Friday, January 15, 2016

Queens County Revisited: The 1970's (55)

So it wasn't until I happened to discover Bob Fass's late night "Radio Unnameable" free form radio show on Pacifica's WBAI-FM radio station in New York City one late summer night in August 1965, when he aired Joan Baez's recording of "There But For Fortune," that I actually first heard how Baez sounded like when she sang. And, naturally, I immediately became a fan of hers, although--since Fass didn't announce the name of the person who was singing "There But For Fortune" so beautifully and intensely--I didn't actually realize that it was Joan Baez's voice until two or three months later. 

It was only after living in Columbia University's Livingston Hall dormitory in Manhattan for awhile and then visiting my parents' apartment in Whitestone, Queens, where I listened to Baez's "Farewell Angelina" vinyl album (that my older sister had brought there when she returned to Queens from the Bay Area) for the first time, that I made the connection in my mind that the person whose voice I had liked singing "There But For Fortune" was the same Joan Baez whose "Farewell Angelina" album I also liked.

And, from the middle 1960's until the end of the 1970's, I, naturally, began to purchase every Joan Baez album I could afford to buy when I had extra money to spare on vinyl records; and I also began to religiously read every article that I happened to notice in the U.S. newspapers and magazines about Joan Baez, as well as reading her first autobiographical book, Daybreak

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