“For Us, There’s Only the Trying:”:
John Dear Talks Nonviolence with Legendary Singer Joan Baez
Legendary singer and activist Joan Baez recently retired for touring but continues to speak out for justice, democracy, and peace. On October 18th, she sang to 100,000 people at the No Kings rally in San Francisco. On a recent episode of “The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast,” [at www.beatitudescenter.org], she talks with her longtime friend, John Dear, about her lifelong commitment to nonviolence and activism.
Joan Baez has released over 30 albums, traveled the world singing for 60 years, published her best-selling autobiography “And a Voice to Sing With,” and recently published her first collection of poems, “If You See My Mother, Ask Her to Dance.” She performed at Woodstock, opened Live Aid, was inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, and was featured in the PBS documentary, “How Sweet the Sound.” She was a close friend of Dr. King; arrested for protesting the Vietnam War; went to Hanoi and was bombed by the U.S. [This transcript of their conversation has been edited. Go to the podcast to hear the full conversation. It was recorded in October, 2025.]
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John Dear: We could talk at length about how bad things are under the Trump administration, with the growing authoritarianism, injustices, white supremacy and wars, but I thought it would be helpful to talk about nonviolence and your journey of nonviolence. Who or what inspired you to learn nonviolence, and what did it do for you in your day-to-day life? How did this start with you?
Joan Baez: I guess it started probably not on a conscious level, but when my parents became Quakers when I was eight years old. And like most kids, I couldn’t stand Quaker meeting, because you just had to sit there and listen to old people talk. But when I was 16, we started meeting on Sundays with Ira Sandperl, a longtime teacher of nonviolence. And the thoughts I had begun to form began to take shape.
He had us reading Gandhi, Lao Tzu and eventually Huxley, and so he was opening my mind to all of it, always in the context of the Quakers and nonviolence. I have never stepped out of that. I mean, I was lucky I had that internalized nonviolence from a very young age, so I didn’t have to worry when it came around for marches and demonstrations, whether I was going to be in the “raising the fist group,” or whether I was going to be in the “nonviolence group.”
I was raising my own nonviolent arm in those situations, all those demonstrations and all those marches, and so I felt completely at home with King later on. I met him when he spoke in my high school and gave the annual talk. I started to cry at the beginning of his speech. I cried all the way through because this was a man who was doing what I’d been reading about. He was doing what I’d been thinking about.
JD: This is in the late 50s when you were still a teenager, right?
JB: Yeah, after the Montgomery Bus Boycott.
JD: So, you’ve stayed with nonviolence all your life. What does it mean for you? What are some essential ingredients of nonviolence for you?
JB: I lived in Baghdad when I was 10 for a year, and it was a pretty tough experience. So we’d never seen beggars eating out of a garbage can, and dogs too skinny to walk, and I was trying to absorb that. Later, I remember I was in a car traveling cross-country watching a train and you see the train is going more or less your same speed, and in that train, I saw an image of a little girl, whatever you want to call it, of another me, and I knew that if somebody hurt her, it would be hurting me, and vice versa. I connected somehow with other people’s pain, and I figured that if they didn’t like the pain, I didn’t either, and vice versa–if I didn’t like it, then they wouldn’t like it either.
Later on, I was speaking to a crowd of raving leftists in Argentina, saying that a beating with a rubber hose feels the same whether it’s the right wing or the left wing who’s administrating it. They just about blew their lids, they were so furious at me. I had to stop singing. Then Mercedes Sosa, an unbelievable Chilean singer, came out on the stage and she tamed them. She shouted at them, saying, “You don’t know anything about this woman.” Then she ended up singing to them, “No nos moveran, no nos moveran.” [“We will not be moved.”] These poor kids were beaten into submission, but she wanted to validate me, and she did so by shouting at them.
