Joan Baez
Joan Baez will bring her “Fare Thee Well” tour to Birmingham with a performance Wednesday, April 10, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
The performance is presented by UAB’s Alys Stephens Performing Arts Center. Tickets are $73, $63 and $53. UAB faculty and staff may receive $15 off two single tickets. A limited number of faculty/staff tickets are available. For tickets, call 205-975-2787 or visit www.AlysStephens.org.
A VIP dinner package, which includes an elegant dinner, full bar and premium seating, is also available. The VIP dinner package is $175 per person, or $150 for ASC members.
Six decades after becoming a regular on the coffee house scene that was emerging around Club 47 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Baez determined this would be her last formal extended touring. With her 2017 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction topping off a lifetime of awards and honors for her recordings and human rights achievements around the globe, Baez has never wavered in her mission, according to her artist’s statement, written by Arthur Levy. An artist of incalculable influence, “Whistle Down The Wind,” her first new studio album in a decade, gathers material by some of her favorite composers.
“I’m looking forward to being on the road with a beautiful new album about which I am truly proud,” Baez said. “I welcome the opportunity to share this new music as well as longtime favorites with my audiences around the world.”
Speaking on one of her new songs, “I Wish The Wars Were All Over,” Baez says she does not know if a better world will come.
“But we have to do our work for a just and loving society whether the end comes tomorrow or whether we are still holding fast for generations to come,” she said. A 440-year-old manuscript of an American rebel imprisoned by the British in the Revolutionary War is the source for the song, adapted by balladeer Tim Erickson.
“Whistle Down The Wind” includes songs from Tom Waits (“Whistle Down The Wind,” “Last Leaf”), Josh Ritter (“Be of Good Heart,” “Silver Blade”), Eliza Gilkyson (“The Great Correction”) and Mary Chapin Carpenter (“The Things That We Are Made Of”). Ritter’s “Silver Blade” has been described by Baez as “a bookend to ‘Silver Dagger’ [the first song on her self-titled debut LP of 1960] at the end of this nearly 60-year career ... like something I would have picked up in Club 47 when I was 18.”
It was produced by three-time Grammy Award winner Joe Henry (Carolina Chocolate Drops, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Solomon Burke, Bonnie Raitt, Allen Toussaint and others). Henry’s composition “Civil War” explores how conflict brings down individuals and society, “a swelling of emotions put to music,” Baez said.
Baez has recorded or performed works by songwriters Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Richard Fariña, Leonard Cohen, Tim Hardin, Jacques Brel, John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Johnny Cash and his Nashville peers Kris Kristofferson and Mickey Newbury, Jackson Browne, Janis Ian, John Prine, Stevie Wonder, Steve Earle, Tom Waits, and many others.