While apparently not influenced much, or enough, by Ayn Rand’s political principles, 1960s leftist activist Joan Baez credits The Founainhead with influencing her own trenchant approach to politics:
A little music, a little politics. It’s always been that way for Baez, but only now is it a comfortable balancing act. The woman whose silver soprano held audiences spellbound at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival has occasionally seen her career buffeted by her commitment to social causes. While Baez helped turn “We Shall Overcome” into a civil rights anthem, she also devoted an entire side of an album to a listener-proof account of a U.S. bombing raid on Hanoi.
“Dark Chords” is the singer’s coming-out party of a sort, and she’s celebrating her newfound confidence after a 15-year break from activism, during which she focused on her inner folk star.
“For the first 20, 25 years, I was steadier in my politics than I ever was in my image of myself musically,” she said. “Nobody could trip me up politically, and that came before the music. That started when I was 10 years old and reading Ayn Rand’s ‘Fountainhead’ while living in Baghdad.
See the full profile in TCPalm.com for more info about Baez’s development as a woman, singer, and songwriter.