1960s songbird Joan Baez had a treehouse built -- without walls -- 20 feet high in an oak tree behind her Woodside home because she wanted to sleep with birds.

The folksinging legend, who once performed the civil rights anthem "We Shall Overcome" before a half-million people at Woodstock, fell from that treehouse Wednesday as she climbed down from the platform.


Baez, 69, was "resting comfortably" Thursday, according to Nancy Lutzow, who runs Baez's Menlo Park production company.

"I sleep in a tree all summer long," Baez told an English blogger in 2008. "I climb up on a ladder, with ropes and things. The birds are right there in the morning. Sometimes they're flying so close to my head I can feel the wind.

"Those things are heaven to me."

Baez was at the forefront of a musical movement that began in the coffeehouses of Greenwich Village in the early 1960s, performing the first cover of a song written by the then-unknown Bob Dylan, with whom she soon plunged into a tempestuous three-year romance.

Contact Bruce Newman at 408-920-5004.