Harvard’s best listeners
One Monday afternoon in 1958 a 17-year-old folk singer from Boston University auditioned at a jazz club on Mt. Auburn Street. There was no one in the audience but the club’s managers. They were skeptical. Why change the music card? Then their tryout started singing. The girl was Joan Baez. The venue was Club 47. Soon, both were famous. Folk got one night a week, then it got the whole week at the coffeehouse down the street from the Harvard Lampoon. The little audition in Cambridge 54 years ago was a pivotal moment in the revival of American folk music. It also marked the start of a musical age that provided a soundtrack to the tumult of the 1960s. No one recorded the young Baez that Monday afternoon, or her first official performance at Club 47 soon after. (She earned $10. Eight people were in the audience.) But about 30 reel-to-reel tapes...