Posted on 10/21/2024 12:28:16 PM PDT by Borges
Barbara Dane, a jazz, blues and folk music giant who tirelessly championed social justice movements from around the world, died of heart failure in her Oakland home on Oct. 20 at age 97, her daughter Nina Menendez told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Praised for her rich voice, Dane was known not only for singing with Louis Armstrong and Muddy Waters, but also for founding Paredon Records with her husband, music scholar and activist Irwin Silber. From 1970 to 1985, the label put out over 50 albums that addressed racial justice, feminism and anti-imperialism, giving a platform to activist artists from Cuba, Palestine, Puerto Rico, Mexico, Greece, the United States and many other places. Their work is now archived in Smithsonian Folkways.
“I saw that whenever the movement in a particular country was strong, there was an emerging music to go with it,” Dane told The New York Times in 2021. “It struck me that this stuff needed to be heard in the voices of the people who wrote the songs.”
Instead of following a conventional path to fame, the Detroit-born Dane began her career as a teenager in the 1940s singing at protests. “Why would I want to stand in front of a band with a low-cut dress singing stupid words when I could be singing for workers who are on strike?” she said in the Times interview about her career beginnings. “It didn’t seem like a good bargain to me.”
Dane relocated to San Francisco that decade and became a star of the local post-World War II jazz and blues scene, which also launched the careers of Etta James and Sugar Pie DeSanto. She made her debut as a recording artist with her 1957 album, Trouble in Mind. As a white artist, she defied convention by touring with Black musicians like Willie Dixon and Memphis Slim during segregation. In 1961, Dane opened her own club in San Francisco’s North Beach, Sugar Hill.
“Even in this business the way it is now, there really isn’t anyone that accomplished as much as she did, in terms of breaking barriers and standing up for what she believed in,” Bonnie Raitt told NPR in 2011. “She’s always been a role model and a hero of mine, musically and politically.”
From the 1940s, Dane was involved in leftist politics and joined the Communist Party, from which she was later expelled in the 1950s for undisclosed reasons. She continued to identify as a socialist. In 1966, she became the first singer from the U.S. to perform in post-revolutionary Cuba. In the 1970s, she dedicated herself to performing at anti-Vietnam War rallies, and released her album I Hate the Capitalist System in 1973.
Dane was one of the many artists whom the FBI surveilled because of their activism, and her FBI file later became source material for her 2022 autobiography, This Bell Still Rings: My Life of Defiance and Song, where she revealed that she suspected her first husband, Rolf Cahn, of feeding the FBI information about her.
Dane continued to be active well into her 90s. In addition to publishing her book, she continued to perform and appeared in a 2023 documentary about her life, The Nine Lives of Barbara Dane, which is currently on the international film festival circuit.
She is survived by her children Jesse Cahn, Pablo Menendez and Nina Menendez, and grandson Osamu Menendez (all of whom are musicians), and three great-grandchildren. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, a memorial will be announced in the spring.
Yet she didn't hate enough to move to Cuba and the Soviet Union to enjoy the wonders of communism. Just like so many other fair-weather "revolutionaries." I'll never understand the fervor to make the whole world communist. Why not have some capitalist countries and some communist countries and let them duke it out in the arena of ideas and results? Why do they want to destroy all capitalist countries?
Never heard of her.
I never heard of her, but this is interesting Popular Music history. In those days, it took a village to make a hit record. Some of those ‘villagers’ never became known to the public. Production, background vocals, agents, uncredited song writing teams. Art production teams.
When a social justice warrior dies the world gets better off.
Never heard of her and I grew up in the Bay Area in the 60-70’s
Then again , I can not name a single Taylor Swift song .
Rest where you will.
Well said.
She’s just another commie on her way to satan and hades.
She’s a good commie now
You don’t need to. They are all about her lousy choices in men. The same song again and again.
Oh dear...trouble in paradise?
Crap music (not jazz, but her anti-freedom attitude).
Give me Rush’s Tom Sawyer or Red Barchetta any day.
Singing in hell with fellow Commies Pete Seeger and Paul Robeson.
Never heard of her, she sounds troubled.
Okay. Bye.
“Okay. Bye.”
That’s all the eulogy she deserves, huh?
Or maybe “Bye, good riddance.”
Aren’t you the lucky one.
I have heard some....they crushed my soul for a while.
Just like she crushes the soul of every man she destroys, er, dates.
shes singing aaio aaio i wanna go home, with harry in hell
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