Barbara Dane obit

Barbara Dane, indomitable blues and jazz singer, dead at 97

 

She was not on the list.

Barbara Dane, who more than held her own singing jazz with Louis Armstrong and Earl “Fatha” Hines and blues with Muddy Waters and Lightnin’ Hopkins, died Sunday, Oct. 20, at her home in Oakland at age 97. Surrounded by family and friends, she availed herself of medical aid in dying after a long struggle with heart failure, her daughter Nina Menendez told the Chronicle. 

 A powerhouse singer who moved effortlessly between traditional New Orleans jazz, Chicago blues, international protest anthems, gospel, and folk ballads, Dane was an effective guitarist, civil rights activist, club owner and record producer. Paredon Records, the politically oriented label she founded with her third husband, the American folk music scholar and socialist Irwin Silber, released 50 albums that are now archived at Smithsonian Folkways.

Guided by her commitment to racial equality and leftist causes, she had numerous brushes with fame that quickly came to naught as she cared far more about fighting for justice than her “career,” a word she invariably intoned with ironic air quotes. Yet she never expressed regret for following a wending path using her voice “to help with the whole complicated process of trying to change the world,” she told the Chronicle in a 2016 interview. 

From the early 1950s to the mid-1990s, Dane’s career unfolded largely in the Bay Area, Chicago, Los Angeles and New York City, and in each locale she helped shape music scenes that resonated around the world. In the Bay Area she was the primary vocalist in the New Orleans jazz revival that flourished in the decade after World War II. But she was equally at home belting out the blues, challenging conventions as a white artist performing with Black musicians at a time when that meant canceled gigs and television appearances.

In the early 1960s, “Willie Dixon and Memphis Slim were her backup band on tour for a year,” Menendez said. In 1961, Dane opened Sugar Hill, a venue that brought overlooked blues masters to San Francisco’s North Beach. Big Mama Thornton, whose hit version of “Hound Dog” introduced the Leiber and Stoller classic, was a regular at the Broadway club, where Dane performed with Kenny “Good News” Whitson on piano and cornet and Wellman Braud, who pioneered jazz’s walking bass style during his long prewar tenure in the Duke Ellington Orchestra.

Oakland filmmaker Maureen Gosling’s “The 9 Lives of Barbara Dane,” an award-winning documentary that premiered last year at the 46th Mill Valley Film Festival, captured the kaleidoscopic nature of her life, a story Dane told herself (with help from her voluminous FBI files) in her 2022 memoir, “This Bell Still Rings: My Life of Defiance and Song.” She performed well into her 90s and was looking to make new musical friends. Her last album of new material, 2016’s “Throw It Away,” was a blues-steeped collaboration with jazz pianist-arranger Tammy Hall. 

Born Barbara Jean Spillman in Detroit on May 12, 1927, she started singing at community events and labor meetings as a teenager. Rejecting an early offer to join swing guitarist Alvino Rey’s band, Dane preferred to sing in informal settings at protests and union rallies. Relocating to San Francisco in the late 1940s with her first husband, folk singer Rolf Cahn, she was deeply involved in leftist politics, faith that didn’t waver when they were summarily expelled from the Communist Party in the early 1950s for reasons that were never explained.

After a brief stint as the host of a KGO TV show attempting to capitalize on the budding folk music movement, she encountered a central figure in the East Bay’s thriving traditional jazz scene, banjo player Dick Oxtot, who was blown away by her command of country blues and spirituals. He invited her to sit in with trombonist Bob Mielke’s band, the Bearcats, and before long she was working every trad jazz joint in the region.

Her resonant, soulful contralto, supple sense of time, and selfless commitment to Black music paved the way to perform, record and befriend a vast constellation of foundational artists in jazz and blues, from Louis Armstrong, Kid Ory and Count Basie to Clara Ward, Mama Yancey and the Chambers Brothers.  

Dane is survived by her son with Rolf Cahn, folk singer Jesse Cahn; her children with Byron Menendez, Havana-based Pablo Menendez, who leads the Cuban rock band Mezcla, and vocalist Nina Menendez, the artistic director of the Bay Area Flamenco Festival and Festival Flamenco Gitano; and her grandson, Havana guitarist and vocalist Osamu Menendez; and three great-grandchildren. A memorial will be announced, probably in the spring in conjunction with her birthday.

She co-founded Paredon Records with Irwin Silber.

"Bessie Smith in stereo," wrote jazz critic Leonard Feather of Dane in the late 1950s. Time 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 music critic James Reed called her "one of the true unsung heroes of American music.

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 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 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.