JD: So, you’re saying that empathy and compassion led you to your principled nonviolence. I want ask you what you think about the way I’ve been talking about nonviolence in recent years. I’ve been proposing that what we need the holistic total nonviolence that you see in Gandhi and Dr. King, and that requires three simultaneous practices. You got to do all three, but the problem is we’re good at one or two of them. No one does all three. We have to be totally nonviolent to ourselves. We don’t cultivate inner violence; we’re always learning to be peaceful toward ourselves. At the same time, we try to practice total nonviolence toward all people, all creatures, and Mother Earth. So we’re always trying to be nonviolent to everyone everywhere, and that means, we work with the difficult people in our lives. But then at the same time, we have one foot in the global grassroots movement for justice, disarmament and creation.
JB: On a personal level, I don’t live up to that. I think it’s a great idea, but I have too much, what do I call it? I have a short fuse. I don’t hurt anybody, but I get pissed off instantly and attempt to keep my mouth shut, and I’m not very good at a peaceful response. As I say, I keep it to myself.
JD: Well, you’re not responding with violence.
JB: You’re trying to get me out of this. I know you’re going to try and get me out of whatever feet I have in my mouth, but I, you know, I’m not cut out. It’s an effort for me. Part of me absolutely does all the things that you say about nonviolence, because I came to it early. Even as a kid, I didn’t like the quiet time with the Quakers, but meditation has stayed with me all through my life, and is a very, very important part of my life.
JD: Tell me about that. I think that’s meditation is the best help so that we do not respond harshly and snap back. Meditation practice helps disarm us.
JB: It does help. Yeah, it helps. For a while, my practice is like many of my friends’–20 minutes in the morning or 25 minutes, and then guilt for the rest of the day that I haven’t done more. Since the second Trump administration, I’ve upped it to 45 minutes a morning, and sometimes an hour.
JD: I want to ask you about Martin Luther King, Jr. Maybe you could offer one or two memories or stories that might encourage me on my journey. I get the impression that Martin Luther King was born naturally nonviolent, that he was a very rare guy, a gentle person down to his bones.
JB: I agree with that. I think he was way more patient and gentle than myself, for instance. You know, too, that he was very funny, which people didn’t get a chance to see because he kept it under wraps. I’m sure he thought he would be discounted one more time for one more thing if he was funny while he was giving a speech. But I was able to enjoy that. It was part of the release when he wasn’t in front of the crowd and we were laughing and making jokes and talking like regular people.
I do know that before he ever did anything, he’d spend a long time on his knees the night before, trying to get his own still small voice within to speak to him.
JD: Really? I never heard anybody say that before.
JB: They probably didn’t know it.
JD: You have said that every time you were with him in the 60s and heard him talk about nonviolence, you cried because it was so beautiful. Can you tell us a little about that?
JB: I traveled with him to demonstrations and heard his speeches in churches and one time, he said, as he was preaching, “I love having Joan Baez sitting here with us because I know the minute I say nonviolence, she starts to cry.”
JD: During this time in the mid-1960s, you started a school of nonviolence. Tell me about that.
JB: I knew how much I got from Ira Sandperl about nonviolence and it occurred to me that we could expand what we were trying to get across to each other to other people. So together we formed the Institute for Study of Nonviolence. It was not trying to promote public action; it was for the study of nonviolence in every sense of the word.
A lot of people had their first acquaintance with nonviolence during the silence we had. One time each day, we had an hour of silence. You didn’t get to read or walk around or do anything. People were just shocked. But I’ve had people come up to me later on and say that they’d been at the school and the thing that made the most impression on them and stayed with them the longest was this practice of meditation with nonviolence, basically shutting up for an hour.
JD: That brings me to a question about another friend of yours, one of my great teachers, Thomas Merton, the monk and popular writer who spent his days in silence and seemed to write more brilliantly about civil rights and peace than anybody else. What can you tell me about Merton and also Dorothy Day in terms of nonviolence.
JB: I have brief memories of Dorothy. In the early 1970s, we were with the farmworkers in Southern California, and she was about to get arrested.
And I remember her just sitting there with a very peaceful look on her face in a chair while everyone else was bustling around. I didn’t get arrested with her and it would have been nice to have been, but I just remember that elderly calm that some of us have. I almost have it sometimes.
