JOAN Baez is nearly starving when she calls me from Luxembourg, where she’s on tour, but she’s endured worse.

“It’s awful, she says it’s the tiniest town and it’s Sunday here and there’s not a lot you can buy, even at the service station.”

We discuss the possibility of Burger King and McDonald’s for hungry tourists, but she’s not convinced.

“I’d rather not,” she tells me, just as you would expect from the legendary female folk-singer, environmental activist and humanitarian protester who’s been jailed for her beliefs more times than any other chanteuse one can think of.

Although a considerable recording artist, she’s still quintessentially a performer and she’ll be in Canberra on September 17, backed by her son Gabriel Harris on percussion and Dirk Powell on banjo, guitar, keyboards and fiddle.

Who can doubt that Baez will stir up memories with folk songs such as “Silver Dagger”; the song of the South, “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down”; the old union ballad, “Joe Hill” and, above all, “We Shall Overcome”, famously performed during Martin Luther King Jr’s march on Washington in 1963?

Several people here have asked me recently: “Who is Joan Baez?” They’re about to find out, but it’s odd. Baez, after all, helped to bring the songs of Bob Dylan to prominence, outdoing him in his own songs, numbers such as “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”, “How Many Roads”, “Blowin’ in The Wind” and “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright”.

“This is fun,” Baez says as we talk our way around her life story. “I keep thinking I’m 35 or 36, but then I get to 8.30pm or 9pm and I feel like going to sleep.”

Luckily for “CityNews” it’s noon in food-deprived Luxembourg when she calls and, besides, there are compensations.

“It’s delightful to be singing in Europe – there are so many young people here,” she tells me.

“More, I’ll bet, than there are in Australia and more than there are in LA.” In fact, she has noticed, the European public is entirely youthful.

“It’s as if they’re from high school, so I want to make myself as good as I can sound,” she says.

Baez, a confirmed true believer in all the good things, is still a ball of fire. In August, 2003, she joined Emmylou Harris and Steve Earle in the London Concert for a Landmine-Free World; in 2005, she sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” at a protest against capital punishment; in 2006, she joined a “tree sit” in a poor neighbourhood of Los Angeles and in 2008 she endorsed Barack Obama in the US presidential election, likening him to Dr King.

Her profile has long been global, cutting across contemporary issues. In 2009, she reworked “We Shall Overcome” with Farsi lyrics in support of post-elections protests by Iranians. In 2011 she was honoured by Amnesty International at its 50th Anniversary Annual General Meeting. Later that same year Baez sang “Joe Hill” for the protestors at Occupy Wall Street.

And it’s done her no harm at all.

“It’s good looking back over my life, fighting for civil rights, protesting about Vietnam,” she says. It’s all fuel for her music and she still stands up for people whose voices are not being heard, though with the qualification: “I am less uncompromising than I used to be”.

Just because she’s 74, Baez is not about to give up singing.

“As long as my voice holds out, I’m not giving up,” she tells me.

“It’s very different from what it was in the ‘60s… Don’t forget the voice is an instrument, it’s subject to wear and tear.”

I tell her about how Dionne Warwick came to the Royal Theatre and sang “Walk on By” transposed to an octave lower.

“That’s what people like us do,” Baez replies, explaining that she has found a vocal specialist to help her cope with an ageing voice.

“I don’t have any high notes left anymore. It’s become a series of tricks in which you find something else, some emotion to take the place of the high notes.”

Canberrans need have no fear that Baez’s soaring voice will be any less thrilling than it has always been as she sings to us of pain, loss, and human aspirations.

“I can’t say I don’t enjoy it,” she says as she hangs up.

Joan Baez, Royal Theatre, Canberra, Thursday, September 17, bookings to ticketek.com.au or 132849.