Joan Bayz wrote about it in her memoir. The book was published in 1989, 20 years after Woodstock. She called it and A Voice to sing with. In the Woodstock chapter, she described the early morning hours of August 18th, 1969. The festival was nearly over. Jimmy Hris was on stage for the closing set.
She and Janice Joplain were watching from Joe Cocker’s van. Two women, the same van, the same muddy field, the same music coming through the windows. Almost nobody knows this. To understand what that van contained, you have to understand how different these two women were.
Joan Bayz in 1969 was 28 years old. She had been the most important female voice in the folk music movement since she was 19. She had performed at the Newport Folk Festival every year since 1959. She had marched with Martin Luther King Jr. She had gone to jail for her anti-war activism. She had introduced Bob Dylan to the world by standing beside him on stage in 1963 and saying, “This is someone you should hear.
” She was in 1969 what the music establishment and the political establishment and the cultural establishment considered the ideal of what a female musician should be. serious, political, vocally disciplined. Her soprano was precise and pure, each note placed exactly where she intended it. She had never put a feather boa on in her life.
She did not see the point of southern comfort. Janice Joplain in 1969 was 26 years old. She had been famous for exactly 2 years since Monterey in 1967. Before that, she had been the girl Port Arthur laughed out of town. The girl San Francisco failed to catch the first time. The girl who tried to become ordinary and could not.
She was in 1969 what the music establishment considered a problem. She was too loud, too raw, too obviously in pain. She drank on stage. She was not managing her image. She was giving everything she had every night and not saving enough for the next night. And everyone who knew anything could see where it was going.
She was also the most important female rock singer in America. And the folk queen and the blues queen ended up in the same van at Woodstock watching Jimmyi Hendris together. The Woodstock program had stretched over days. By the early morning hours of Monday, August 18th, the festival that was supposed to be a weekend had become something else.
A city, a culture, an event that had exceeded every prediction by a factor of four. Janice had performed on Saturday night, or rather early Sunday morning. She had been waiting backstage for hours, had consumed what Pete Townshand would later describe as a considerable amount of booze and heroin during the wait, and had given everything she had to 400,000 people in the dark at 2 in the morning.
Joan Bayz had performed on Friday night. She was eight months pregnant during her Woodstock set, a fact that almost nobody who was there knew at the time. She had stood on that stage in the opening hours of the festival and sung the old songs with the full moral authority she always brought. Both of them had done their sets.
Both of them were still there. And at some point in the early hours of Monday, they both found themselves watching Jimmy Hendris from Joe Cocker’s van. Joan Bayz wrote about this matter of factly in her memoir, not as a dramatic revelation, just as the thing that happened. She was there, Janice was there, they watched Hrix, the festival was ending.
That matterof factness is itself interesting because the world in 1969 was very invested in the difference between these two women. The folk establishment, the rock establishment, the critics who saw Bayz’s disciplined precision and Joplain’s bleeding edges as representing fundamentally incompatible visions of what music was.
And here they were in the same van, in the mud, at the end of the most important music festival in American history, watching the same guitarist. Whatever the establishments thought they represented, in the specific reality of that morning, they were just two women who had been performing all weekend and were now watching something beautiful from the inside of a van.
There is a moment documented by David Crosby in his memoir from that same night. During Crosby, Stills and Nash’s performance, around 3:00 in the morning, the specific hour between everything, Joan Bayz organized something. She created a circle of performers who had been backstage all weekend.
Musicians who had finished their sets and stayed, who had been part of the community of the festival in a way that went beyond their own performances. She brought them together, standing in a circle behind the stage, listening to CSN play. Janice Joplain was in that circle. Both of them standing in the dark behind a stage at 3:00 in the morning.
Part of the same circle that Joan Bayz had organized the folk queen and the blues queen in the same field in the same circle in the same van. What did these two women think of each other? The historical record is not full on this point. Bay’s memoir describes the van moment without extensive commentary on Joplain. Joplain’s documented statements do not include much specific commentary on bias.
But here is what we can infer from what both of them were and what both of them did. Both of them understood that being a woman in music in 1969 required a negotiation that being a man in music did not require. Bayz had negotiated it one way by being more disciplined, more political, more serious than the establishment expected, by making herself into something they could not dismiss.
Joplain had negotiated it another way, by refusing to negotiate at all, by being exactly as much as she was, and not managing any of it. Both of them had paid a price for their respective approaches. Bay’s seriousness had sometimes made her seem joyless to people who came for the music without the politics.
Joplain’s rawness had sometimes made people forget the intelligence underneath it reduce her to the excess rather than the quality. In the van, neither of those things was happening in the van. There were just two women watching Jimmyi Hendris in the early morning. Two different answers to the same question.
In the same van, Janice Joplain died on October 4th, 1970. She was 27 years old. Joan Bayz is 83 years old. She is still here. She retired from touring in 2019, but has continued to make music and speak publicly. She wrote about Woodstock in 1989. She put the van in the book, The Circle, The Hendrix Closing Set, The Early Morning Mud.
She is the one who remembers. She carries the memory of what it was like to be in that van. Here is what this story asks you. Have you ever been in the same room or the same van with someone who represented a completely different version of what you were trying to do and discovered that in the specific reality of the moment, the difference was smaller than everything around you suggested.
The folk establishment and the rock establishment spent a lot of time in 1969 explaining why Joan Bayz and Janice Joplain were incompatible visions of what a female musician could be. In the early morning hours of August 18th, 1969, they were in the same van watching the same thing in the mud at the end of the same festival.
Both of them had given everything they had that weekend. One of them would be gone in 14 months. One of them is still here carrying the memory. Subscribe.
