How Voice Became Possible for Joan Baez

The singer’s family experienced a moral crisis when she was a young girl, leading them to become pacifists; as a teenager, she discovered a method to add warmth to her voice.

Folk singer and guitarist Joan Baez, now 77, was honored with a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007. “Whistle Down the Wind” (Razor & Tie) is her most recent album. Marc Myers chatted with her.

My father had a moral conundrum when I was nine years old. He accepted a position at Cornell University working on a project to strengthen fighter jets’ bulletproof windows after receiving his Ph.D. in physics. But after witnessing the atrocities of the atomic bomb in the late 1940s, he felt uneasy working for the defense sector.