A decade before WBCN began broadcasting as "The American Revolution," college radio stations in the Boston area were airing a wide array of music including from a growing field of local folk singers, many of whom addressed social issues from civil rights to the anti-nuclear weapons movement.
One of them was Joan Baez, a freshman at Boston University, whose family had recently moved to Belmont, MA from Palo Alto, CA, after her father accepted a teaching position at MIT.
By 1959, Baez, then 18 years old, was regularly performing at Cambridge's famed Club 47, where she developed a large and devoted following, and she accepted an invitation to appear on the Harvard student radio station WHRB's "Balladeers" program.
This four-minute recording of that broadcast, in which her interviewer, the musician Bill Wood, has trouble pronouncing her name, is Baez's first radio interview and on-air performance.
Not long after this broadcast, Baez would perform solo at the 1960 Newport Folk Festival and record her first album for Vanguard Records, which would launch her hugely successful career.
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Click here to hear Joan Baez's first radio interview and performance (1959).