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.”
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 biopicA 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, a label that allowed her to 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.”
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 & Hard Hitting Songs, while 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 screens at the Barbican, London, on 27 October as part of Doc’n Roll film festival.]
