Joan Baez, 60’s American Queen of Folk put an end to her colourful stage career on Sunday through performing at a show at the Teatro Real in Madrid, Spain, according to a report of the Rolling Stone.
The farewell concert featured some of her most popular songs, including Diamonds and Rust, The House of the Rising Sun, Joe Hill and The Boxer.
Bent on drumming up support for Bangladesh in the United States, Baez wrote and sang The Story of Bangladesh, a song based on the Pakistan army crackdown on unarmed sleeping Bengali people on March 25 at the beginning of the country’s Liberation War in 1971.
Baez began her last musical tour, Fare Thee Well, in March 2018 and ended the tour with the last concert in Spain.
Being an American singer, songwriter, musician, and activist, Baez performed her final stage shows in Europe as, she said, that Europe had been faithful to her, in some ways, at times when the States had not kept up.
‘I wouldn’t blame that on anybody expect my own self and my own career and when I let it kind of go and when I worked hard. At any rate, I love Europe and my public over there. It’ll bring a nice closure,’ she added.
According to the report, Baez decided to wrap up her career as a stage performer and stop touring because of the condition of her voice.
‘This vocal box has been extraordinary,’ she told the Rolling Stone, adding, ‘It’s holding out OK and I don’t want to try and use it forever. I know some people strain to sing until they’re 100 and then drop dead on the stage, but that’s never been my vision of how I’d end the career. I like this voice. It’s nothing to do with the one I had 50 years ago, nothing at all, but I’m enjoying it and it’s also, at the same time, quite difficult to keep up.’
About the future, Baez said that she was yet to have a concrete plan though she knew that she wanted to remain involved with music.
‘I think that the main thing for me will be the painting because it’s pretty well established by now that I’m heading off to do that,’ she said, adding, ‘I’ve never taken much time to do nothing, which I think is pretty important, especially at my age, and sort of contemplating what is coming. In this culture, we spend most of our time trying to avoid it. I would like to have more of a Buddhist approach.’