Barbara Dane (born Barbara Jean Spillman; May 12, 1927) is an American
folk,
blues, and
jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a majo ...
singer, guitarist, record producer, and political activist. She co-founded
Paredon Records with
Irwin Silber.
"
Bessie Smith in stereo," wrote jazz critic
Leonard Feather
Leonard Geoffrey Feather (13 September 1914 – 22 September 1994) was a British-born jazz pianist, composer, and producer, who was best known for his music journalism and other writing.
Biography
Feather was born in London, England, into an u ...
in the late 1950s. ''
Time
Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, t ...
'' wrote of Dane: "The voice is pure, rich ... rare as a 20-carat diamond" and quoted
Louis Armstrong's exclamation upon hearing her at the Pasadena jazz festival: "Did you get that chick? She's a gasser!"
On the occasion of her 85th birthday, ''
The Boston Globe
''The Boston Globe'' is an American daily newspaper founded and based in Boston, Massachusetts. The newspaper has won a total of 27 Pulitzer Prizes, and has a total circulation of close to 300,000 print and digital subscribers. ''The Boston Glob ...
'' music critic James Reed called her "one of the true unsung heroes of American music."
Early life
Dane's parents arrived in Detroit from Arkansas in the 1920s. Out of high school, Dane began to sing regularly at demonstrations for racial equality and economic justice. While still in her teens, she sat in with bands locally and won the interest of local music promoters. She received an offer to tour with
Alvino Rey's band, but she turned it down in favor of singing at factory gates and in union halls.
Career as singer
To ''
Ebony
Ebony is a dense black/brown hardwood, coming from several species in the genus '' Diospyros'', which also contains the persimmons. Unlike most woods, ebony is dense enough to sink in water. It is finely textured and has a mirror finish when ...
'' magazine, she seemed "startlingly blonde, especially when that powerful dusky alto voice begins to moan of trouble, two-timing men and freedom ... with stubborn determination, enthusiasm and a basic love for the underdog,
he ismaking a name for herself ... aided and abetted by some of the oldest names in jazz who helped give birth to the blues." The seven-page article was filled with photos of Dane working with
Memphis Slim,
Willie Dixon,
Muddy Waters,
Clara Ward,
Mama Yancey,
Little Brother Montgomery and others.
By 1959,
Louis Armstrong had asked ''Time'' magazine readers: "Did you get that chick? She's a gasser!"
After his invitation, she appeared with Armstrong on the nationally screened Timex All-Star Jazz Show hosted by
Jackie Gleason
John Herbert Gleason (February 26, 1916June 24, 1987) was an American actor, comedian, writer, composer, and conductor known affectionately as "The Great One." Developing a style and characters from growing up in Brooklyn, New York, he was know ...
on January 7, 1959. She toured the East Coast with
Jack Teagarden,
appeared in Chicago with
Art Hodes,
Roosevelt Sykes, Little Brother Montgomery, Memphis Slim,
Otis Spann,
Willie Dixon and others, played New York with
Wilbur De Paris and his band, and appeared on ''
The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson'' as a solo guest artist. Other television work included ''
The Steve Allen Show'',
Bobby Troup's ''
Stars of Jazz'', and ''
Alfred Hitchcock Presents''.
In 1961, she opened her own club,
Sugar Hill: Home of the Blues, on
San Francisco's Broadway in the
North Beach district, with the idea of creating a venue for the blues in a tourist district where a larger audience could hear it. At this location, Dane performed regularly with her two most constant musical companions: Kenny "Good News" Whitson on piano and cornet and
Wellman Braud, the former Ellington bassist.
In her speech to the
GI Movement of the Vietnam War Era (whose text can be found in the booklet included in Paredon Records' 1970 ''FTA! Songs of the GI Resistance'' LP), Barbara Dane said, "I was too stubborn to hire one of the greed-head managers, probably because I'm a woman who likes to speak for herself. I always made my own deals and contracts, and after figuring out the economics of it, I was free to choose when and where I worked, able to spend lots more time with my three children and doing political work, and even brought home more money in the end, by not going for the 'bigtime.' I did make some really nice records, because I was able to choose and work with wonderfully gifted musicians."
Political activism
She continued to weave in appearances as a solo performer on the coffeehouse circuit with her folk-style guitar. She opposed building a
Pacific Gas and Electric nuclear plant at the seismically-precarious
Bodega Bay
Bodega Bay ( es, Bahía Bodega) is a shallow, rocky inlet of the Pacific Ocean on the coast of northern California in the United States. It is approximately across and is located approximately northwest of San Francisco and west of Santa ...
. In organizing the resistance to that siting proposal, she recorded an album on the
Fantasy
Fantasy is a genre of speculative fiction involving magical elements, typically set in a fictional universe and sometimes inspired by mythology and folklore. Its roots are in oral traditions, which then became fantasy literature and drama ...
label with
Wally Rose,
Bob Helm
Robert Marshall Helm (July 18, 1914 – September 1, 2002) was a jazz clarinetist and saxophonist.
Helm was born in Fairmead, California and began playing brass instruments when he was young. He later turned to alto saxophone and by the age of 11 ...
, Bob Mielke, and
Lu Watters. It included the title track, "Blues Over Bodega", and another tune, "
San Andreas Fault
The San Andreas Fault is a continental transform fault that extends roughly through California. It forms the tectonic boundary between the Pacific Plate and the North American Plate, and its motion is right-lateral strike-slip (horizontal) ...
".
