Biography:

Barbara Jean Spillman, (May 12, 1927 – October 20, 2024), known professionally as Barbara Dane, was an American folk, blues, and jazz singer, guitarist, record producer, and political activist. 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!”[1] 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.”[2]

Early life

Dane’s parents arrived in Detroit from Arkansas in the 1920s. Out of high school, Dane began to sing regularly at demonstrations for racial equality and economic justice. While still in her teens, she sat in with bands locally and won the interest of local music promoters. She received an offer to tour with Alvino Rey‘s band, but she turned it down in favor of singing at factory gates and in union halls.[3]

Career as singer

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.[4]

By 1959, Louis Armstrong had asked Time magazine readers: “Did you get that chick? She’s a gasser!”[1] 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,[3] 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.[1]

In 1961, she opened her own club, Sugar Hill: Home of the Blues, on San Francisco’s Broadway in the North Beach district, with the idea of creating a venue for the blues in a tourist district where a larger audience could hear it.[5] At this location, Dane performed regularly with her two most constant musical companions: Kenny “Good News” Whitson on piano and cornet and Wellman Braud, the former Ellington bassist.[6]

In her speech to the GI Movement of the Vietnam War Era (whose text can be found in the booklet included in Paredon Records’ 1970 FTA! Songs of the GI Resistance LP), Barbara Dane said, “I was too stubborn to hire one of the greed-head managers, probably because I’m a woman who likes to speak for herself. I always made my own deals and contracts, and after figuring out the economics of it, I was free to choose when and where I worked, able to spend lots more time with my three children and doing political work, and even brought home more money in the end, by not going for the ‘bigtime.’ I did make some really nice records, because I was able to choose and work with wonderfully gifted musicians.”[7]

Dane will be portrayed by singer Sarah King in the forthcoming film A Complete Unknown.[8]

Credits: