Joan Baez At The Bushnell

Joan Baez is a folk-music lifer, a believer in the power of song to create and strengthen communities and to bring injustice to the world’s attention. People like to laugh it the idea that folk music can transform the world, but Baez is proof. She turned 75 this year and she’s going strong.

Baez was part of the first folk revival, which spurred a generation of young people to explore older American music from the 1920s and ’30s, and even earlier, for a deeper sense of this country’s history and poetry and for a sense of solidarity with the struggles of the working class, the dispossessed and the downtrodden. There’s plenty of political anger in 2016, but one wonders if the voices of outrage and indignation can still use the power of song to express opposition with dignity and force in any way similar to the protest singers of a previous era.

Baez, for her part, still doesn’t mind sharing her unvarnished take on the presidential election; she called Donald Trump “Hitlerian” earlier this year.

Joan Baez sing songs of peace and pacifism mixed in with a few of sadness and despair at the Bushnell’s iconic William H. Mortensen Hall, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford, Thursday, Oct. 6, at 7:30 p.m. $49.50 to $89.50. 860-987-5900, thebushnell.org.