Folk LEGENDS Joan Baez & Paul Simon’s Heartwarming Duet of “The Boxer”
Famous folk musician Joan Baez commemorated her 75th birthday with a celebrity-filled performance at the Beacon Theatre in New York City. The 2016 birthday concert, filmed for PBS' Great Performances series, now lives on YouTube, where her remarkable duet with folk music pioneer Paul Simon has attracted over 10 million views.
During this performance, Paul Simon (then 73) joined Joan on stage to perform Simon & Garfunkel's 1969 folk classic "The Boxer," from their final, top-selling album "Bridge Over Troubled Water." Paul played guitar and sang with Joan, with additional guitar support from Richard Thompson (66), a renowned London-born folk musician.
Their duet showcases folk music at its richest, with both voices maturing wonderfully and giving the song deeper significance than it originally had. Lyrics like "I am older than I once was / And younger than I'll be; that's not unusual" resonated with poignant beauty, while "After changes we are more or less the same" captured the essence of every former 60s hippie, long after that era passed.
Joan's New York birthday concert featured twenty-two songs, each performed with a distinguished artist from her generation, including David Crosby (who sang The Beatles' "Blackbird" with Joan), Damien Rice, and Mary Chapin Carpenter. The show mixed these collaborative performances with impressive solo renditions and two Bob Dylan covers: "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," and the show-closing "Forever Young."
The birthday concert launched Joan Baez's 18-date North American tour in 2016, organized with Amnesty International to highlight "the critical and urgent issue of racial and ethnic disparities of incarceration, right here in the United States."
This 2016 duet wasn't Joan's first performance of "The Boxer." She delivered a solo version at the Oakland Auditorium in 1981, and in 1982, she performed it with Paul Simon at The Bread and Roses charity event. While only an audio recording exists of their 1982 duet on YouTube, complete with audience chatter and beautiful harmonies, it deserves attention.
New York native Joan Baez rose to fame as a singer-songwriter, guitarist, and activist in the 1960s and 1970s folk scene. Her life story is impressive: after releasing her self-titled first album in 1960 (followed by 24 more albums to date), Joan dated Bob Dylan and Steve Jobs before they became famous, befriended Martin Luther King Jr., performed at Woodstock Festival 1969, and protested against the Vietnam War and later the US invasion of Iraq.
