Sixties singer Joan Baez was taken to hospital after she slipped and fell while climbing down from an oak tree she sometimes sleeps in, behind her California home.
Sixties singer Joan Baez was taken to hospital after she slipped and fell to the ground while climbing down from an oak tree behind her California home.
Baez had her treehouse built — without walls — 20 feet high in the oak tree because she wanted to sleep with actual birds. She does not sleep outdoors out of solidarity with the eco-protesters. She simply likes to sleep in the backyard tree house at the California home that she shares with her elderly mother. The bird feeder is right by her head. “My contact with nature and the moon and the birds and the trees, they mean so much to me,” Baez says.
Almost four decades after she earned a gold record with “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” paramedics drove the golden-throated pixie down to Stanford Hospital, where she was treated and released after it was determined she had suffered only minor injuries.
“I sleep in a tree all summer long,” Baez told an English blogger in 2008. “I climb up on a ladder, with ropes and things. The birds are right there in the morning. Sometimes they’re flying so close to my head, I can feel the wind. Those things are heaven to me.”
Baez was at the forefront of a musical movement that began in the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village in Manhattan during the early 1960s, performing the first cover of a song written by the then-unknown Bob Dylan, with whom she soon plunged into a tempestuous three-year romance.
After their difficult parting, Dylan wrote the revenge ballad “Positively 4th Street,” in which he sang to his former folkie allies, “You know as well as me. You’d rather see me paralyzed.”
Baez, who turns 70 next January,said she wanted the tree for somewhere to meditate, write, and be ‘close to nature’.