In June 2015, just days after a white gunman shot and killed nine African-American worshipers in Charleston, South Carolina, President Obama delivered a eulogy for the slain Rev. Clementa Pinckney that included an a cappella performance of “Amazing Grace.” It was a remarkable moment for many reasons, not least because it acknowledged that certain horrors and hopes were beyond his powers as a public speaker. That moment demanded a song. Two years later, the folk singer Zoe Mulford wrote her own song about that day and called it “The President Sang Amazing Grace.” It’s a matter-of-fact lyric, as though reluctant to do anything but record history: “The President came to speak some words/And the cameras rolled and the nation heard.”
It is, in other words, exactly the kind of song Joan Baez might have sung 50 years ago. And so, when Baez covers “The President Sang Amazing Grace” on her first album since 2008, Whistle Down the Wind, it feels right. In its subject matter as well as in its funereal pace, it recalls Richard Fariña’s “Birmingham Sunday,” written after another act of white supremacist terror, the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church. Baez included that song on her 1964 album 5, and the extent to which her voice has changed over the last half-century only underscores the extent to which the times have not. Her voice now sounds graver, more deeply grooved by age, with a slight tremble as she recounts the violence in Charleston and its aftermath. Her version is less pretty than Mulford’s, less settled, less communal. When Obama sang “Amazing Grace,” he was joined by a grieving congregation. When Baez sings about that moment, she sounds lonely, her optimism measured at best.
Having lived through decades of protest-song history, Baez knows how to gauge the state of the world and how to pitch her music to reflect it. She chooses songs that convey a sense of ambivalence about our country’s fate, as though she must now work to muster something resembling hope. That struggle is what makes this album so compelling and ultimately so rewarding. Working with producer Joe Henry, who has helmed similar late-career albums by Solomon Burke, Mose Allison, and Allen Toussaint, Baez crafts a lo-fi acoustic palette that makes room for the occasional flubbed note and sounds all the more immediate and intimate for it. She sings Anohni’s “Another World” to an insistent thump against the strings of her guitar, which could be a racing heart or a ticking clock. As with the 2008 original, it’s the details that put the song across and make it more than just a farewell: “I’m gonna miss the sea, I’m gonna miss the snow.” Rarely has Baez ventured so far beyond the folk and roots world to find material, but the song suits her remarkably well as both an ecological warning and as a personal consideration of mortality.
For the most part, though, Baez doesn’t sound like she’s saying goodbye or setting her affairs in order, even if she has suggested that this will be her final studio album. She brings a steely fury to “Silver Blade,” a murder ballad penned by Josh Ritter that plays like a righteous #metoo anthem. Similarly, Baez manages to convey a novel’s worth of information in the first four lines of “Whistle Down the Wind,” written by Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan: “I’ve grown up here,” she sings, bending the words slightly upward to convey both nostalgia and bitterness. Only “The Things We Are Made Of,” by Mary Chapin Carpenter, sounds a bit too sentimental for an album that rejects easy sentiment.
Indeed, to her credit, Baez continues her lifelong reluctance to settle for easy answers on Whistle Down the Wind. She doesn’t shy away from political protest, but she’s careful to couch her dissent in the personal and the compassionate. “I’m the last leaf on the tree/The autumn took the rest but they won’t take me,” she sings on the album’s other Tom Waits cover, “Last Leaf.” Baez makes such resiliency sound like a noble, necessary virtue.
