Joan Baez
Folk singer Joan Baez strumming her guitar on the beach near her home. (Photo by Ralph Crane//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Joan Baez will be touring Australia in August with a series of concert performances scheduled.

Joan Baez is returning to our shores after more than 25 years. The political powerhouse, a folk force of nature whose influence cannot be measured.

She was there on the front lines of the civil rights movement with Dr Martin Luther King, sang on the first Amnesty International tour and stood side by side with Nelson Mandela when the world celebrated his 90th birthday.

Joan Baez, at the tender age of 18 was first introduced to the world on stage at the Newport Jazz Festival.  She quickly became a central figure of the powerful folk movement sweeping through.  At 20 she had her first Time Magazine cover.

Baez is recognized as an outstanding, courageous activist whose beliefs can’t be separated from her music.

She sang about freedom and civil rights from the backs of flatbed trucks in Mississippi and on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at Dr Martin Luther King’s march on Washington in 1963.

Baez brought the Free Speech Movement into the spotlight at Berkeley; organised resistance to the war in South East Asia, travelling to Hanoi; performed at numerous benefit concerts and recently, Baez performed at Occupy Wall Street in New York and contributed to the ‘Occupy This’ album.

Her Grammy-nominated and most recent album, Day After Tomorrow (2008) recorded in Nashville and produced by Steve Earle, carries on Joan’s tradition of serving as an interpreter for a wide array of songwriters, with material by Earle, Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, T Bone Burnett, Patty Griffin, Thea Gilmore and Eliza Gilkyson.