Music review: Joan Baez, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall

Joan Baez PIC: Herbert Pfarrhofer / AFP / Getty Images

The great folk doyenne Joan Baez embarked on her farewell tour last year, but it turned out the fans didn’t want to say goodbye just yet so she’s back for another parting shot. Judging by the outpouring of love and respect in the room for this veteran troubadour, gatekeeper and campaigner, it’s going to be difficult to let go again.

Joan Baez, Glasgow Royal Concert Hall ****

Baez began solo, with an utterly fluent rendition of Bob Dylan’s Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right and stamped her graceful authority on Farewell, Angelina, another Dylan song she has made her own.

She was joined on and off by Dirk Powell on stringed things, her son Gabe on percussion and harmony vocalist Grace Stumberg to salute other peers. Tom Waits’ Whistle Down the Wind was delicately embellished with mandolin and bodhran, Leonard Cohen’s Suzanne glided along on a lovely layered dual guitar arrangement, but even in this august company, her self-penned Diamonds and Rust held its own.

There was room in her repertoire for a younger generation of writers, including Antony and the Johnson’s Another World, Josh Ritter’s Silver Blade, which may or may not be an ass-kicking response to the haunting folk standard Silver Dagger, and Zoe Mulford’s The President Sang Amazing Grace, composed in response to the Charleston shootings of 2015.

Baez did not mince her words on Obama’s successor, but still counted herself among the dreamers of Lennon’s Imagine. Most touchingly of all, Dylan’s Forever Young might just be her musical epitaph. - Fiona Shepherd