Bob Dylan called it her “heart-stopping soprano,” and it’s true that when Joan Baez unleashed that pure, angelic voice on the protest song “We Shall Overcome,” you could believe we would, indeed, overcome.
The celebrated folk singer and activist was singing about civil rights, of course. But what we learn in the thoughtful, thorough and sometimes harrowingly intimate “Joan Baez: I Am a Noise” is that Baez was also seeking to overcome much on a personal scale: anxiety, depression, loneliness and, late in life, troubling repressed memories about her own father.
