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Barbara Dane, who described Bob Dylan as “an endearing young scallywag,’ was known as much for championing civil rights as she was for her music.
Barbara Dane, was born and brought up in Detroit and began to fight both racism and injustice after her pharmacist father reportedly admonished her for serving soda to a Black man in his drugstore. In 1957, Barbra Dane released her debut album, entitled Trouble In Mind and was invited by Louis Armstrong to join him on a TV special two years later.
Barbara Dane recounted the incident with her father in her 2022 memoir, This Bell Still Rings: My Life of Defiance and song, and recalled what her father said after he castigated her for serving soda to a Black man. She revealed that he said: “If we start letting them in here, we’ll lose all our business. Times are tough enough as it is!”
When Barbara Dane relocated to New York City, The Guardian reported that “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.”
Democracy Now paid tribute to Barbara Dane on Instagram and wrote: “Legendary singer and activist Barbara Dane died in her Oakland home Sunday. She was 97 years old. In the 1950s, Dane became a popular blues singer and performed with many leading musicians of the time, including Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon and others.She eventually largely dropped out of the commercial music world to focus on social justice, becoming involved in the civil rights movement, as well as the GI resistance movement during the Vietnam War.
“She and her husband Irwin Silber started the record label Paredon to release music from freedom struggles across the globe. She was one of many artists whom the FBI surveilled because of their activism. In 2018, Barbara Dane stopped by the Democracy Now! studio to share stories from her remarkable life and to perform a few songs.”
What was Barbara Dane’s cause of death?
The New York Times reported that “Her daughter, Nina Menendez, said that after suffering shortness of breath for several years because of heart failure, Ms. Dane chose to terminate her life under California’s End of Life Option Act.”
