Jackson Browne & Joan Baez, "Before The Deluge," A Night To Honor Joan Baez, February 8, 2025 (4K)

Joan Baez and Jackson Browne play Browne's song "Before The Deluge" live in concert before a sold-out crowd at The Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco, California on February 8, 2025. Before The Deluge originally appeared on Browne's third studio album, Late For The Sky (1974). Joan Baez released a cover of Before The Deluge on her eighteenth studio album, Honest Lullaby (1979). In 1989, Baez and Browne performed the song together on her PBS concert special.

Joining Baez and Browne onstage were Joe Henry (guitar), David Piltch (bass), Gabe Harris (drums), Greg Leisz (pedal steel guitar), and Jason Crosby (keyboards / fiddle). This was a special one-night benefit concert called Sweet Relief Presents: A Night To Honor Joan Baez. To donate to the Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, visit https://www.sweetrelief.org/general-f....

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Official Show Announcement:

Sweet Relief Musicians Fund announces an upcoming benefit concert, celebrating the legacy of legendary folk singer Joan Baez, on February 8, at Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco. Confirmed performers include Joan Baez, Emmylou Harris, Hozier, Rosanne Cash, Margo Price, Bonnie Raitt, Tom Morello, Joe Henry, Lucinda Williams, Taj Mahal with surprise guests and additional performers to be announced shortly.

Joan Baez has endured as a musical force of nature for over six decades, with an unwavering commitment to social activism and the arts. Her classic early 1960s folk recordings attracted a generation who carried songs like “House Of the Rising Sun” and “Babe, I’m Gonna Leave You” into the rock lexicon. She was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame in 2017. Though Baez stopped touring in 2019, she has been the subject of the film, I Am The Noise, and has released a book of drawings, Am I Pretty When I Fly? and a book of poetry, When You See My Mother, Ask Her To Dance.

Emmylou Harris shares “So happy to be a part of celebrating my dear friend Joan Baez!" Aric Steinberg, Executive Director at Sweet Relief Musicians Fund adds, “We’re beyond thrilled to celebrate 30 years of Sweet Relief while honoring the great Joan Baez and her amazing career. Joan has supported our charity for many years, and it’s a privilege to honor her this year alongside so many incredible artists. It will be a night to remember and I’m so grateful to Joan and all of the performers who will help ensure that our music community continues to have Sweet Relief as a resource for emergency financial assistance.”

"Joan Baez is a mountain on our landscape, and has been for the entirety of my lifetime. As much as any artist I know, she has dismantled the wall between public artistry and personal conviction—investing each with the other, to create a body of work that, in the words of Woody Guthrie, "comforts the disturbed and disturbs the comfortable.”

The event is part of an ongoing series of shows presented by Sweet Relief Musicians Fund, which provides services and financial assistance for career musicians and music industry professionals. Grants are earmarked for medical and vital living expenses, including insurance premiums, prescriptions, medical treatment and operative procedures, housing costs, food costs, utilities, and other basic necessities.

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Before The Deluge lyrics:

Some of them were dreamers
And some of them were fools
Who were making plans and thinking of the future
With the energy of the innocent
They were gathering the tools
They would need to make their journey back to nature
While the sand slipped through the opening
And their hands reached for the golden ring
With their hearts they turned to each other's hearts for refuge
In the troubled years that came before the deluge

Some of them knew pleasure
Some of them knew pain
And for some of them it was only the moment that mattered
And on the brave and crazy wings of youth
They went flying around in the rain
And their feathers once so fine grew torn and tattered
And in the end they traded their tired wings
For the resignation that living brings
And exchanged love's bright and fragile glow for the glitter and the rouge
And in a moment they were swept before the deluge

Now let the music keep our spirits high
And let the buildings keep our children dry
Let creation reveal its secrets by and by, by and by
When the light that's lost within us reaches the sky

Some of them were angry
At the way the earth was abused
By the men who learned how to forge her beauty into power
And they struggled to protect her from them
Only to be confused
By the magnitude of her fury in the final hour
And when the sand was gone and the time arrived
In the naked dawn only a few survived
And in attempts to understand a thing so simple and so huge
Believed that they were meant to live after the deluge

Now let the music keep our spirits high
Let the buildings keep our children dry
Let creation reveal its secrets by and by, by and by
When the light that's lost within us reaches the sky