Barbara Dane (with the Chambers Bros.)
*Barbara Dane was born on this date in 1927. She was a white-American folk, blues, and jazz singer, guitarist, record producer, and activist.
Barbara Jean Spillman was born in Detroit, and her parents arrived from Arkansas in the 1920s. She was the eldest child of a pharmacist. In 1936, her father publicly admonished her for serving a soda to a Black man in his drugstore. The humiliation of her and the customer set Dane on a lifelong path of fighting racism and injustice. A teenage communist, she began singing folk, then blues.
After graduating high school, Dane began singing 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 a band but turned it down in favor of singing at factory gates and union halls.
To Ebony 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, [she is] making 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 included photos of Dane working with Memphis Slim, Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Clara Ward, Mama Yancey, Little Brother Montgomery, and others.
"Bessie Smith in stereo," wrote jazz critic Leonard Feather of Dane in the late 1950s. By 1959, Louis Armstrong had asked Time magazine readers: "Did you get that chick? She's a gasser!" After his invitation, she appeared with him on the nationally screened Timex All-Star Jazz Show hosted by Jackie Gleason 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 in 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'sStars of Jazz, and Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In 1961, she opened her 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, 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 deals and contracts. After figuring out the economics of it, I was free to choose when and where I worked, 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 'big time.' I did make some nice records because I was able to choose and work with wonderfully gifted musicians."
In January 1964, Bob Dylan praised Dane's commitment in an open letter he wrote to Broadside magazine: "The heroes of this battle are not me and Joan [Baez] and The Kingston Trio... but there's some that could use the money I mean people like Tom Paxton, Barbara Dane, and Johnny Herald... they are the heroes if such a word has to 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, and 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 12 years. The label was later incorporated into Smithsonian Folkways, a label of the Smithsonian Institution, and is available through its catalog. Before she died, Dane said: "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."
Barbara Dane died on October 20, 2024. Singer Sarah King will portray Dane in the forthcoming film A Complete Unknown.
To Become a musician or Singer
To Become a Conductor or Composer
