WHEN I was 16, I wanted to be Joan Baez. I hounded my parents for a guitar and perfected a facial expression that was plaintive but ethereal. I learned all the songs in the Joan Baez Songbook except the ones with B-major chords, which my fingers couldn't reach without cramping, causing me to cry out in pain, the only time I even approached the heights of Joan's out-of-this-world soprano.

I envied Joan her Scottish/Mexican/Quaker background. My own ancestry was more of the Hoosier/Kentuckian/White Bread variety. Joan had long, dark shiny hair. I had curly dishwater blond hair. Joan had talent and a record deal.

I had ... records.

I listened to them all day and all night, until my father yelled, "Would you stop wailing in there, please?" I told him he should have more empathy for the poor and downtrodden. He told me to go work for the Salvation Army.

When I grew tired of singing about oppressed coal miners and blacksmiths, I said "fare thee well" to Joan and moved on to Judy Collins.

Now there was a folksinger. She didn't spend her time partying with Bob Dylan in Greenwich Village. Judy was always standing in a meadow or on a wind-swept cliff, her strawberry blond hair blowing around her while her huge blue eyes stared off into the distance. After all, she had looked at life from both sides now, and looked none the worse for wear.

Ah, but Joni Mitchell! She actually WROTE "Both Sides Now," and could really sell it with her curtain of blond hair and her hooded eyes.

OK, she was Canadian, but I'd forgive her for that. She hung out in meadows like Judy, but preferred the woods. I guess they have a lot of those up north. Joni also was a watercolor artist, another skill I never had a chance of mastering.

Plus, she could wear a beret with a fringed suede jacket and actually pull it off. Her lilting soprano gave me goosebumps, but my college roommate's boyfriend called her "that screeching female." I played "Big Yellow Taxi" at full volume until he ran to the corner and hailed one.

Joan, Judy and Joni. The triumvirate of female folkies. They provided the soundtrack to my middle-class small-town life, where there were no migrant workers to champion, no cafes to brood in, and no wind-swept cliffs to pose on.

But, hey, singing along in my room in my fuzzy white slippers and my hair wrapped around orange juice cans, I was there. I was singing for the poor immigrant, singing for my unrequited love, singing for my life in that ol' lonesome jail. I was a rambler and a gambler, a long way from home.

I've given up the folk scene for the easy listening scene, but I can still belt out a fair version of "We Shall Overcome." If you're travellin' down El Camino Real early one morning and hear a sudden screeching, that's me.

Either that, or you just ran over a cat.

Mary Hanna performs protest songs nightly in her bathroom in San Carlos. Send requests to her at mary@willwriteforfood.org