Singer, songwriter, and activist Barbara Dane has died at age 97. In a career spanning 80 years she played folk, blues, world music, and, of course, jazz, and befriended greats from Louis Armstrong to Bob Dylan. Leonard Feather dubbed her “Bessie Smith in Stereo” for her bluesy vocal style unexpected from a pretty young blonde. Her activism began as early as her singing and she became involved in the folk music scene and Civil Rights movement of the 1940s while still a teenager, meeting Pete, Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Big Bill Broonzy, and other notables along the way. Born in Detroit, and having spent time in LA and New York, the Bay Area was her home base for most of her adult life.
Often associated with folk music, because of the part she played in the Greenwich Village scene of the early ’60s, she first gained widespread recognition in the ’50s playing jazz with the likes of Jack Teagarden, Louis Armstrong, and Earl Hines, who accompanied her on a 1959 album.
She was already 30 in 1957 when she released her first album, Trouble in Mind, a mix of blues and traditional jazz tunes she had perfected playing the jazz haunts along San Francisco’s Embarcadero. She founded her own San Francisco club in 1961, Sugar Hill: Home of the Blues, in an effort to bring blues to a wider tourist audience. Ellington bassist Wellman Braud was part of the house band. Jimmy Rushing, Mose Allison, Tampa Red, Lonnie Johnson, Big Mama Thornton, Lightnin’ Hopkins, T-Bone Walker, and Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee all played the club. Carmen McRae and John Lee Hooker recorded albums there.
In 1963 she recorded an album with Lu Waters, Wally Rose, Bob Helm, and Bob Mielke, Blues over Bodega, to protest the construction of a nearby nuclear power plant. There are also many live recordings of her appearing with traditional jazz units. Dave Radlauer will share some of them in a December column.
Her refusal to tone down her politics limited a career that could have led to fame and fortune. Instead of bending to the record companies she embraced the anti-war and civil rights movements, singing protest songs alongside folk artists and blues singers, most notably with the Chambers Brothers on a 1966 album. In 1970 she established Paredon Records which produced 50 albums in styles from protest movements around the world.
A week after giving final interviews, and suffering from heart failure, Barbara Dane died by assisted suicide on October 20th.
