Barbara Dane (1927- 2024)
Barbara Dane and Abe Osheroff in Feb. 2004. Photo Richard Bermack.
When Barbara Dane accepted the Clara Lemlich award for social activism in 2021, she drew a distinction between singer-activists whose songs deal with injustice, and activist-singers, who are out there on the picket lines fighting injustice themselves. She was definitely one of the latter.
Barbara, who died at her home in Oakland, California, on October 20, 2024, at the age of 97, was also one of us: She performed many times at the annual VALB reunions and ALBA events with her friend and collaborator Bruce Barthol. An expansively talented singer who broke boundaries both musical and political, her career spanned many genres, including blues, jazz, folk, and standards. Through it all, she refused to compromise her ideals.
In the 1950s, Barbara Dane was one of the first white musicians to cross the color barrier, singing with African Americans including Muddy Waters and Louis Armstrong, who described her as “a gasser.” She was the first white person to appear on the cover of Ebony magazine. Jazz critic Leonard Feather called her “Bessie Smith in Stereo. . . The voice is pure, rich, rare as a 20-karat diamond.” Later she produced and toured with the Chambers Brothers.
Barbara Dane at the Bay Area VALB Reunion in San Francisco, February 2004. Photo Richard Bermack.
An active participant in the civil rights movement, in 1964 she went south to participate in the Mississippi Freedom Project. There she met Lincoln vet Abe Osheroff, who was building a community center. They reunited forty years later at a vets’ gathering in Oakland.
Throughout her career, Barbara supported solidarity movements worldwide. She sang in underground concerts in Spain defying Franco, and in Cuba supporting Castro and the Cuban revolution. During the Vietnam War, she performed in GI coffee houses from New York to the Philippines as part of the FTA (Fuck the Army) tours. Her FBI file was the size of a large phone book—a point of pride.
For Barbara, taking a stand for justice trumped commercial success. She refused to perform on the TV show Hootenanny when her friend Pete Seeger was barred from the program. Bob Dylan was so impressed that he declared her his hero in a Sing Out! magazine article. Dylan’s producer, Albert Grossman, offered to produce her if she toned down her politics. She refused. One of her most successful albums was I Hate the Capitalist System (1973). Barbara Dane practiced what she preached.
To learn more about Barbara Dane, see The Nine Lives of Barbara Dane, a documentary by Maureen Gosling, and the 2021 Bay Area ALBA event, which is viewable here.
