Vanguard
1964
Joan Baez 5
About This Album
Joan Baez 5 was where the singer's music experienced its first major blossoming. Having exhausted most of the best traditional songs in her repertory on her four prior LPs, Baez had to broaden the range of her music, and she opened up some promising new territory in the process. Baez and Vanguard Records must also have recognized by 1964 that the folk audience was changing and, in fact, was no longer just the "folk" audience -- they were expecting current compositions in a folk vein, especially topical material, and also a certain degree of eclecticism, and Joan Baez 5 runs the gamut from classical to country. The album opens with a rendition of Phil Ochs' "There but for Fortune" that was so alluring that Vanguard released it as a single, and it actually saw some modest chart action; Baez nearly pulled off a Peter, Paul & Mary, masking the song's piercing, topical lyrics (which addressed more hot-button issues in three minutes than most radio stations preferred to acknowledge in a week's worth of editorials) in a falsetto so lovely that they simply eased past most of the censors, right-wingers, and anyone else who might've objected. Her recording of Dylan's "It Ain't Me Babe" was the latest in a small but growing list of her excellent covers of his songs, culminating with the release of the two-LP Any Day Now later in the 1960s.
Track List

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.