Joan Baez – Baptism: A Journey Through Our Time

I have been steeped in Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown (the new Orpheus-inspired folk opera) for the last couple of days, and it inspired me to update this 11 December 2008 post with a higher quality rip. I also took several of the war-themed tracks and put together a 17-minute podcast. You can read along below while you listen.

Baptism (1968) is probably the most stand-out item in the entire Joan Baez catalog, perhaps even the whole Vanguard catalog. It is certainly the most dark and compelling concept album I have ever heard. This is a sit-down and pay attention album – headphones if you like, but you definitely need to be prepared for a dark and intense journey. A really great gem from Baez and Peter Schickele.

Original music composed and conducted by Peter Schickele. Poems selected and edited by Joan Baez. Conceived and compiled by Maynard Solomon.

Baptism: A Journey Through Our Time

1) Old Welsh Song (Henry Treece)
2) I Saw The Vision Of Armies (Walt Whitman)
3) Minister of War (translated from the Chinese by Arthur Waley)
4) Song In The Blood (Jacques Prévert)
5) Casida Of The Lament (Federico García Lorca)
6) Of The Dark Past (Ecce Puer) (James Joyce)
7) London (William Blake)
8) In Guernica (Norman Rosten)
9) Who Murdered The Minutes (Henry Treece)
10) Oh, Little Child (Henry Treece)
11) No Man Is An Island (John Donne)
12) from Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man (James Joyce)
13) All The Pretty Little Horses (Negro Lullaby)
14) Childhood III (Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Louise Varèse)
15) The Magic Wood (Henry Treece)
16) Poems From The Japanese (Translated by Kenneth Rexroth)
17) Colours (Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated by Robin Milner-Gulland and Peter Levi)
18) All In Green Went My Love Riding (e. e. cummings)
19) Gacela Of The Dark Death (Federico García Lorca, translated by Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili)
20) The Parable Of The Old Man And The Young (Wilfred Owen)
21) Evil (Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Norman Cameron)
22) Epitaph For A Poet (Countee Cullen)
23) Old Welsh Song (Henry Treece)
24) Mystic Numbers: 36. Wedding Song (Henry Treece)
25) When The Shy Star Goes Forth In Heaven (James Joyce)
26) The Angel (William Blake)

Review by Bruce Eder:

Joan Baez’s most unusual album, Baptism is of a piece with the “concept” albums of the late ’60s, but more ambitious than most and different from all of them. Baez by this time was immersed in various causes, concerning the Vietnam War, the human condition, and the general state of the world, and it seemed as though every note of music that she sang was treated as important — sometimes in a negative way by her opponents; additionally, popular music was changing rapidly, and even rock groups that had seldom worried in their music about too much beyond the singer’s next sexual conquest were getting serious. Baptism was Baez getting more serious than she already was, right down to the settings of her music, and redirecting her talent from folk song to art song, complete with orchestral accompaniment. Naturally, her idea of a concept album would differ from that of, say, Frank Sinatra or the Beatles. Baptism was a body of poetry selected, edited, and read and sung by Baez, and set to music by Peter Schickele (better known for his comical musical “discoveries” associated with “P.D.Q. Bach,” but also a serious musician and composer). In 1968, amid the strife spreading across the world, the album had a built-in urgency that made it work as a mixture of art and message — today, it seems like a precious and overly self-absorbed period piece. Baez lacks the speaking voice to pull off an album’s worth of readings, though her interpretations of Federico García Lorca’s “Casida of the Lament” and “Gacela of the Dark Death” show her achieving a level of compelling expressiveness that is lacking elsewhere; and the recording of Countee Cullen’s “Epitaph for a Poet” features some beautiful accompaniment by Schickele. Additionally, the sung portions, including “Old Welsh Song,” “Who Murdered the Minutes,” “The Magic Wood,” and “Oh, Little Child” by Henry Treece, “Of the Dark Past” by James Joyce, “All in Green Went My Love Riding” by e.e. cummings, and the lullaby “All the Pretty Little Horses” are beautiful and sustain those portions of the album. Baptism is primarily for Baez completists, however, although it is also a singular reminder for ’60s history buffs that not all of the antiwar movement’s music, or the work coming out of the folk scene in 1968, was necessarily loud, harsh, or bitter.

Old Welsh Song (Henry Treece)

I take with me where I go a pen and a golden bowl;
Poet and beggar step in my shoes, or a prince in a purple shawl.
I bring with me when I return to the house that my father’s hands made
A crooning bird on a crystal bough and, o, a sad, sad word!

I Saw the Vision of Armies (Walt Whitman)

I saw the vision of armies;
and I saw, as in noiseless dreams, hundreds of battle-flags,
borne through the smoke of the battles and pierced with missiles, I saw them,
and carried, hither and yon through the smoke, and torn and bloody;
and at last but a few shreds of ‘the flags left on the staffs, (and all in silence,)
and the staffs all splintered and broken.
I saw battle-corpses, myriads of them,
and the white skeletons of young men, I saw them;
I saw the debris and debris of all dead soldiers,
But I saw they were not as was thought;
they themselves were fully at rest, they suffered not;
the living remained and suffered, the mother suffered,
and the wife and the child and the musing comrade suffered,
and the armies that remained suffered.

