Remembering Barbara Dane

Nina Silber

DURING MUCH OF Barbara Dane’s lifetime, I seldom thought of her as a musical giant. She was, after all, my stepmother and that relationship, as it so often is, could be complicated. Yet in the last few years of her life, I came to understand what I had so long failed to see: how tremendous her musical gifts were and how much her deeply-held political commitments guided her musical career.

Named Barbara Jean Stillman at her birth on May 12, 1927, she died October 20, 2024 in her home in Oakland, California, having chosen to end her life under California’s End of Life Option Act. She was 97, clear and lucid to the end.

She is survived by her children Jesse Cahn, Pablo Menendez, and Nina Menendez, a grandson and three great-grandchildren, and her step-children Josh Silber, Fred Silber and myself, Nina Silber.

A deeply committed left-wing activist, Barbara fought tirelessly — throughout her long career — for peace and racial justice. Indeed, she was never shy or hesitant when it came to explicitly drawing out the political message in her music. I can remember times when she and my father, Irwin Silber, a committed leftist and folk music editor who was married to Barbara until his death in 2010, debated how much she should talk politics at her concerts.

My father tended to urge a more measured political message, which might be surprising to anyone familiar with his own fiercely radical tendencies. “People are there to hear you sing,” he would say, or something along those lines. But Barbara wanted to be sure audiences, unequivocally, got the messages in her songs. I have no doubt they did.

None of this diminished Barbara’s tremendous musical accomplishments, especially her enormous range across multiple genres — folk, jazz and blues — and her strong and vibrant rendering of songs like “Trouble in Mind” and “I Hate the Capitalist System,” a song written in the 1930s by the Kentucky-born Sara Ogan Gunning.

My father wrote the liner notes for Barbara’s album of the same name: “Barbara Dane says she has hated the capitalist system ever since she was a teen-ager helping out in the little drug store her father operated in a Detroit working-class community during the depression years.”(1)

That Detroit drugstore shaped Barbara’s political beliefs in other ways. When she was nine, she once served a coke to a Black man at the drug store counter only to be harshly scolded by her father while the Black customer was hounded out of the store.

“My father had refused a thirsty man a drink,” Barbara wrote in her 2022 memoir, This Bell Still Rings, “and had humiliated a grown man before a child. That Black man and I had both been humiliated…Unknowingly, I took him inside my heart and bonded with his hurt, identified with the denial of his personhood.”(2)

People’s Songs

During her high school and college years, including a short stint at Detroit’s Wayne State University, she became increasingly interested in Marxism and left-wing causes while she also honed her singing abilities.

Those interests inevitably brought her in touch with an early manifestation of the folk revival. At 18 she organized the Detroit chapter of People’s Songs, an organization founded by Pete Seeger in 1945.

Building on the Popular Front efforts of performers like Woody Guthrie and Lee Hays in the 1930s, People’s Songs aimed to write and disseminate songs “of labor and the American people.” They published a Bulletin and dispensed singers to perform at union meetings and on picket lines.

Although they never created the “singing labor movement” that Pete Seeger envisioned, they did maintain links with some unions, singing at meetings of the National Maritime Union, at UAW locals, and on picket lines of striking workers in the film industry. At the same time, many labor connections were starting to fray as postwar anti-communism ramped up in the labor movement.

In 1947 my father became the executive secretary of People’s Songs and was the coordinator for a national convention in Chicago where Barbara was an attendee. Although they didn’t yet know each other, my father and Barbara were essentially following a similar path that linked radical politics with folk singing.

By this time both had also become Communist Party members, a not unusual path given the prominence of the CPUSA in left-wing cultural activities going back to the 1930s. Still, Irwin Silber always insisted that the CP maintained a kind of laissez faire attitude about folk music. Pete Seeger agreed: “People’s Songs related to the left although no one ever ordered us what to do.”(3)

Barbara did, however, provoke the ire of someone in the CP’s upper echelon, leading to her and her first husband Rolf Cahn’s expulsion from the party in the late 1940s for a list of arbitrary infractions. Despite this, she remained in the Party’s orbit for many years and later in life moved into other sectors of the non-CP left.

A Dynamic Presence

While living in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1950s with Byron Menendez, her second husband, and three children, Barbara’s singing became more professional and wide-ranging, embracing the rising popularity of both jazz and blues.

Throughout her career she was often on the cusp of “making it big”: she appeared on radio and television specials; recorded with Capitol Records; ran Sugar Hill, a well-established blues club in San Francisco; and performed and sometimes toured with the likes of Louis Armstrong, Jack Teagarden, Lenny Bruce, even a rising comic named Bob Newhart.