With Merton, the same thing. I didn’t spend a lot of time with him, but the fun part was me thinking, “I’m going to a monastery, probably going to have to eat brown bread, with nuts and grains.” But he wanted to go out to lunch and have a hamburger and he wanted a milkshake. I think he had two hamburgers and a milkshake. He probably never wanted to see any brown bread again in his life. He was just sweet and funny. I don’t know if he talked about anything in depth or whether he was just relieved not to have to.
JD: Do you have any story or event that stands out for you in terms of nonviolence, from your time in Chile or Prague with Vaclav Havel [the dissident who became the last president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until 1992, before he became the first president of the Czech Republic from 1993 to 2003] or the time you went to Sarajevo with the violinist, or Vietnam, or Nicaragua or somewhere?
JB: The one that always pops to mind is the one that I felt I’d actually made a difference. I was told that it made a difference from Vaclav Havel and that was from a stunt that we pulled.
I was waiting for him to come from Prague to Bratislava and he would be in a bus with other dissidents. We didn’t know when they’d arrive. I was in my hotel room. We didn’t know if they’d get arrested. We didn’t know anything. So I was just waiting. I had a concert that night and it was going to be filmed and shown on national TV, always a risky business. So I’m waiting for him to arrive and finally I get this phone call. He says, “Havel, this is Havel in lobby, very many police.” That was my introduction. So I said, come up. They all came up. They all started smoking and drinking beer.
And then he and I started what he called “mischief.” And that’s why my art, all my portraits in acrylic, are of “mischief-makers.” And so we started planning what we would do. He’d carry my guitar, which is huge. And he would sit up in the balcony. Then he would say, “More mischief.” And so it turned out to be very mischievous, a mischievous concert.
He carried the guitar and we met the security at the doors of the stadium. And they said, “We’ll take him from here.” And we’d say, “No, he’s our guest.”
And they tried to get him. We held on, we got him up in the balcony where it would have been difficult for the police to get at him. Then I sang a regular concert and the TV would click on and off whenever I said something they didn’t want to hear.
I knew that I was going to say something about him. So I said his name, and I knew that the TV would shut down. So I just suddenly said, “And now I’d like to dedicate a song to my good friend Vaclav Havel.” The microphone went off.
So I sang “Swing Low” to him without the microphone. And it was quite a moment. That song soars. He said later that that concert was the last drop before the chalice filled over and launched the Velvet Revolution. Ever after that, he called himself my roadie.
JD: In the late 90s, I invited you to go to Iraq and do a concert, as part of our campaign to stop the US sanctions on Iraq. Later, in March 2003, after a concert in Santa Fe, we stayed up late talking, and I was complaining to you about all my work to stop the impending war and then Bush’s war on Iraq began that night. I was saying I’d given speeches all over the country, and I was looking for advice. Finally, you said to me, “Well, John, you know what Gandhi said?” And I said, “what?” You said, “Full effort is full victory.”
That was so helpful! Tell me about that.
JB: I have another quote for you. From T.S. Eliot: “For us, there’s only the trying. The rest is not our business.”
JD: That’s great, thanks. The trying’s the thing, the full effort is the thing, the staying with it, the not giving up. Tell me a little bit about Gandhi, who is so important to both of us. Nobody’s talking about him.
JB: They never really did in the circles where we were hoping they would. But I would say that with this second round of Trumpism, I’ve heard the word “nonviolence” used by young people more than I had in a while. They started their demonstrations. They really were not only doing nonviolence, but talking about it, which I thought was pretty extraordinary. John, it’s going to take forever for people to not misunderstand the word, to get beyond their image of passivity, of somebody giving up and lying down on a train track. It takes a lifetime. I used to say, I’m sure we could convert everybody in the world to nonviolence if we could just meet them one by one, one at a time.
