I grew up with Joan, and I guess she will always be a part of me, at least musically. Every so often, when I pick up one of my guitars, my fingers find their way into a little lick from one of those old songs that were so magical in 1961. I didn't have any guitars then; I was just a high school kid, but I can almost remember the first time I ever heard Joan's voice. It must have been on a folk music show on the little local college radio station in my town, Berea, Ohio. I think it was in the Fall of the year, a quiet Midwestern Fall in a small Midwestern college town, with colored leaves, and ivy-covered nineteenth century sandstone buildings. The campus even had sidewalks made from sandstone slabs that, over a century, had settled at crazy angles to challenge walkers, especially on an icy day.

"Silver Dagger" was the first song on the very first Joan Baez album. Along with "All My Trials" and a bunch of Child's Ballads like "House Carpenter," (which was #101, I think - all Child's Ballads were numbered). These plaintive songs and the purity of the voice singing them to the accompaniment of that simple finger-picked guitar...it hit me like a ton of sandstone. For about a year, it was all I wanted to listen to. It drove my dad crazy. "She sounds like she's dying," he would say.  I wanted my girlfriend Kathy to like Joan too, but in those ancient days you couldn't just make someone a cassette of the album.  Either they bought their own, you lent them yours, or you invited them to your parents' house to listen to yours. None of those options worked out for me.  Anyway, I think Kathy was into rock n roll, so it didn't matter. Sometimes the high school kids went to the college library to study, and one evening I met Kathy there, and afterwards we walked along the tilted sidewalks, the dry leaves crackling underfoot, on the way back to my parents' station wagon. I think we might have even held hands, but now I'm not sure. It seems so long ago.

But a couple of years later I was in college myself, in snowy upstate New York. Joan was ancient history, as were the Kingston Trio, the Four Preps, and a lot of other music of forgotten youth. Most people who were alive in 1963 remember where they were and what they were doing when they heard about the shooting in Dallas; my most vivid memory that year is one of eight of us guys crammed into Jeff Davis' room on a November afternoon with the snow piled around the Neo-Gothic dormitories and the sound of distant drumming from the stadium half a mile away where we were headed to watch Cornell defeat Dartmouth, we hoped. None of us could hear the drumming, because the small radio on Jeff's dresser was playing loud rock music, which was all we wanted to listen to at this mature time of our lives. I remember that I was zipping up my new ski jacket and Jeff's roommate Phil was wrapping a long scarf around his neck when the local radio jock, using that sort of clipped, splattery affectation popular at the time, began saying something about "a great-a new group from a-England and I wantcha to a-give em a listen-a!" A few seconds later, we were all listening, for the first time, to a song that really didn't sound like anything else I'd ever heard.  I remember there were three-part harmonies and the lyrics were different.  I remember that conversation ceased for about two minutes and thirty seconds. Then it ended and we were all comparing notes, suddenly drawn together by shared approval, saying things like, "Yeah" and "all right" and "That's a cool song," or whatever it was we said in those days.  zA few minutes later we were out the door and walking up the hill and I was wishing for two or three more sweaters. I don't remember who won the game. It was too damn cold.

I've enjoyed thinking back to these distant times. Some may see the past as misty and dim, but for me it's wonderful how some things that far away can seem so glossy and hard-edged, like the icicles on the trees, or the outline of the clock tower against the sky on that frosty afternoon. Thank you Molly, for giving me an excuse to remember things that happened before you were born. And thank you, Joan, for the inspiration and the nostalgia. I still listen to folk music now and then. And I'm still learning to fingerpick the guitar. And I guess for a lot of us, like it or not, the sixties will always be in there, somewhere.