“Where Are You Now, My Son?” Album by Joan Baez Essay

Parallel to her career as a singer-songwriter Joan Baez has been a human rights activist and anti war campaigner. In December 1971, along with a group of journalists, fellow artists, and veterans, she stayed in Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam. Their mission was to address human rights in that region, deliver Christmas mail to American Prisoners of war, and build solidarity with the Vietnamese people. Baez recorded many of her conversations and performances during the trip resulting in ‘Where are you now, my son?’ In December 1972, at the height of the Vietnam conflict, she spent 13 days in that country and returned home with 15 hours of tapes. She survived the 11-day long Christmas bombings campaign over Hanoi and Haiphong (Dávila 56). As the bombs were falling, she sang ‘Silent Night’ with the people around her. There were over sixty bombing raids in those eleven days in what turned out to be the heaviest bombing in the history of the world.

‘Where are you now, my son?’ is an album by Joan Baez released in December 1973. On one side of the album, she made the recording during a US bombing raid on Hanoi over Christmas in 1972 when she made her visit to North Vietnam (Dávila 56). The other album’s side was recorded in Nashville in 1973. The genre of the album is folk-rock and contemporary folk. She made it clear that the war in Indochina was not yet over, and the war against violence had barely begun. The album featured audio clips from the war zone and studio-recorded songs reflecting her experience (Dávila 60). The album captured a unique perspective in a painful and complicated historical moment.

The album is a journalistic investigation, a memorial, and an elegy that captures the complexity of living in a war (Baez 15). The journalistic feature in the album is the grief experienced by all parties, noises of their environment, Baez’s monologue, and the laughter and music. She portrays Hanoi’s overflowing love and generosity despite the constant pain of war. The first side of the album is a 22 minutes splice of Baez’s experiences in North Vietnam during the 1972 Christmas bombings, interspersed with her spoken narrative about her eye-witness accounts of what she saw during that intense historical period. It contains a tale of the horrors of war. It is spoken and sung and includes actual war recordings from Hanoi’s massive Christmas bombing raids (Baez, 1977). It opens with the sounds of war, and for a minute, there is no noise except for an American B-52 flying overhead and the sounds of distant bombs crashing like heavy percussions.

The recordings included the audios of the Christmas service and conversations with Vietnamese and foreign citizens who secluded in a bomb shelter with Baez and her company. Throughout the years, Baez has remained deeply committed to social and political matters, lending her voice to many concerts for various causes. Her tone was formal yet somber, as if she was reading a eulogy. A man is heard bonding with Baez stating that they are not afraid together and if they die, they will die and that one dies once, that would be all for them. Themes of grief and renewal shine throughout the first half (Dávila 56). Baez laments the loss of a lover on the opening track. The track is bittersweet, detailing both the heavenly feeling of love and the melancholy in knowing the relationship will someday fizzle.

The other side is a tale of resilience, and the second track inspires hope no matter the path taken in life and represents a rebirth from the sadness experienced earlier in the album. The other tracks signal a farewell to a singular person and a changing of tides and shift towards a new zeitgeist (Reid 45). The last songs show that love will always exist even when it takes another form. Baez utilizes music as a tool of healing.

Baez allowed the viewers to see past the tragedy. She allowed the viewers also to hear the voices of the oppressed. She expresses the pain so deeply into the memory of her ancestors that she often felt like she inherited her parents’ grief. “Where are you now, my son?” serves as a memorial to that history that will never fade away as long as our people continue to sing (Reid 74). The album is maximalist in style, it described the modernism of that period when the song was recorded and released. It is filled with aggression for the value of life and anger for losing lives. It is a radical intensification of means towards accepted and traditional ends. The album is also filled with different musical features, such as the guitar as an instrument and harmonic complexity blended with the great vocals from Joan Baez.

The album is a work of art that had a role in activism. It can be a way to insight consciousness among listeners. Otherwise, music allows us to preserve the memory of periods of tumult. The album was her gift to the Vietnamese people and her prayer of thanks for being alive. The album has been about the pain and grief the war brought and the great loss of loved ones, property, and bad governance effects (Reid 80). It was also a great platform for most musicians to express what people face and their life experiences. It was a way to insight consciousness amongst listeners too. Nowadays, a similar sentiment reflected in the music can be seen, primarily of Black musicians reacting to today’s racial climate from Kanye West and Kendrick Lamar offering their life perspectives.

Works Cited

Baez, Joan. Where are You Now, My Son? A & M Records, 1977.

Dávila, Arlene. Latinx Art. Artists, Markets, and Politics. Duke University Press, 2020.

Reid, Anna, Carrigan, Jeanell, and Da Costa, Neal P. (Ed.). Creative Research in Music. Taylor & Francis, 2020.