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BOB DYLAN WAS AN ENDEARING YOUNG SCALLYWAG!’ BARBARA DANE, THE
SINGER WHO BURNED A PATH THROUGH FOLK, BLUES AND ACTIVISM, DIES AT 97
 
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Garth Cartwright
October 21, 2024
The Guardian
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_ The US singer-songwriter, who has died at 97, encountered Louis
Armstrong and more as she championed civil rights as much as music. In
her final interview conducted last week, she explained why she was
still angry. _

Barbara Dane performing with the Chambers Brothers., Photograph:
Moses and Frances Asch Collection // The Guardian

 

As a singer-songwriter who was as devoted to social change as she was
to her craft, Barbara Dane, who has died aged 97, is a singularly
inspiring figure in American music. Amid a crop of reissues and a new
film, I spoke to her just last week over the phone as she was cared
for in a home hospice in Oakland, California, due to heart disease. As
a singer, songwriter and activist over almost 80 years, finding
kinship with everyone from Bob Dylan to Louis Armstrong, she
demonstrated formidable quantities of courage and compassion, as
documented in that new film, The 9 Lives of Barbara Dane.

“This is the end,” Dane said when I tentatively asked how she is.
“I struggle to breathe. My time ain’t long.” In US folk and
blues circles, Dane was venerated for breaking down racial and gender
barriers and never compromising. “She’s always been a role model
and a hero of mine – musically and politically,” Bonnie Raitt, one
of Dane’s many famous admirers, has said. A Dylan blurb graces the
cover of her 2022 autobiography: “Barbara is someone who is willing
to follow her conscience. She is, if the term must be used, a hero.”
 

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In the UK, her star is rather lower: she is best known for Northern
soul anthem I’m on My Way, recently reissued as a 7in. Dane made the
1960 recording with industry mavericks Lee Hazlewood and Lester Sill.
“It was very straightforward,” she said. “When I heard the
finished record, he’d gone and added horns and transformed it into a
dance tune. It got me some airplay but I never gave it much thought
until I heard how crazy they were for it in England. Then Samsung used
it to soundtrack a commercial and I got paid royalties for the first
time – Lee and Lester never paid me royalties.”

Dane was born and raised in Detroit, the eldest child of a pharmacist
who publicly admonished nine-year-old Barbara for serving a soda to a
Black man in his drugstore. The humiliation of her and the customer
set Dane on a lifelong path fighting racism and injustice. A teenage
communist, she began singing folk, then blues (“female blues singers
wrote and sang about their lives with such feeling and directness”).
In her remarkable autobiography, This Bell Still Rings: My Life of
Defiance and Song, Dane recalls encounters with Woody Guthrie, Big
Bill Broonzy, Pete Seeger, Earl Hines, Jack Teagarden, Count Basie, to
name but a few.

 
Dane with Lightnin’ Hopkins.   (Photograph: Chris Strachwitz  //
 The Guardian)
Dane released her debut album, Trouble In Mind, in 1957 – “Bessie
Smith in stereo” declared British jazz critic Leonard Feather –
and, in 1959, Louis Armstrong, having shared the stage with her,
invited Barbara to join him on a TV special. “Did you get that
chick? She’s a gasser!” Armstrong would declare to Time magazine.

Relocating to New York City made Dane the unintentional godmother of
Greenwich Village’s burgeoning folk scene. Inevitably, she
befriended Dylan: “He used to turn up on stage uninvited when I was
singing!” she said. Dylan would play her his new songs, “an
enormous talent hidden inside an endearing young scallywag”. An
actor plays Dane in forthcoming Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown but
she disdains celebrity. “Bob was hungry for fame and that never
interested me.”

Instead, Dane focused on activism: vocal in the civil rights and
anti-Vietnam war movements. In 1966, she was one of the first US
artists to tour post-revolutionary Cuba, then sang in North Vietnam as
the war raged. All the while Dane continued to champion Black artists,
recording with Lightnin’ Hopkins then launching psych-soul band the
Chambers Brothers at Newport folk festival: the 1966 album Barbara
Dane and the Chambers Brothers is possibly the first US album cover to
feature a white woman and Black men as equals.

“The Chambers Brothers were great talents,” Dane said. “Early on
in LA, I suggested they join me in Mississippi singing freedom songs
for the movement but, as they were originally from Mississippi, there
was no way they were going back there. A wise decision on their
part.”

 
On an anti-war march in San Francisco.   (Photograph: Erik Weber
 //  The Guardian)
While many of her contemporaries went on to earn fortunes, Dane
slipped into the shadows of American music. Partly this was due to her
contempt for the music industry – she turned down Albert Grossman,
powerhouse manager of Dylan, when he emphasised she should leave
politics behind. Her love of vintage blues and trad jazz made Dane
appear old fashioned once rock dominated. She also admits to
self-sabotaging: in 1960, when both Capitol and Atlantic offered her
deals, she opted for Capitol, so missing out on joining America’s
then premier blues and jazz label. Appearances singing on hugely
popular TV variety shows hosted by Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson went
awry. Her political beliefs meant Dane was blacklisted by the
Hootenanny folk TV show, then bumped off goodwill tours with Armstrong
and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee by the state department. “Having
a brassy blond woman openly criticising the USA all over Africa, Asia
and Europe was never going to happen,” she noted.

In 1970, Dane founded Paredon Records
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release albums alongside music she embraced from across the globe. Her
1973 album I Hate the Capitalist System is brilliantly blunt, an
overlooked gem, with Working Class Woman being a trenchant protest
song. The album feels ever more relevant now.

“Capitalism has made things worse than they were then, sure,” she
said. “It’s increased economic insecurity and that’s why we find
people turning to Trump and conspiracy theories and religion, the
stuff that gives them easy answers. As a Marxist, I believe that a
period of socialism has to follow. If I’m wrong, well, I won’t be
here but our world can’t survive. Capitalism and climate change have
created a crisis.”

She lived longer than most of her contemporaries, and Dane recalled
comedian Lenny Bruce and folk singer Phil Ochs – both radical
artists who died young – with affection. “Lenny was dedicated to
outing all the hypocrites and they made him pay for it. Phil was
bipolar. People focus on the tragedy of his life when they should be
celebrating his stunning songs.”

 

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Throughout her life of ardent struggle, Dane never lost her love of
music. “There’s a power in music that unites people. You can take
a roomful of people and make them feel their kinship in a way that
nothing else can with a song.”

Appropriately, Smithsonian Folkways has compiled a double CD career
retrospective, Barbara Dane: Hot Jazz, Cool Blues
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Jasmine Records is reissuing her earliest albums. Along with Maureen
Gosling’s engaging documentary and that garlanded Northern soul 45,
it appears that Dane is finally receiving the respect she has long
deserved.

“I was interested in communicating with people, not fame,” she
said. “If the film and reissues allow me to continue to do so after
I’m gone, well, so be it.”

_[THE 9 LIVES OF BARBARA DANE [[link removed]]
screens at the Barbican, London, on 27 October as part of Doc’n Roll
film festival.]_

_[GARTH CARTWRIGHT is a London based journalist and the author of
Princes Among Men: Travels with Gypsy Musicians
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and More Miles Than Money: Journeys through American Music
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* Barbara Dane
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* Music
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* folk music
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* Jazz
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* Jazz music
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* blues
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* protest music
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* world music
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* 1960s
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* civil rights movement
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* Anti-Vietnam War movement
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* Bob Dylan
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* Louis Armstrong
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* Cuba
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* Cuba solidarity
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* Chile solidarity
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* international solidarity
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* Anti-apartheid
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* Africa solidarity
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* anti-imperialism
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* left political movements
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