Mary Chapin Carpenter Performs With Joan Baez During 2017 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony [WATCH]
Mary Chapin Carpenter joined 2017 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Joan Baez onstage during Friday night's (April 7) induction ceremony to perform two songs, "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)" and "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." The Indigo Girls also accompanied Baez on both songs.
Readers can press play above to watch Baez, Carpenter and the Indigo Girls sing "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," originally recorded by the Band for their self-titled 1969 album. Baez released her cover version of the song in 1971; it hit No. 1 on the Billboard Adult Contemporary chart and earned a Top 5 (No. 3) spot on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100, and was certified gold.
"Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)," meanwhile, was originally written by Woody Guthrie, who was inspired to pen the protest song by a Jan. 28, 1948, plane crash near Los Gatos Canyon in California that killed 32 people: four Americans and 28 migrant workers, who were being deported. Baez originally covered the song on her 1971 album Blessed Are ... (the same record on which "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down" appears); she also recorded a live version of the song for her 2004 disc Bowery Songs.
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Baez was officially inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame during Friday night's ceremony, held at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, N.Y. Jackson Browne introduced Baez, raving about the folk icon's "spellbinding effect on her audiences" and her "ethereal, powerfully in-tune, deeply expressive, dramatic, hypnotic" music (quote via Ultimate Classic Rock). Baez, in turn, thanked the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame "for this somewhat unlikely induction" and shared a humorous anecdote about how Taylor Swift helped Baez connect with her granddaughter.
"My granddaughter had no clue who I was, until I took her backstage at a Taylor Swift concert," Baez recalled, "where she got a selfie, an autograph, a T-shirt and newfound respect for her grandmother."
In addition to Baez, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame's Class of 2017 included Electric Light Orchestra, Journey, Pearl Jam, Tupac Shakur and Yes. The ceremony will premiere on HBO on April 28 at 8PM ET.
Carpenter last released a new studio album, The Things That We Are Made Of, in May of 2016.
Watch Joan Baez, Mary Chapin Carptenter + the Indigo Girls Cover "Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)"