The first in a three-part series on the Return of Joan Baez

Joan Baez

On Feb. 7, I opened my email earlier than usual and found a message, deposited less than two hours earlier, from the legendary American folk singer and activist, Joan Baez.

If you’ve been following this blog, you know what Joan Baez means to this hotel, and if you haven’t you’ll remember Joan Baez from the 1960s. She is one of the icons of that time, a singer with an ethereal voice who knew Bob Dylan long before his entrance onto the world stage, who sang her way through that tumultuous decade, speaking her mind in song and speech as her country experienced the growing pains of Civil Rights and a cataclysmic war with Vietnam. She was with Martin Luther King at the March on Washington in 1963. She sang at Woodstock. If Forrest Gump could have met three more people, Joan Baez would have been one of them.

Throughout the war, Joan protested heartily against the violence. In 1972, inevitably, she traveled to Hanoi as a participant in a small peace delegation. She stayed 11 days while the United States applied a heavy hand to its negotiations with Hanoi, and rained bombs nightly all over the city. In the midst of all this, Joan visited the American POWs at Hoa Lo prison. (Incredibly, they asked her to sing “Dixie” while she was with them.) And at night, Joan and our other guests dropped down into the air raid shelter in our garden, seeking shelter from the storm. Read more

Kids love to climb trees, and they love to go underground. At the Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi, we can’t do much to satisfy the tree climbers, but we’ve got a great new underground attraction that two intrepid kids discovered as we were discovering it.