When she sings alone, you can see how she transfixed audiences during her brief appearance: a show that earned her the title of “Barefoot Madonna” as word spread through the festival of the surprise arrival with a bewitching voice. Also worth listening to is when she performed it with Bob Dylan and the Rolling Thunder Band in 1975 while in New Orleans: the audience go wild, the venue is packed and Dylan's band really give the song even more chutzpah than normal. Blessed Are…, as an album, is heavy with excellent Baez songs.

It’s odd, in some ways, to talk about how groundbreaking Baez is as a musician.

While her matriarchal ballad “All The Weary Mothers Of The Earth (People's Union #1)” (her own song) is a rare moment of maternal musicality with a nice Procol Harum organ in the background, it’s her sister’s “In The Quiet Morning” – a tribute to the late Janis Joplin – that might be the album’s best track. However, below we’ve gathered some of our favourites.
Joan is an album full of Baez flourishes: full of orchestrated covers of folk and rock staples of the time – Simon & Garfunkel's “Dangling Conversation”, The Beatles' “Eleanor Rigby”, multiple Donovan numbers – a French anti-war anthem and a tribute to her late brother-in-law Richard Fariña, there's lots to pluck out here. The result sounds like when you pierce a perfectly cooked egg yolk on a perfectly sunny morning. Written by Richard Fariña, Baez’s brother-in-law, it documents the KKK bombing an Alabama Sunday school that killed four black teenage girls. When praising lauded musicians, it can be easy to say that without them we wouldn’t have had X, Y or Z. It’s usually true: without Joni Mitchell, Ray Charles, Blondie or Fleetwood Mac we would have lost some of the greatest musicians of the 21st century.

It is a barnstorming performance by Baez, big and ballsy and almost up tempo in a way her music rarely is (which might explain why it was such a commercial success for her as a single.)

While they both performed on “The Rolling Thunder Revue”, sometimes in the same line-up, Mitchell has said that the women of folk were not the sorority that the laughing, hugging photos of the two of them might suggest. Catch the Wind 7. Later used by Spike Lee as the opening song for his documentary on the same killing, 4 Little Girls, it’s amazing to see how correctly Baez pitches this subtle, microcosmic song about American racism.

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot 11. While her Dylan, Donovan and Woody Guthrie reimaginings here are all great, there is something so ineffable about this song that it had to feature. Although she wrote her own material, she is perhaps best known for reimagining traditional folk songs and 1960s classics with that signature voice, as soft and angelic as Dylan’s isn't. Joan’s honeyed singing on the melody and Joni’s wailing riffs around the edge are heaven when left to their own devices – then come the horns. Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

Her prose is as stunning as her voice here – lower than when she sang about the Virgin Mary at Newport around 30 years earlier – the production including a full gospel choir. A tribute to Baez’s gay fanbase and a passionate rebuttal of an attempt to ban LGBTQ people from working in California schools, “The Altar Boy And The Thief” is both a tribute to her local gay bar (The Pink Elephant in Santa Monica) and also a tribute to queer culture at large. It feels like vintage Joan given a new sound, continuing her engagement with the music of marginalised groups, religious demographics, politics and traditional arrangements. Over dozens of albums and decades of work, Baez has produced so much music it is almost impossible to provide a selection that will describe her virtues and attributes perfectly.

A voice that drove out bad spirits.”. While “We Are Crossing The Jordan River” is infectiously upbeat, Baez’s trill is best deployed on the downbeat “Virgin Mary Had One Son”, especially when it juxtaposes Gibson’s lower notes at the end of each chorus. Joan Baez’s version of Pete Seeger’s “We Shall Overcome” is one of her best known songs. Arguably Joan Baez’s opus, her poetry has never been more laser-keen and powerful than it is here: "As I remember your eyes/ Were bluer than robin's eggs/ My poetry was lousy you said/ Where are you calling from?” The story of the “original vagabond” calling up “the Madonna” to discuss his work on Blood On The Tracks, their relationship is portrayed here with such love and such rage that it deserves to be remembered as one of the greatest break-up records of all time, if only because it so completely transcends that description – this is Baez’s In The Wee Small Hours, her Lemonade, and truly a masterpiece.

Head to GQ's Vero channel for exclusive music content and commentary, all the latest music lifestyle news and insider access into the GQ world, from behind-the-scenes insight to recommendations from our editors and high-profile talent. When Baez does Dylan, she gives some of his most melancholy songs a chance to sound a bit more lilting, soft and rhapsodic, rather than… well, we’ve all heard Dylan’s voice. But it can be a bit of a complex game: after all, even the people who inspired contemporary music were inspired by someone else. They were also romantically involved, which was perhaps inevitable when you read how Dylan described the first time he saw her on TV in Chronicles: Volume One: “The sight of her made me sigh. The version of the song there is slow and melancholy, but in its second iteration it is light and breezy: as much a Burt Bacharach number as it is something from Court & Spark-era Mitchell.
Joan Baez's first albums were entirely composed of rearrangements of traditional folk songs from all over the world. Originally by Seeger and first recorded in German by Marlene Dietrich, the actress’ performance of the song in Israel marked the country's first performance in German since the Second World War. Our personal favourite is her German version of Pete Seeger’s “Where Have All The Flowers Gone”, from her album Farewell, Angelina.

That makes it sound like she is subjugated by other sources, but that is probably inaccurate: not only were Baez's A&M years a chance for her to run riot with musical influences, but there's jazz all over this album (just listen to the exceptional “Children And All That Jazz” to hear that this was a very purposeful avenue she explored). Some have argued that the character of Rosemary in Dylan's nine-minute long opera was inspired by Baez, and the clear similarity in energy – when Dylan recited the song to her – helped fuel the rage that led to her writing her aforementioned skewering of him.

Blackbird 5.

Not so much with Joan Baez. Whatever the knotty history of this song, Baez included a performance of it on her 1976 live album From Every Stage and it gives the song a completely different energy.

To quote Langston Hughes in the liner notes of her album Joan Baez/5: “She does not try to be Brazilian in singing a Brazilian song, or Negro in singing a spiritual, or English in singing a British ballad.