Minister of War (translated form the Chinese by Arthur Waley)

Minister of War, we are the king’s claws and fangs
Why should you roll us on from misery to misery,
giving us no place to stop in or take rest?

Minister of War, we are the king’s claws and teeth
Why should you roll us from misery to misery,
giving us no place to come and stay?

Minister of War, surely you are not wise
Why should you roll us from misery to misery?
We have mothers who lack food

Song In The Blood (Jacques Prévert)

there are great puddles of blood on the world
where is it all going? all this spilled blood?
is it the earth that drinks it and gets drunk?
funny kind of drunkography then,
so wise,
so monotonous,
no,
the earth doesn’t get drunk
the earth doesn’t turn askew
it pushes its little car regularly, it’s four seasons,
rain, snow, hail, fair weather,
never is it drunk
it’s with difficulty it permits itself from time to time
an unhappy little volcano
it turns,
the earth,
it turns with its trees, its gardens, its houses
it turns with its great pools of blood
and all living things turn with it and bleed

it doesn’t give a damn the earth
it turns
and all living things set up a howl,
it doesn’t give a damn,
it turns
it doesn’t stop turning
and the blood doesn’t stop running

where’s is it going
all this spilled blood?
murder’s blood, war’s blood,
misery’s blood, and the blood of men tortured in prisons,
and the blood of children calmly tortured by their papa and their mama
and the blood of men whose heads bleed in padded cells
and the roofers blood if the roofer slips and falls from the roof
and the blood that comes and flows and gushes with the newborn
the mother cries,
the baby cries,
the blood flows
the earth turns
the earth doesn’t stop turning,
the blood doesn’t stop flowing

where’s it going all this spilled blood?
blood of the blackjacked,
of the humiliated,
of the suicides
of firing squad victims
of the condemned
and the blood of those that die
just like that
by accident

in the street a living being goes by with all his blood inside
suddenly there he is,
dead
and all his blood outside
and other living beings make the blood disappear
they carry the body away
but it’s stubborn blood
and there where the dead one was, much later
all black
a little blood still stretches
coagulated blood, life’s rust, body’s rust
blood curdled like milk, like milk when it turns, when it turns like the earth like the earth
it turns with its milk, with its cows,
with its living, with its dead,
the earth that turns with its trees, with it’s living beings, with its houses
the earth that turns with marriages, burials,
shells, regiments, the earth that turns and turns and turns
with its great streams of blood.

Casida of the Lament (Federico Garcia Lorca – translated from the Spanish by Stephen Spender and J.L. Gili)

I have shut my balcony
because I do not want to hear the weeping,
but from behind the grey walls
nothing else is heard but the weeping.

There are very few angels that sing,
there are very few dogs that bark,
a thousand violins fit into the palm of my hand.

But the weeping is an immense dog,
the weeping is an immense angel,
the weeping is an immense violin,
the tears muzzle the wind,
nothing else is heard but the weeping.

London (William Blake)

I wander thro’ each charter’d street,
Near where the charter’d Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant’s cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg’d manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper’s cry
Every black’ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier’s sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro’ midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot’s curse
Blasts the new-born Infant’s tear
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.

Who murdered the minutes (Henry Treece)

Who murdered the minutes
The bright, golden minutes
The minutes of youth?
I, said the soldier, dressed in his red coat
I with my trumpet, my sword and my flag
I murdered the minutes
I took the minutes and what good I did,
For see how the black men kneel, he said

Who killed the hours
The gay purple hours
The hours of faith
I, said the Parson, in his black cloak
I with my book and my bell and my pen
I killed the hours
I killed the hours
As my holy right
and see how the people kneel at night

Who slew the years
the sweet precious years
The years of truth
I, said the lover, in her gay gown
I with my lips and my breast and my eyes
I slew the years
I slew the years
My silly talk
And see how you kneel to me in love

Gacela Of The Dark Death (Federico García Lorca – translated by Stephen Spender and J. L. Gili)

I want to sleep the dream of the apples,
to withdraw from the tumult of cemetries.
I want to sleep the dream of that child
who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas.

I don’t want to hear again that the dead do not lose their blood,
that the putrid mouth goes on asking for water.
I don’t want to learn of the tortures of the grass,
nor of the moon with a serpent’s mouth
that labors before dawn.

I want to sleep awhile,
awhile, a minute, a century;
but all must know that I have not died;
that there is a stable of gold in my lips;
that I am the small friend of the West wing;
that I am the intense shadows of my tears.

Cover me at dawn with a veil,
because dawn will throw fistfuls of ants at me,
and wet with hard water my shoes
so that the pincers of the scorpion slide.

For I want to sleep the dream of the apples,
to learn a lament that will cleanse me to earth;
for I want to live with that dark child
who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas.

Evil (Arthur Rimbaud, translated by Norman Cameron)

While the red-stained mouths of machine guns ring
Across the infinite expanse of day;
While red or green, before their posturing King,
The massed battalions break and melt away;

And while a monstrous frenzy runs a course
That makes of a thousand men a smoking pile-
Poor fools! – dead, in summer, in the grass,
On Nature’s breast, who meant these men to smile;

There is a God, who smiles upon us through
The gleam of gold, the incense-laden air,
Who drowses in a cloud of murmured prayer,

And only wakes when weeping mothers bow
Themselves in anguish, wrapped in old black shawls-
And their last small coin into his coffer falls.