Joan Baez — Club 47, Cambridge, Massachusetts

Club 47 at 47 Mount Auburn Street in Harvard Square, Cambridge, was the venue where Joan Baez launched her career and the spiritual home of the American folk revival. Baez — born on Staten Island in 1941 and raised partly in the Boston area — began performing at Club 47 in 1958 and 1959, when she was a teenager, and her pure, crystalline soprano and natural stage presence drew audiences that packed the small room. Her appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959 made her a national figure virtually overnight. Within two years she was one of the most celebrated musicians in America.

Club 47 (later renamed Passim) occupied a basement room in Harvard Square and was central to a Cambridge folk scene that also nurtured Tom Rush, Eric Von Schmidt, and Jim Kweskin. When Bob Dylan came east from Minnesota in the early 1960s, he moved in overlapping circles with the Cambridge scene, and Baez became his most important early champion — bringing him on tour and introducing him to audiences who might otherwise have taken longer to find him. Their personal and professional relationship, and its eventual dissolution, is one of folk music's central stories.

Club Passim — the successor to Club 47 — continues to operate at 47 Palmer Street in Cambridge and remains one of the most respected folk music venues in America. The original Club 47 address on Mount Auburn Street is a short walk away. Harvard Square retains something of its bohemian character, and the folk music tradition that Baez helped launch here has never entirely left the neighbourhood. She received the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2007 and continues to perform and advocate for causes she has championed since the civil rights era.