Memory #1:
Memory #2: I think I was in junior high school, back in the 1960’s, when my friend Johnny told me that his brother, Jimmy, had returned stateside after serving our nation in the US Navy. Jimmy had brought a collection of 33 rpm records he had bought overseas. One of the records was an album by Joan Baez. The European LPs were, at that time, sold in paper jackets, different from our American cardboard album covers.
On the back of the Joan Baez cover were some notes written by a fella named Bob Dylan. I remember one note in particular, where Bob described his feelings as he was sitting in grass beside a railroad track and waxing poetically about the sound of Joan’s voice.
Memory #3: The Pacifist “fighter.”Later, Joan was all over the country, singing for peace, singing and working for civil rights, in a peace-keeping strategy in which the fighters for justice placed nonviolence as a higher priority than bloodshed and violence. Joan Baez and her compatriots conducted demonstrations with tactics of nonviolent resistance. Even so they were true fighters, “drum majors for justice” as Dr. Martin Luther King had demonstrated.
They were nonviolent fighters against prejudice, demonstrating peacefully that a fighter could still remain, carrying the reminders of “every glove that laid him (them) down” and rocked him (them)in his (their) anger and their pain, wanting to cry out: “I am leaving; I am leaving. But the fighter still remains” in the ring of public demonstration, protesting nonviolently and still yet. . . the fighter still remains. And Joan believed, and they believed, deep in their heart, that they would overcome some day.
And overcome, they did. Look around, witness the death of racism that has happened in my generation, beginning in Little Rock in 1954. Oh, but the fight for justice is never over. True-dat! We still have work to do.
And I remember listening to Joan, and to Peter, Paul and Mary, and Dylan, who expressed, tunefully, our generation’s expressed resistance against unnecessary violence and war.
Memory #3: I was in high school when a friend of mind, Sonny, mentioned to me that Paul Simon had presented a new song called “The Boxer.”
Memory Update #4:
In this week, July 2025, I am hearing Paul Simon’s voice and Joan Baez’ voice, harmonizing as they sing Paul’s autobiographic ballad, The Boxer. I am noticing on the YouTube video that Paul has added a new verse to the original edition of his classic ballad. On the updated rendition, Paul and Joan deliver this profound addition, which is the newly-inserted third verse:
“Now the years are rolled behind me; they are rocking evenly, and I am older than I once was and younger than I’ll be; but that’s not unusual. Nor is it strange to have the changes upon changes.We are more or less the same; After changes we are more or less the same.”
And I must note that Paul has, as we say in the carpentry trade, “hit the nail on the head” which is to say, he hath sung a profound truth. The changes of which this duo sing are not described or enumerated, except within the mysterious context of the song itself.
Yet for this boomer, those “changes” are clearly understood. We, the baby boomers, have a clear memory of what-all happened in our nation during our time on this earth. We’ve had that TV screen shining images at us since the beginning. We had a little help from our friends, Paul and Joan. . . and there was Judy Collins, and Peter, Paul and Mary, Joni Mitchell, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young. I have Deja Vu just thinking about all of them.
And all of us have had, even as spoiled as we were by so much comfort, luxury and entertainment . . . we have, each of us, had our share of hard knocks and traumas and tragedies . . .”I am leaving; I am leaving; but the fighter still remains”
. . . in memory, if not in life. . .
Even so. . . at the end of the day, or the era, of your life or mine. . . after all those changes, we are, as Paul and Joan sing. . . each of us, “more or less the same”. . .
