To the Queen of Hearts, he's the Ace of Sorrow

Continuing my trip back through the 1965 album charts.

04/07/65 : Joan Baez In Concert Vol 2 - Joan Baez

Our FOURTH visit with Ms Baez this year (which is still behind the five visits we had with Elvis in '61) - yes, it's a live album but we only had the choice of this or a fifth posthumous best-of/whatever-we-could-find from Buddy Holly, so Joan get's the nod. I'm not expecting this to be wildly different from our previous visits though.

Nope, it isn't. In fact, the only way you'd know it's live is the applause which is (badly) edited in at the beginning and end of the tracks, which is a credit to Joan (and there's some very decent guitar playing on it) and the quality of the sound recording but makes the whole point of it a bit odd. There's nothing wrong with any of the tracks though and I liked "Jack-A-Roe", "Portland Town" and "Manha De Carnaval" (her voice suits Spanish really well), but (and I'm amazed I'm saying this) I actually think I've had enough of female folk for the year - whoever knew that '65 would be quite so equitable?

We're at #16 in the charts this week on her first week of a thirteen week run, with it peaking at #8 for three weeks - although it actually first charted in '64 for a couple of weeks. The top five this week were  TSOM, Bob Dylan, Donovan, Mary Poppins and The Beatles and there are no new entries in the chart.

Wikipedia tells us this is her second live album (out of FIFTEEN!) and her fourth album all told (out of 41!). Quite commonly for the time, the album was released in mono and stereo versions but less commonly, they had different track listings - I can only assume that some of the stereo stuff went a bit wrong. It doesn't tell us anything else about the recording other than it happened in "early 1963" but it is notable because it's her first album to feature Bob Dylan covers which are "Don't Think Twice It's Alright" and "With God On Our Side" - I wonder how many she's done over the years? 

In the critical review section, Richie Unterberger makes the good point that she did a good job of mixing traditional folk with more contemporary stuff without particularly alienating anyone and, amusingly, to "keep her from falling into too much of a maiden-of-constant-sorrow rut". Commerically, it did well in the US, getting to #7 in the Billboard Pop Albums chart - although pop this very much is not.

"Customers also listened to" "no similar recommendations" - Amazon has certainly struggled in certain areas in this year. I've enjoyed my visits with Joan throughout '65, but I do think I've had enough of them now - although I do think she's been somewhat unlucky that I've been listening to them in reverse chrolonogical order because I think I enjoyed the latest one (ie the first one we met) the most.

27/06/65 - Nope
11/07/65 - Interesting, but not great