After purchasing and listening to the 1970's Joan Baez vinyl album which she recorded and released after she had visited North Vietnam (during the same December 1972 week when Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger had ordered the Christmas bombings of some North Vietnam cities which destroyed civilian targets like hospitals) and spent some time in a North Vietnamese bomb shelter, I thought Baez might now be interested in recording some of the anti-imperialist and anti-war protest folk songs I had written in the late 1960's and early 1970's, such as "Bloody Minds," "He Walked Up The Hill," and "Living On Stolen Goods," as well as the "Richard Farina Is Gone" eulogistic folk song. So I mailed a cassette "basement" tape of these folk songs and some other protest folk and folk love songs to the contact address for Baez that was listed in Who's Who In America.
Baez, however, didn't seem interested in recording any of these folk songs. But Baez's mother wrote me a personal note indicating she liked some of the folk songs and encouraging me to keep on writing folk songs.
Baez was the only post-1940's-born U.S. folk singer in the 1970's (aside from Phil Ochs, who only sang the songs he wrote himself) whose politics and song lyrics/musical preferences were close to mine and who had access to a record company recording studio. So, once she didn't express any interest in recording any of the protest folk songs, eulogistic folk songs or love folk songs I had written in the 1970's, that pretty much eliminated the possibility, of course, that any of these folk songs would reach a mass anti-war audience with their anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, revolutionary consciousness-raising message during the rest of the 20th century.
