With President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden and wife Jill all sitting front-row center at the White House’s relatively intimate East Room, Bob Dylan took the stage at the first “In Performance at the White House” concert of 2010, which was themed “A Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement.”

Whereas gospel singer Yolanda Adams changed the tense in a few lyrics to Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come” by singing “a change has come” as a shout-out to President Obama’s ‘08 campaign slogan, Dylan’s lyrics to “The Times They Are A-Changin’” didn’t need any, uh, a-changin’. Accompanied by stand-up bass and piano, Dylan sang his 1964 anthem loud and clear, highlighting the song’s many apropos lyrical moments (“Come senators, congressmen / Please heed the call / Don’t stand in the doorway / Don’t block up the hall”).

His former musical/romantic/protest partner Joan Baez also performed, though the pair did not sing a duet as we had hoped. Baez sang protest classic “We Shall Overcome” with a little help from the crowd for the refrain.

As previously reported, this program will still be broadcast on PBS Thursday night at 8pm EST (I luckily caught the stream online tonight after the live show was rescheduled due to an upcoming snowstorm), as well as on NPR for at least the remainder of the month. **Update: Audio of the performance can be heard here.

“Perhaps the pictures in the Times could no longer be put in rhymes,” Joan Baez sang in 1972’s “To Bobby,” a song which not only begs her former musical/romantic partner Bob Dylan to return to writing the kind of civil rights music (or “protest songs”) that once made him the so-called “voice of a generation,” but also guilts him with a form of social responsibility (“Do you hear the voices in the night, Bobby? / They’re crying for you”).

Now forty-seven years after Dylan and Baez sang at the same March on Washington where Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, the pair are performing in the District of Columbia again, not in protest, but for a performance at the White House’s “Celebration of Music from the Civil Rights Movement.”

As previously reported, Dylan, Smokey Robinson, John Mellencamp, Blind Boys of Alabama, and many other artists will take part in the event, which will be broadcast on PBS this Thursday night (Feb 11), but now, as BroadwayWorld reports, Baez has been added to the lineup as well, turning what was already an historical event for Dylan fanatics like myself into a truly remarkable reminder of the history between that legendary rally and the present.

In addition to PBS’ broadcast and President Obama’s opening remarks to be streamed live on Whitehouse.gov, NPR will air a one-hour concert special throughout the rest of the month that will also be made available online.