On Joan Baez

In the first slide, I’m maybe six years old in the living room that no one ever sat in, with its modular 70s couches and animal-print pillows, wall-to-wall green carpeting, rubber-tree plants, and curios from my parents’ travels, including an impressive copper samovar on the hearth. My siblings and I would never understand the design scheme of this room, some cross between Elvis’s Jungle Room and a souk in Marrakesh. There is a tall music console in the corner, radio, double cassette player, turntable, speakers, buttons and dials that I love to punch and twist when I wander the house alone, which I so often do. Joan Baez’s voice is issuing from the speakers, and I’m staring at her face, which I can picture perfectly, on an album cover—which album, I can’t recall. I can hear the voice but not the lyrics. This is the nature of memory. This is also the nature of Joan’s particular sound, her relentless soprano more aura than music, more frequency than song.