JB: I want to ask you about the connection of music and nonviolence and peacemaking. I grew up in a small town in North Carolina and I had a few 21 year old nuns teach me in kindergarten, first and second grades in the early sixties. All they did in kindergarten from day one was teach Joan Baez and Pete Seeger songs, and Peter, Paul and Mary, Dylan and the Beatles, which I learned by heart. My mother went to the church finally and said, what have you done to my son? Cause I could come home singing “Where have all the flowers gone?” They changed my life, and set a trajectory for me. And then I got to know you and Pete and attend your concerts over the decades. I think everyone has found them healing, disarming and inspiring. Tell me about the connection between music, nonviolence and activism. Did the music inspire your activism? Does the activism inspire you to sing?
JB: It goes both ways. People ask me if I think music is important in a movement, and my answer is, “I wouldn’t be involved in a movement that didn’t have the music, because it’s the life support.” The music is what brings us together, and helps us cross boundaries and borders. I was saying this to Mercedes Sosa, the great Chilean singer, who is a very large woman and very funny. I said, “Music crosses all boundaries.” And she said, “Yeah, music and food. The two essentials.” [laughs]
JD: Once, late at night after a concert, I remember asking you, “So where are you finding God these days?” You almost fell out of your chair, and laughed, and then you got serious, and you said so beautifully, “in the music.” That was 25 years ago. These days, I’ve been teaching and talking about God as universal love, universal compassion, universal peace, and total nonviolence and I have a new book coming out next year called “Universal Love.” So, forgive my impertinence, but where are you finding God these days?
JB: As we’re talking, I’ve started to polish a little apple. I’ve got four apple trees in my yard, and the last one is now popping them out. This has got a lot of red on it. Where do I get inspired? In this apple in the yard. Nature totally does it for me these days. I have a little creek at the bottom of the hill, and I go in there each summer, four days a week, and walk the creek. There are wonderful rocks in that creek. They have a design on them, on the bottom side. You pick one up, and it’s got these extraordinary designs on it. I go down there, I don’t know where to put them, but I start harvesting them. And to me, being down in that creek is being God-centered.
JD: Beautiful. I want to ask you, too, about hope and Dr. King. He never talked about hope in his whole life until the very end when he started speaking out against the Vietnam War and organizing the Poor People’s Campaign. Then the week before he was killed, one night in Memphis, he started to talk about hope and announced his definition of hope. So I want to ask what you think about it and what you think about hope. Dr. King said, “Hope is the final refusal to give up.”
JB: Will you send me that? Because I have a terrible time with hope. Someone suggested to me that hope is a muscle, which was helpful. I need to get to the gym, you know, because I’m not terribly hopeful. I never was. So actually, could I read you a poem I just wrote? It’s called “This Is Not Optimism”:
I just wasted a day and a half writing a long-winded response to the question, ‘Are you an optimist?’ Really? In this shitstorm? Are you kidding me?
The simple answer is, No. I’ve never been an optimist.
Does that mean I ever gave up the fight against tyranny? No, I never did.
Most likely, I never will.
I used to be a pessimist until someone suggested it was a waste of time.
So I’m trying to quit.
Being an optimist may be a waste of time too, but at least it’s less depressing.
Be an activist instead.
Carry your light out into this shitstorm.
Keep your eyes on the prize and shout, “Glory, hallelujah, goodness will prevail!”
This is not optimism.
This is a dance.
I think you have a choice, so just keep on keeping on and talk to people when you can and keep your eyes on the prize and keep dancing.
JD: That’s wonderful. Thank you so much. Is there anything else you’d like to add as we wrap it up?
JB: I learned this during the Civil Rights movement. [She breaks into song:]
“Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around, turn me around, turn me around. Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around. I’m gonna keep on walking, keep on talking, marching up to freedom land.
Ain’t gonna let this administration turn me around, turn me around, turn me around. Ain’t gonna let this administration turn me around. We’re gonna keep on walking, keep on talking, keep on singing, keep on swinging, marching up to freedom land!”
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To hear the full conversation, visit “The Nonviolent Jesus Podcast” at www.beatitudescenter.org or whatever platform you use. To learn more about Fr. John Dear, visit www.johndear.org To learn more about Joan Baez, visit www.joanbaez.com
