Taylor Swift and Beyoncé are not the first women to find great artistic and commercial success in pop music, but it’s safe to say none of their forebears have been as powerful as these two megastars. Last month, Taylor Swift’s Midnights brought her her fourth Grammy Award for Album of the Year—making her the most-awarded artist in history in that category—and she announced a forthcoming new album at the awards ceremony. Meanwhile, Beyoncé made sure that Swift didn’t dominate all the news in the run-up to the Super Bowl, using the most-watched event on television to announce her new album, tentatively titled Act II, which arrives March 29. She made its first two singles available as soon as the ad aired.

Whether you examine sales of recordings, concert tickets and branded merchandise, or the harder-to-quantify metric of influence, the degree of artistic self-determination, financial independence and cultural “market share” commanded by Bey and Tay is unprecedented. But they didn’t blaze that trail alone.

Six decades ago, Joan Baez was part of a folk revival that regarded music not merely as entertainment but as a vessel for political engagement and social change. In the documentary Joan Baez: I Am a Noise, filmed during the now-83-year-old musician and activist’s final concert tour in 2019, she reflects back on her career and the legacy. The documentary is now available to stream on Hulu.

Smithsonian senior editor Jennie Rothenberg Gritz interviewed Baez about the film and about the shifting intersection of art and activism. We present excerpts from that conversation in this episode. Then, veteran music critic Evelyn McDonnell discusses how the political dimensions of pop music have changed since Baez’s era, and what it means that many fans now look Beyoncé and Taylor Swift not just for great music, but for comment on the state of the world.

Clips from Joan Baez: I Am a Noise in this episode are used with permission from Magnolia Pictures & Mead Street Films.

Evelyn McDonnell’s latest book is The World According to Joan Didion. You can learn more about Evelyn and her work at her site, Populism.

Find prior episodes of our show here.

There’s More to That is a production of Smithsonian magazine and PRX Productions.

From the magazine, our team is Chris Klimek, Debra Rosenberg and Brian Wolly.

From PRX, our team is Jessica Miller, Adriana Rosas Rivera, Genevieve Sponsler, Rye Dorsey, and Edwin Ochoa. The Executive Producer of PRX Productions is Jocelyn Gonzales.

Fact-checking by Stephanie Abramson.

Episode artwork by Emily Lankiewicz.

Music by APM Music.