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A year later, they were singing “With God on Our Side” together at the Monterey and Newport Folk Festivals, and playing house in her Carmel home – the pair of them resplendent, triumphant, the Queen of Folk and her raspy-voiced Consort.Contrary to most fans’ assumptions, their love affair lasted only three months. But Gibson called her up on stage to sing two old spirituals with him, “Virgin Mary Had One Son” and “Jordan River”. After a couple of verses, he stepped back from the mikes and Joan let rip. “She woke everybody up, all the way to Boston,” the concert organiser remarked Backstage, people congratulated Gibson on his discovery. “It was like ‘discovering’ the Grand Canyon,” he later wrote, modestly.Baez remembers it more simply “I was scared to death,” she recalls “My knees were shaking.

I stood there by the stage and watched other people, as the time got closer and closer to when Bob was due to go on It meant I had plenty of time to get into a real state I mean, there were 13,000 people there. Where would hippies, flower-power, student revolt and the anti-Vietnam generation have been without Joan Baez, the Californian Joan of Arc? It happened on a Sunday evening in July 1959, at the Newport Folk Festival, when Bob Gibson, an exuberant Chicago folk singer, invited the 18-year-old Baez to join him on stage for a duet The waif-like Joan was not a prepossessing sight She was drenched with rain Wet hair hung down her face like dirty string Her bare feet were muddy. People are afraid of being called ‘unpatriotic’.”As Ms Baez waxes passionate about modern politics, you can almost see in her the teenager who, in 1959, provided the hinge between traditional folk music and the libertarian culture of the Sixties. He doesn’t understand the world’s disapproval – he just unplugs the TV. Now I understand, for the first time in my life, what the answer is when people ask, ‘Why didn’t people stop Hitler?’ It’s a reign of fear.

I preferred to work, in just about everything I do, with the people. I was lucky to work with Martin Luther King, who worked at the bottom of the pyramid, because he knew that, if you get enough people there, that’s what moves it around. At the top of the pyramid, they can instigate change, but it’s a dangerous position to be in. Because you have to know, or to learn, how to lie, cheat, steal and kill in order to be a good president. That’s part of the job, when you’re commander-in-chief.”But, frankly, I’d vote for anybody who’d bump Bush out of there Because I think he’s a sociopath He doesn’t care He has no empathy Nothing registers with him. And the skies were orange and pink and red at night, with flocks of birds flying across them…”Watching Baghdad being bombed had a bracing effect on its one-time inhabitant “Yeah, I knew those main streets.