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She may not be the rabble-rouser and troublemaker she once was, but every once in a while, an event plays out on the world stage that fans the still-smoldering embers of Joan Baez's humanitarianism.

The eyes still shine bright and fierce in her publicity photos, gracefully framed by the lines of age and she doles out her time carefully, paying attention to things she so often took for granted or placed on the back burner during a 50-plus-year career as a folk singer and activist. But those embers still glow, and when injustice and unfairness are put on public display, they crackle with passion.

"At the moment, what's fascinating me is what's happening in Iran," Baez told The Daily Times during a recent phone interview. "To me, it's the most exciting thing that's happened in years. It's like what happened all of the sudden in Ireland or Czechoslovakia -- here are 2 million people in one of the most violent, ghastly, what-amounts-to-a-dictatorship in the world, carrying these little green ribbons. You have to wonder, what the hell happened to cause this?

"So yes, that flame continues. I don't go out the way I did for years and years, carrying the banner and being on the forefront of everything. At a certain point, I made the decision that I'm not the person to continue that. I want to spend time with my 96-year-old mom, and with my son and his family. I think that's absolutely appropriate for me. I've learned a lot about family and about getting older from my mother -- a lot about dying -- and those are things I didn't pay much attention to while I was circling the globe."

Introduced at the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, Baez was immediately heralded as one of the torch-bearers for the then-burgeoning folk movement. Four years later, she stood beside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial while he gave his "I Have a Dream" speech, and for the rest of that turbulent decade that was the 1960s, she took part in almost every conceivable protest against injustice, oppression and war. In 1964, she withheld 60 percent of her income tax from the Internal Revenue Service to protest spending on the Vietnam War ... she participated in the Free Speech Movement at the University of California-Berkeley and co-founded the Institute for the Study of Nonviolence ... she protested alongside Cesar Chavez and migrant farm workers on behalf of fair wages in 1966 ... she traveled to Hanoi in the early 1970s, meeting with starving North Vietnamese.

Later that decade, she turned her focus to the plight of residents of Chile suffering under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, and she would go on to protest violence in Spain and Northern Ireland. She's rallied on behalf of the nuclear freeze movement and against California's Proposition 6, and she's been credited by former Czechoslovakian president Vaclav Havel with inspiring that nation's move toward democracy. After the outbreak of hostilities in Sarajevo, she was the first major artist to perform there.

Through it all, she built one of the most impressive folk careers of the past 50 years. From her first solo album in 1960, she recorded traditional ballads, the blues, lullabies, cowboy songs and folk staples that mark her as a direct descendent of the legacy of Woody Guthrie. Among the songs she introduced on her earliest albums that would make their ways into the rock vernacular were "House Of The Rising Sun" (The Animals), "John Riley" (The Byrds), "Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You" (Led Zeppelin), "What Have They Done To The Rain" (the Searchers) and "Jackaroe" (Grateful Dead). Her biggest career single, however, was a cover song -- a recording of The Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down."

Despite her own lack of chart success, however, she's been held in high esteem since the beginning of her career by her peers -- from Bob Dylan, who made her a fixture on his Rolling Thunder Revue tours of the mid-1970s, to a generation of female singer-songwriters, from the Indigo Girls to Mary Chapin Carpenter, who have followed in her wake.

Given that political and musical legacy, it hasn't been easy to relinquish her role as a cultural freedom fighter. She still records and performs, as she'll do Monday at The Bijou Theatre in downtown Knoxville, but it's only been over the past year, since the election of Barack Obama, that the left-leaning Baez has felt more capable of relaxing. Needless to say, she wasn't a fan of George W. Bush or the ongoing war in Iraq. And, she added, now that she's able to spend more time with family, she can't help but think about all of the time she didn't.

"I wish I'd spent more time with my son, and when I talked to him and expressed that -- 'I feel crummy that I didn't spend more time with you' -- he said, 'Look, mom, don't waste your time. You were present, front-and-center, at a time in history when the world needed you. I get that, so shut the f--- up about feeling guilty, because it's silly!'" she said. "That was a wonderful little lecture to me, and now he's traveling with me as my percussionist. And that's something that I love."

Musically, she's riding high on the success of her most recent album -- "Day After Tomorrow," released last year and nominated for a Grammy. It's her 24th studio album, and her first on the Billboard charts in 29 years. The liner notes reveal something even more surprising -- not a single song written by Baez herself.

Not that it matters; after all, with fellow folk artist and rabble-rouser Steve Earle as her producer, she rose to the occasion and delivered angelic interpretations of all songs, written by Earle, Patty Griffin, Tom Waits and others.

"Steve is an energizer, period," Baez said. "He moves fast -- his brain is always going, and it's a good mind. With me, he was just a sweetheart. We would meet in the studios, and he would have biscuits and coffee waiting. It was a wonderful way to start a day in a Southern studio."

Right now, Baez is wrapping up a book of poetry and exploring other outlets for her art. These days, her voice is holding steady -- "It's all tricks these days; there's no other way to do this stuff," she said with a laugh. "I go to a vocal coach, and he gives me more tricks, so as long as something dreadful doesn't happen to it, I'll keep working on it so that it stays good and gets better." And with her son by her side on this tour, Baez is content -- with who she is, what she's done and where she fits into a world that, while still crazy and chaotic, doesn't require her on the front lines like it once did.

Or perhaps it does -- but these days, Baez is content to let others take the lead.

"It's like when I was camping and tried to light the butane stove -- I lit it wrong, and it blew the hairs off of one arm," she said, laughing. "That's the way it was with the war in Vietnam or Civil Rights -- it just blew through my body, and it still ignites when I see 2 million people in the streets of Iran. it's exciting, but I don't feel like I have to fly there.

"If somebody called up and said, 'Can you come?,' it would be awfully tempting to go, but I don't have that urge that I have to be everywhere. It was nice to have been a part of it, to have laid the groundwork. It's a comfort to know I was a part of all of that change ... and that I still am, just without the hyperactivity."