On an evening about three years ago in a rural Pennsylvanian venue of Eric Clapton's last world tour, Clapton's guitar work and vocals flawlessly honored his masterpieces-the man played like the legend that he is. While his "Bellbottom Blues" clenched the hearts of many who were enjoying floor seating (one lanky, mustachioed fellow stood alone and closed his eyes as tears rinsed his ruddy cheekbones), Clapton himself hardly blinked after its finale. He glanced around, shuffled his feet, tuned up a bit and leaned into the next smash hit on the set list. On the occasions I've seen Bob Dylan perform, my squeals of delight upon recognizing a favorite have been truncated by a glance at Dylan's gloomy, the-world-will-never-understand visage. Concerts headlined by younger talent have a livlier atmosphere, but the ability to be awe-struck is reduced by the fact that the band is as surprised to be on stage as their mobbish audience is to have gotten tickets. The legends, albeit great, make one feel too small, while contemporary bands tend to be jittery. Is an ideal live-music performer, then, an impossibility?

No, I learned on Oct. 19, when first lady of folk Joan Baez graced the spotlight of the Calvin Theater in Northampton. With the artistic dignity of Clapton and Dylan but without their road-weary countenances, with the winsome curiosity of younger artists but without their nervous tendencies, Baez dazzles and invites at once. She is aware of her prestige;-"I don't do this for the money; I do it for the adulation," she joked-she acknowledges it, yet is more concerned with enjoying the moment's music than managing her persona.

Baez's passion for singing is unmistakable-she sings as if she must sing. At one point she asked the backup band to improvise something while she tuned an ornery guitar, and while the dolbro player and lead guitarist (Baez played mostly rhythm herself) duetted, Baez couldn't help casually harmonizing-no words, just singing. She's been doing that for 40 years. In a passage of D.A. Pennebaker's 1967 documentary "Dont Look Back," in which Dylan is writing a new song, Baez, not yet familiar with the lyrics, joins in anyway, pushing her fist against her mouth but still unable to restrain herself. Her creative spontaneity and ardor still flourish. She sashayed onto stage upon her first entrance, smile-singing with palms upward and arms apart as if delivering an oracle. Throughout the show, when she stepped away from the mic during guitar solos, she danced with the grace and easy rhythm that a typical 62-year-old frame would disallow.

While Dylan loudly split with folk when he "went electric" at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, Baez has for the most part remained in the genre, testing the waters of rock, country and jazz from time to time but never completely submerging. At the concert, she played pieces by country standbys Steve Earle and Gillian Welch and some rock 'n' roll tunes by Natalie Merchant and newcomer Ryan Adams, yet still glided through folk favorites by Woody Guthrie and Dylan, wrapping up the set with her own "Diamonds and Rust."

Over decades of composition and performance, Baez's relative consistency of style has nurtured a remarkable intracacy in her craft. While Dylan's development, always finding new highways, is vertical, Baez's maturation is horizontal, giving her great agility within her style. Her awareness of this lends her such onstage ease that the distance between stage and seat feels marvelously small. It seems as if Baez happened to stop in, and feels like playing a song-when she adjusts her capo she removes it gently and reclamps it slowly and carefully, for she has nothing to hide. Other artists seem to feel as if they have to hide technical necessities, painfully aware of their duty to entertain.

In a way, Laura Cantrell, the Nashville-born singer-songwriter who opened for Baez, helps to illustrate Baez's development. Cantrell's delicate voice is measured and clear, and her songwriting is sweetly intelligent. The effect is pretty, but not beautiful-after her touted major debut in 2000, she hasn't yet filled her own shoes. By comparison, during her first performances in Cambridge coffeehouses, Baez's voice was perfectly lovely, yet her voracity might have tainted the listening experience. "Striking and clear yet tightly wrought, self-consciously projected, Joan's singing demanded attention without apology for its determination to get it," according to "Positively Fourth Street," David Hajdu's account of the early careers of Dylan and Baez. Baez's teenage (she was 18) self-consciousness was then a liability, causing many reviewers to find her style deliberate. Now, Baez is still self-conscious, but she is conscious of her confidence rather than her desire to succeed.

The climax of the Northampton show might very well have been when Baez covered The Band's "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down." The moment Baez beckoned the audience to join her, the theater sounded with hundreds of eager voices, the less classic-rock savvy among them capitalizing on the "Na, na, na" of the chorus. Pleased, at the end of the song Baez laughed, "Thank you, that was beautiful." The stocky, chestnut-haired woman beside me chuckled back, "You're welcome, Joanie, you're welcome."