Joan Baez Family History

Joan Chandos Baez was born on January 9th, 1941 to Albert and Joan Baez in Staten Island, New York.  Her father was born in Mexico, her mother in Scotland.  She was the middle child of their three daughters.

Joan spent her early years in Morris, New Jersey.  However, owing to her father’s work with UNESCO, the family moved around a lot, living in towns across America, as well as in Canada, Europe and the Middle East.  She spent much of her formative youth living in the San Francisco Bay area, graduating from Palo Alto High School in 1958.

During Joan’s early childhood, her family had converted to Quakerism; and while growing up, she would be subject to racial slurs and discrimination because of her Mexican heritage.  All of this helped to spark her interest and commitment to social causes.

The Singer and The Sixties.  After graduating from high school Joan moved to Boston and began singing in the folk clubs there.  She felt that she had been “born gifted” with her singing voice.

Her career was launched in 1959 with an appearance at the Newport Folk Festival.  She left the crowds there stunned.  As she got up on stage, people were hypnotised by her angelic looks and the gorgeous folky flutter of her voice.  It earned her the nickname of “the barefoot Madonna,” instantly making her the new star of the scene.  By the following year she had signed her first record deal.

In addition to her singing, Joan became increasingly involved in the civil rights movement.  Her performance of We Shall Overcome at the March on Washington in 1963 linked her to that civil rights anthem.  And she later became vocal about the Vietnam War and prison reform.

Joan’s Loves.  Joan had three well-known loves in her life:

• the first was with the singer/songwriter Bob Dylan whom she had first met during the Greenwich Village folk scene in 1961.  Her song Diamonds and Rust commemorated that love.
• the second was with the draft resister David Harris whom she had married in 1968 during his trial while heavily pregnant.  They amicably divorced in 1973.
• the third was with the tech titan Steve Jobs whom she had first met when she was forty-one and he was twenty-seven.

And Later.  Joan did not disappear after the sixties.  She continued recording and would tour on behalf of many of the issues that she felt strongly about.

She played a significant role in the 1985 Live Aid concert for African famine relief, opening the US segment of the show in Philadelphia.  Czech President Vaclav Havel was a great admirer of hers and she would often perform in Prague.

By the 2020’s, when she was in her eighties, she was still spry and alive to the world, although she had cut back the touring that she once had done.

Baez in Mexico

Baez is a Spanish surname, probably patronymic (ending in “-ez”) in origin and coming from Pelago (meaning “the sea” or “open sea”).  This reduced to Paez and Baez.

The name is mainly to be found in Mexico (some 60,000 there today), but it also occurs elsewhere in Latin America (particularly in Paraguay).  Within Mexico, the principal Baez numbers are in the south – in the states of Puebla and  Veracruz.

Alberto Baldomero Baez studied in Puebla but had come from the more mountainous state of San Luis Potosi to the north.  Born into a Catholic family in 1888, he was the son of Librado and Adelaida Baez.  Llittle more is known about him there.

While in Puebla Alberto became exposed to Methodism through the work of a local ministers’ training school in which he enrolled.  He fell in love with the director’s daughter, Thalia Valderrama, and they married in 1912.

Baez in America

Rev. Baez, Joan’s Grandfather.  Alberto and his new family moved to the United States in 1915.  They crossed the border at Laredo and tried to start a new Methodist church in Alice, Texas.  That did not work out and in 1917 they moved north to Brooklyn, New York.

Here Alberto started preaching initially to a group of 35 faithfuls, the holdovers from an earlier Hispanic Methodist church in Brooklyn.  Through the 1920’s the Rev. Baez and his wife Thalia, a highly regarded social worker, grew their First Spanish Methodist Church from a tiny congregation into one of thousands with almost all the Latin American countries represented.  Alberto preached and advocated for his Spanish-speaking congregation there.

Later he lived on President Street in Brooklyn in the Brooklyn Deaconess residence of the Methodist Episcopal Church.  He was indeed one of the most prominent Mexican Americans in Brooklyn in his time.

This Mexican minister had some brainy children an America, notably his son Albert and grandson John Carlos.  His three children were:

• Alberto/Albert Baez, born in Mexico in 1912, was the eminent physicist.  He married Joan Bridge in New Jersey in 1936 and  they were the parents of three daughters, including the folk singer Joan Baez.
• Mimi Baez, born in Mexico in 1914.  She married James Kingsley in New Jersey in 1938.
• and Pedro/Peter Baez, born in Brooklyn in 1920.  He married Phyllis Goudzwaard in 1959.  Their son John Carlos Baez, born in 1961, is a mathematics professor at UCR in California.  He is well known on the internet as the author of the crackpot index.

Alberto died in 1963 in the American hospital at Neuilly in France.

Albert, Joan’s Father.  Her father Albert grew up in Brooklyn and did consider becoming a minister before turning to mathematics and physics.  He studied mathematics at Drew and Syracuse University in the 1930’s.  He then received his doctorate in physics at Stanford University in 1950.

By that time he had already made important contributions to the early development of X-ray microscopes and X-ray telescopes.  He later held professorships at the College of Redlands, Baghdad University, and MIT. Throughout his career he was prolific in the development of educational materials in physics, including textbooks and videos.

Upon retirement in California he served as president of Vivamos Mejor/USA, an organization founded in 1988 to help impoverished villages in Mexico.

Big Joan, Joan’s Mother.  Her mother Joan Bridge, whom Albert married in 1936, was generally referred to as “big Joan,” as opposed to her daughter’s “wee Joan.”   She was born in Scotland, the second daughter of William Bridge, a man who claimed descent from the Brydges who were once the Dukes of Chandos.

William, born in Sussex, was an Anglican minister:

• in Cumberland where he married his wife Florence in 1908
• in Edinburgh where their daughter Joan was born in 1913
• and probably in British Columbia, Canada where Florence died in  1916.

After her death William was married two more times.  He moved with his family to America in 1917, first to Idaho and then to New Jersey where he died in 1937.

His daughter Joan married Albert Baez in New Jersey in 1936.  She died in California in 2013 at the grand age of one hundred years plus nine days.

Joan Baez’s Family Tree

• Jose Librado Baez (b. circa 1860) m. Adelaida Fonseca (b. circa 1870) in San Luis Potosi, Mexico
• – Alberto Baez (1888-1963)

• Rev. Alberto Baldomero Baez, Methodist minister from San Luis Potosi m. Thalia Valderrama (1884-1951) in Puebla in 1912 and moved to Brooklyn, New York in 1917.
• – Alberto/Albert Baez (1912-2007)
• – Mimi Baez (1914-1969) m. James Kingsley (1914-1997) in 1938
• – Pedro/Peter Baez (1920-2008) m. Phyllis Goudzwaard (b. 1925) in 1959, with son John Carlos Baez (b. 1961)

• Albert Baez, physicist from Puebla, Mexico (1912-2007) came to Brooklyn, New York in 1917 and m. Joan Bridge in New Jersey in 1936.  Albert retired and died in California.
• – Pauline Baez (1938-2016) m. Nicholas Marden and Leyton Bryan
• – Joan Baez (b. 1941)
• – Mimi Baez (1945-2021), singer-songwriter, m. Richard Farina in 1963

• Joan Baez, folk singer from Brooklyn m. David Harris, draft resister (1946-2023) in New York in 1968, divorced in 1973.  She was also known for her relationships with Bob Dylan in the 1960’s and Steve Jobs in the 1980’s.
• – Gabriel Harris (b. 1969), drummer