Bargain Audio CDs & Priceless Collection (series)

Blowin' Away

by Joan Baez

Description by OLDIES.com:

A budget-priced reissue of Joan Baez's 1977 album, "Blowin' Away." All original recordings.

Product Description:

Personnel: Joan Baez (vocals, guitar, synthesized strings); Elliott Randall, Dean Parks (acoustic & electric guitars); David Mansfield (steel guitar, violin, mandolin); Jeff Baxter (steel guitar); Tom Scott (saxophone); Larry Knechtel (piano, keyboards); Joe Sample, Malcolm Cecil (keyboards); Duck Dunn, Wilton Felder (bass); Rick Shlosser, Jim Gordon (drums); Mike Borts (percussion).

Recorded at Cherokee Recording Studios, Los Angeles, California.

Joan Baez first became known for her unique voice, then her political beliefs, and finally for her songwriting skill. On BLOWIN' AWAY, the sensitive, outspoken singer opens her heart to the listener with lyrics that look back at her career and her personal life. Her first record for CBS, this album documents the singer's professional travails, as well as her failed marriage.

On "Time Rag," Baez laments, "Rippin' along towards middle age/and my music career kinda missed a page/record sales began to drop." On her own composition "Miracles," which may be the highlight of the album, she writes with a kind of poetic dolefulness, "Look around you and you will see/everyone has a small franchise on misery." The Queen Of Folk is in great form on BLOWIN' AWAY. Her singing is marked by variations in texture and mood, as well as by shades of humor and irony, and she even dabbles with a quasi-jazz setting on "Cry Me a River."