Joan Baez, Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, review By the time she got to Woodstock, Joan Baez was six months pregnant and her husband was in jail. It was August 1969 and the end of a decade that had seen her emerge as the undisputed queen of the US folk revival and a leading light in the civil rights movement. Her early-morning set at the festival included a rousing Swing Low, Sweet Chariot and Joe Hill, a 1930s protest song about a labour activist wrongly executed for murder, whose story became a universal symbol of the fight against injustice. Forty-plus years later and Baez, now 71, is still singing those tunes. There was a genuine narrative arc to tonight's performance, too, her on-stage percussionist being Gabe Harris, the son she produced in December 1969 and whose father was David Harris, then imprisoned for resisting the draft. And while time and age may have softened the swooping soprano of yore, Baez's voice is still an unusually potent weapon. Swing Low, Sweet Chariot was especially powerful, see-sawing between tender and strident. As was Steve Earle's Jerusalem, a plea for tolerance and understanding that found its echo in a spirited rendition of Bob Dylan's With God on Our Side, a song Baez has been playing live since 1963. The spectre of Dylan, her sometime lover and fellow ambassador of socially conscious folk, loomed large. The Sixties, she explained at one point, "had the best songwriters and the best of those was Dylan." Her live set was peppered with his compositions, while the very lovely Diamonds and Rust, perhaps Baez's own finest effort, was written about their days in Greenwich Village. All of which brings us to the strange paradox that is Joan Baez. She may still be fighting the good fight (only last November she played at the Occupy Wall Street protest), but, unlike Dylan, she doesn't seem to have quite transcended the era that forged her. Covers of Donovan, Phil Ochs and Leonard Cohen made for an oddly cosy, nostalgic feel to much of this show. It was a point further illustrated when an encore of The Band's The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down elicited a mass singalong from the audience, most of whom looked to have grown up alongside her. A perfunctory version of John Lennon's Imagine, followed by the inevitable Blowin" in the Wind, prompted much the same reaction. Baez remains a true icon of the music world, but one curiously fixed in time. Touring until March 26