She was praised by prominent jazz and blues critics. “Did you get that chick?” Louis Armstrong was quoted in a Time magazine article in 1958. “She’s a gasser.”(4)

In 1959 she was spotlighted in Ebony, the first white woman to be profiled by that magazine. Barbara earned Ebony’s respect not only for her musical talent, but also for her persistent efforts to promote and work with Black performers including Muddy Waters, Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon. “Through this pale-faced young lady,” they wrote, “a lot of dark-skinned people hope to keep the blues alive and the royalties flowing.”(5)

Barbara remained a dynamic presence on the folk music scene, especially as the late 1950s witnessed a renewed “folk revival” which brought her into folk clubs, even folk music TV programs, as well as collaborations with younger folk artists like Bob Dylan.

While it has never been possible to isolate Barbara into one musical genre, it was mainly as a folk performer that she became a vital part of the civil rights and peace activism of this era. She divided her time in the summer of ’64 between singing at voter registration events in Mississippi and performing at the Free Speech protests in Berkeley, California.

Her outspokenness and activism on these issues ultimately made her unappealing to the power brokers of commercial music. Albert Grossman, the top folk music manager of the era, expressed an interest in bringing Barbara into his “stable” but only if she could get her “priorities straight.”

This was a clarifying moment for Barbara, perhaps giving her a renewed commitment to her political convictions and certainly solidifying her decision to keep her distance from the commercial music scene.(6)

Deep Commitment

When I first came to know Barbara, when she and my father got together in 1964, no one could doubt the depth of her political commitment. With LBJ escalating the war in Vietnam, she and my father organized a “Sing-in For Peace” at Carnegie Hall in September, 1965.

It was a moment that signaled a firm link between folk performers like Joan Baez, Len Chandler, Tom Paxton and dozens of others to the movement against the war in Vietnam. It also signaled, again, the constraints of the commercial music industry.

Many of the performers managed by Albert Grossman, including Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary, declined to participate, apparently because Grossman feared that an association with antiwar politics would hurt their popularity.

Barbara pursued her antiwar activities by appearing repeatedly at rallies across the country and eventually helping to organize an anti-war entertainment troupe — a kind of alternative to the USO — for American GIs opposed to the Vietnam War.

Although I was too young to fully comprehend her efforts, I knew that Barbara often traveled around the globe to spread her music. Her travels to Spain, Italy, the Philippines, Vietnam, and to Cuba brought her in contact with a host of musicians pursuing their own struggles against fascism and for national liberation.

Her visit to Cuba in 1966 also opened a door not only for her own son to live and study music there but also for my brother to study art. Those contacts expanded her awareness of the international music scene, encouraging her, along with my father, to launch their own record label, Paredon records, started in 1970.

Now part of Smithsonian Folkways, Paredon recorded and promoted the music of national liberation and anti-repression movements across the globe, including anti-Pinochet Chileans, Asian Americans fighting oppression in the United States, and Palestinian activists.

“The very writing of a poem or a speech or the raising of a song,” Barbara wrote in her memoir, “was a kind of victory in itself, a triumph over censorship or marginalization, disparagement or even death.”(7)

One of the last times I saw Barbara perform in a public setting was at a concert celebrating her 90th birthday at the Miner Theater in San Francisco.  She was joined by two of the Chambers Brothers, a Black gospel and soul group with whom she had performed and cut an album in the early 1960s.

She was also accompanied by one of her sons, Pablo (previously Paul) Menendez, who had forged a life and a musical career in Havana. One number was the Civil Rights era staple, “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Round.” Performing in the first year of the first Trump administration, Barbara added this lyric: “Ain’t gonna let no pussy-grabbing liar turn me round.”

Rest in Power, Barbara Dane.

Notes

1. Irwin Silber, Liner Notes to I Hate the Capitalist System, Paredon Records P-1014, Brooklyn, New York. https://folkways-media.si.edu/docs/folkways/artwork/PAR01014.pdf
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2. Barbara Dane, This Bell Still Rings: My Life of Defiance and Song (Heyday Press: Berkeley, CA), 9.
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3. Interview transcript, David Dunaway interview with Pete Seeger, Box 1, Folder 8, David Dunaway Collection, American Folklife Center.
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4. Armstrong quoted in “Nightclubs: A Gasser,” Time magazine (November 24, 1958).
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5. “White Blues Singer: Blonde Keeps Blues Alive,” Ebony magazine (November 1959).
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6. This Bell Still Rings: My Life of Defiance and Song, 182.
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7. This Bell Still Rings: My Life of Defiance and Song, 355.
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March-April 2025, ATC 235