Dave, I have a copy of Joan Baez in Concert (Vol. 1) on cd - and you're right - the original album was released in 1962. I have forced my poor aging eyes to read the incredibly small print, and here's what it says:

"Danger Waters: The ethnomusicologists have been tracing African influences on American folk music for decades, but now we find that our folk music, jazz and Latin American rhythyms are being re-exported to Africa and creating new hybrids which in turn will exert a new influence on our music. This lament of a hard-time heroine is from the Gold Coast, created in the "Highlife Cafes" patronized by the poor and less-poor, where a new African-Western-African music of extraordinary poetic and rhythymic strength is now emerging. Beneath the seemingly direct and simple verses is a fluid use of words and images which marks this as poetry of a higher order, a realistic poetry based on the patterns of ordinary speech which makes use of the slashing transitions and many-leveled ambiguities of the finest modern poetry."

I dunno, maybe I'm just tired, but that doesn't make it much clearer to me! It doesn't explain what the song is about - other than a "hard-time herione".

Annie