6=1
|11.4.04 @ 8:55PM|#
Yo. Her beats be ILL, man. She should cut a rap album, fo sho. Bling bling.
|11.5.04 @ 6:52AM|#
I'll bet she and her audience didn't vote for W. Think about this the next time you hear that conservatives and/or Republicans are the intolerant people. Liberals and/or Democrats just don't get it.
|11.5.04 @ 8:47AM|#
"folk speech"? Is that what we call that? Spare me. Does Enron practice "folk accounting"?
Warren|11.5.04 @ 10:18AM|#
The performance described is just creepy. The audience's enthusiasm for it is down right scary.
|11.5.04 @ 10:28AM|#
Oh fuck yeah, Stevo, that Priest version, like everything from that era of the band, is just murderous.
|11.5.04 @ 11:01AM|#
``Folk speech'' has a grammar and vocabulary as rigorous as any. If you make a mistake, they know you're not from around there.
If you want to move into other circles, of course, you learn standard English. Easy if you're brought up in it, harder if you're not.
If you're in broadcasting, you learn a specific dialect of standard English, beyond that.
What the dialect shows is that the speaker has not moved out into a wider circle. That gives you a correlation in terms of what they know, perhaps; but in this case it's not a real person, and Baez is not herself taking that expectation on.
So it's your expectation, not hers. That's why I said you have it backwards.
I met Baez in 1961 I guess; she fiddled around a little on a 13-string lute (basically a 12-string guitar with an extra bass string) I had bought in Germany, in some college snack bar.
I liked her pure vibrato-less voice; not particularly her politics, which came later anyway.
Tiffany Eckhardt has a song very reminiscent of Baez's ``Night They Drove Old Dixie Down'' namely ``Silver and Gold'' on the album _Barefoot_
She's not particularly Baez-like otherwise. Worth checking out though, if you liked Baez's harmonies; Eckhardt is more of a poet of the life of lov
|11.5.04 @ 11:03AM|#
...poet of the life of love.
I wonder why sometimes recently the last two characters of comments get truncated away for me, not only on this site.
hmm.
|11.5.04 @ 11:20AM|#
Chris,
Leftists have controlled Hollywood, academia and the MSM since at least about 1970. Despite the efforts of Reason and others, the left has sanctioned a hypocritical double standard regarding commentary on race. i.e., liberals can say whatever they want, and everyone must fall in line to a Shalala-esque speech code, or else they are Bull Connor ordering out the hoses.
Furthermore, I'm sick of people complaining about this double standard...your Ted Nugent hypothesis is valid, but it's a waste of time to complain about "how the media would react if a conservative did the same thing."
|11.5.04 @ 12:42PM|#
Snake, you make a good point. Not so much about the griping (come on it IS fun to point out how hypocritical the left is) but the control thing. If libertarianism were seen as cool, we'd have it wired.
Ron, I love Baez--okay some of her stuff is just great, others just okay. But, like many talented folks she is missing some gene somewhere.
Joe O is right. Baez was the ONLY anti-war protestor from the '60's that had the guts to stand up and say that Viet Nam's communists were evil. From Fonda, to Hayden, to Kerry, everybody else just walked away. Although I hated her politics then and now, I had to respect her for that.
|11.5.04 @ 12:47PM|#
Ron Bailey!
Your mother in law is way too old to be into Baez. Her coming-of-age music was Charlie Parker, Bill Haley, or Wynonnie Harris not folk music.
I'm just yanking your chain, but dude, she would have been a decade older than most of the core of the Baez fan club.
|11.5.04 @ 6:55PM|#
The respect Baez shows and has shown throughout her life for grape and cotton pickers and others who live day to day by muscle and guile give her an automatic pass on this. When one of you slackers gives 40 years of your life to a cause you will be given the same consideration.
|11.6.04 @ 8:24PM|#
Gadfly,
Cotton is harvested by machines now. Soon, grapes will be too. Praise to the machine-makers. Ya think Baez would write a song about them ?
|11.8.04 @ 5:43AM|#
"...I liked her pure vibrato-less voice..."
What in the hell are you talking about? That's all I can hear when she sings, that goddamn awful vibrato. Hideous!