AMERICAN MASTERS. 8 p.m. tomorrow, Channel 12.

JOAN BAEZ was not amused.

It was early August and the 68-year-old folk legend was in Newport, R.I., for the 50th anniversary of the festival that helped launch her own career in 1959, and speaking via satellite to reporters at the Television Critics Association's summer meetings in Pasadena, Calif., about "Joan Baez: How Sweet the Sound," which premieres on PBS' "American Masters" tomorrow night.

And the second question wasn't so much about Baez herself as it was about Bob Dylan, that "unwashed phenomenon" she sang about in the classic "Diamonds & Rust."

What was her current relationship with him?

"Well, I don't really have one," she said. There might have been a note of warning in her voice, but if so, the reporter didn't heed it.

"Why is that?" he asked. "When is the last time you chatted with him?"

"You know . . . 'American Masters' made a magnificent documentary on him," Martin Scorsese's "Bob Dylan: No Direction Home," Baez replied. "And once you've seen it, you won't really have another question of me about Bob Dylan."

And yet he did.

"When was the last you talked to him?"

"I don't think you heard what I just said," she said, with finality.

Dylan, however, never really goes away, and he's a little more than a voice on the telephone in Baez's own "American Masters," having given one of his rare interviews for the production. He spoke unusually clearly about the artistry of Baez, who'd been on the cover of Time magazine at 21 and who'd helped bring him to prominence by calling him up to the stage during her own concerts.

"Joanie was at the forefront of a new dynamic in American music," says Dylan, noting that when they met, everyone was listening to her album, including him.

She, for her part, contributes a spot-on impression of her former lover and appears to recall their early days, at least, fondly.

"My mother instincts all poured out because he was a scruffy little mess," she says of Dylan. "I was crazy about him. We were an item, and we were having wonderful fun."

She reminisces fondly with her former husband David Harris about their short marriage, much of which he spent in prison for refusing to be drafted.

"How Sweet the Song" manages to remain mostly sweet, by focusing on the songs as well as the woman who sings them.

Born to a family that moved frequently throughout her childhood - "when I was 10 years old, I lived in Baghdad of all places," says the singer, who describes her parents as "modern-day gypsies" - the young Baez seems to have been hungry for attention, dragging her Sears Roebuck guitar to school to attract it, and even making the paper at 17 when she refused to walk out of her Palo Alto, Calif., high school during an air raid drill to protest the inanity of teaching children they could survive a nuclear attack by hiding in their basements.

Having achieved fame early, she remained in some ways naive, she says, recalling that the first time she saw the letters "SRO" in a headline about one of her concerts, she thought it meant "Sold Right Out." She also struggled for years with panic attacks, both offstage and on, sometimes stopping a performance in mid-song to go backstage and calm herself, then returning and picking up where she'd left off.

No one, she claims, ever seemed to want to talk about it. "I battled that for years, and nobody ever knew it."

Music and activism having been linked throughout most of Baez's career, her "Masters" biography contains plenty of clips from the early civil rights movement, including some from a visit she made to Grenada, Miss., at the request of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.

Black children were attempting to integrate a white school there, and facing violence, and Baez was one of their escorts.

"It did work - I was enough of a celebrity that no one threw bricks" while she was there, she says.

She came, the Rev. Jesse Jackson says, "as a member of that family," unlike some celebrities, "who asked for their hot tea and lemon."

In the years that followed, she'd be jailed multiple times for participating in draft protests, visit North Vietnam and would immerse herself in many another cause, sometimes, she now admits, to the detriment of her son with Harris.

It's the music, though, that ultimately drives "How Sweet the Song."

"American Masters" followed Baez on her 2008-09 tour, capturing a voice that, if anything, has grown deeper and richer over the years.

"It's totally different singing now," Baez told reporters in August, saying it required constant work to keep her voice.

"For the first 20 years, I didn't have to think about it. I just opened up my mouth and sang. And then, all of a sudden, lo and behold, I was mortal. What a nuisance."

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