She stepped up her work in the movements for peace and justice as the struggle for civil rights spread and the
Vietnam war
The Vietnam War (also known by #Names, other names) was a conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. It was the second of the Indochina Wars and was officially fought between North Vie ...
escalated. She sang at peace demonstrations in
Washington, D.C. and throughout the U.S. and toured anti-war GI coffeehouses all over the world. In 1966, Dane became the first U.S. musician to tour post-revolutionary Cuba.
In January 1964,
Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan (legally Robert Dylan, born Robert Allen Zimmerman, May 24, 1941) is an American singer-songwriter. Often regarded as one of the greatest songwriters of all time, Dylan has been a major figure in popular culture during a career sp ...
praised Dane's commitment in an open letter he wrote to ''
Broadside'' magazine: "the heroes of this battle are not me an Joan
aezan the Kingston Trio... but there's some that could use the money I mean people like Tom Paxton, Barbara Dane an Johnny Herald... they are the heroes if such a word has t be used here... we need more kind a people like that people that can't go against their conscience no matter what they might gain an I've come to think that that might be the most important thing in the whole wide world."
In 1970, Dane founded
Paredon Records with husband
Irwin Silber,
a label specializing in international
protest music. She produced nearly 50 albums, including three of her own, over a 12-year period. The label was later incorporated into
Smithsonian Folkways, a label of the
Smithsonian Institution
The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded ...
, and is available through its catalog.
In 1978, Dane appeared with
Pete Seeger
Peter Seeger (May 3, 1919 – January 27, 2014) was an American folk singer and social activist. A fixture on nationwide radio in the 1940s, Seeger also had a string of hit records during the early 1950s as a member of the Weavers, notabl ...
at a rally in New York for striking coal miners.
Blues singer and role model
When Dane was in her late 70s, Philip Elwood, jazz critic of the ''
San Francisco Examiner
The ''San Francisco Examiner'' is a newspaper distributed in and around San Francisco, California, and published since 1863.
Once self-dubbed the "Monarch of the Dailies" by then-owner William Randolph Hearst, and flagship of the Hearst Corpora ...
'', said of her: "Dane is back and beautiful... she has an immense voice, remarkably well-tuned... capable of exquisite presentations regardless of the material. As a gut-level blues singer, she is without compare." Blues writer Lee Hildebrand calls her "perhaps the finest living interpreter of the classic blues of the 1920s." In a 2010
KALW profile on Dane, produced by Steven Short, blues musician
Bonnie Raitt
Bonnie Lynn Raitt (; born November 8, 1949) is an American blues singer and guitarist. In 1971, Raitt released her self-titled debut album. Following this, she released a series of critically acclaimed roots-influenced albums that incorporate ...
said "she's always been a role model and a hero of mine – musically and politically. I mean, the arc of her life so informs mine that – she's – I really can't think of anyone I admire
ore the way that she's lived her life."
Family
Dane was married to folk singer
Rolf Cahn. Their son, Jesse Cahn, also became a folk musician. Pablo Menendez, Dane's son with jeweler Byron Menendez, leads
Mezcla
Mezcla is a music group from Cuba.
Mezcla
Mezcla has been a part of the Cuban music scene for the past twenty-five years.
Mezcla was featured in the Smithsonian Institution's documentary on Latin Jazz ''La Combinacion Perfecta''.
The band has pa ...
, a multicultural musical ensemble in Cuba. Nina Menendez, Dane's daughter, is the artistic director of the Bay Area Flamenco Festival and Festival Flamenco Gitano. In 1964, Dane married
Irwin Silber, a Communist activist and former editor of ''Sing Out!'' magazine, who died in 2010.
Dane resides in
Oakland, California
Oakland is the largest city and the county seat of Alameda County, California, United States. A major West Coast of the United States, West Coast port, Oakland is the largest city in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area, the third ...
.
Discography
* ''Trouble in Mind'' (San Francisco, 1957)
* ''A Night at the Ash Grove'' (World Pacific, 1958)
* ''Livin' With the Blues'' (Dot, 1959)
* ''On My Way'' (Capitol, 1962)
* ''When I Was a Young Girl'' (Horizon, 1962)
* ''Sings the Blues with 6 & 12 String Guitar'' (Folkways, 1964)
* Lightning Hopkins with His Brothers Joel and John Henry / with Barbara Dane (Arhoolie, 1964
966
* ''Barbara Dane and the Chambers Brothers'' (Folkways, 1966)
* ''FTA! Songs of the GI Resistance'' (Paredon, 1970)
* ''I Hate the Capitalist System'' (Paredon, 1973)
* ''When We Make It Through'' (Paredon, 1982)
* ''Sometimes I Believe She Loves Me'' with Lightnin' Hopkins (Arhoolie, 1996)
* ''What Are You Gonna Do When There Ain't No Jazz?'' (GHB, 2002)
* ''Live! at the Ash Grove: New Years Eve 1961–62'' (Dreadnaught, 2004)
* ''Throw It Away'' with Tammy Hall (Dreadnaught, 2016)
*''Hot Jazz, Cool Blues & Hard-Hitting Songs'' (Smithsonian Folkways, 2018)
See also
*
References
External links
Official siteParedon Records, Smithsonian Folkways
{{DEFAULTSORT:Dane, Barbara
1927 births
Living people
American blues singers
American women jazz singers
American jazz singers
American folk singers
American television actresses
Musicians from the San Francisco Bay Area
Singers from Detroit
Jazz musicians from Michigan
Jazz musicians from California
21st-century American women