Joan Baez singing to a sold-out audience in Albany, New York, at the Egg Performing Arts Center in 2016. (Wikimedia Commons/Jim Gilbert) More than a decade ago, I wrote to the chair of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, expressing my hope that that year, 2010, would be the one in which Joan Baez would be one of the honorees for the center's annual award for the performing arts. "She has used her gifts fully," I wrote, noting that she had given more than 40 concerts a year since the late 1950s, when she began singing in the folk clubs of Boston. "Her voice remains as pure as it was when the nation first heard it at the 1959 Newport Folk Festival. Equally so, her commitment to nonviolence and human rights has been unwavering."