Come round by my side and I'll sing you a song

Continuing my trip back through the 1965 album charts.

24/10/65 : Joan Baez/5 - Joan Baez


From never having met her, we meet her twice in a couple of months! My previous visit suggests this is going to be a bit more folky so I'm interested to see what this is like.

Yeah. it's mostly standard folky stuff - even the contemporary stuff is done in a traditional "one woman and her guitar" style. I particularly liked "Birmingham Sunday" but it's all decent stuff, although "Bachiana Brasilieras" is a peculiar track with her warbling some opera over a string quartet. She's got a nice voice and decent picking ability - it doesn't sound particularly ground-breaking now, but I can believe it was a breath of fresh air back in the day.

We're at a year-low #14 in the chart this week on her eighteenth week of a 21 week run, with #3 being as high as it got in her second to sixth weeks (what are the chances of TSOM and The Beatles having been involved in keeping her from getting any higher?). The top five this week were TSOM, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Andy Williams and Mary Poppins and there were no new entries in the chart.

Wikipedia tells us that, unsurprisingly, this is her fifth album but apart from that, there's not loads here. As previously mentioned, it's a mix of traditional and contemporary with covers from Bob Dylan (of course), Johnny Cash and Phil Ochs with "Birmingham Sunday" having been written by Richard Farina, who was married to her sister. Taking a detour into her entry (because she deserves it and we won't be seeing her again for, oooh, a month or so) you wouldn't believe the number of political causes she's aligned herself with over the years - some of which are obvious (anti-Vietnam war, LGBT, the environment) and some not so much (Iran, urban farms, Catalan) but interestingly the only presidential candidate she's ever endorsed is Barack Obama. She also has some interesting names in the relationship section - Bob Dylan, David Harris (a US activist) and Steve Jobs ("Steve had a very sweet side, even if he was as... erratic as he was famous for being"). Back to the album, commercially it did OK, getting  to #12 in the US.

"Customers also listened to" "no similar recommendations" which seems slightly odd, but has been somewhat of a theme this year. There's plenty out there like her these days, but I can believe she was on her own in '65 - and '65 was all the better for it, with the ladies absolutely bossing things.

17/10/65 - A decent enough album
31/10/65 - Good, but could easily have been better

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