Barbara Dane, an acclaimed folk, jazz and blues singer whose communist leanings and fierce civil rights and antiwar activism earned her both critical plaudits and a thick Federal Bureau of Investigation file, died on Sunday at her home in Oakland, Calif. She was 97.
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.
Over the course of her long career, Ms. Dane, with her rich, woody contralto, built a reputation in a variety of musical genres.
She established her bona fides as a folky of the first order while still in her teens, performing with Pete Seeger. “I knew I was a singer for life,” she recalled in a 2021 interview with The New York Times, “but where I would aim it didn’t come forward until then. I saw, ‘Oh, you can use your voice to move people.’”
Ms. Dane wore her convictions proudly, belting out worker anthems like “I Hate the Capitalist System” and “Solidarity Forever.” She performed at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959 with Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon. In the 1960s, Bob Dylan would often sit in with her when she was performing at Gerdes Folk City, the renowned Greenwich Village club.
In 1970, she and her third husband, Irwin Silber, the editor of the folk-music magazine Sing Out!, founded Paredon Records, a label that showcased protest music from around the world and released several of her albums.
She was equally prominent outside folk-revival circles. She was also one of the few white women to perform with Black male musicians in the 1950s and ’60s, including blues luminaries Muddy Waters and Lightnin’ Hopkins, the jazz pianist Earl Hines and Louis Armstrong.
Armstrong gave her a career a major boost by featuring her in one of his appearances on the “Timex All-Star Jazz Show” series in 1958 and extolling her talents in Time magazine: “Did you get that chick? She’s a gasser!”
In 1959, she was blocked from joining Armstrong on a State Department-sponsored tour of Europe, because of her provocative views on race, she assumed. “I was blacklisted,” she said in a 2002 interview with The San Francisco Chronicle, “for not playing ball, for not hanging out, for not being a butt-kisser.”
After she released her first album, “Trouble in Mind,” in 1957, the influential jazz critic Leonard Feather called her “Bessie Smith in stereo.”
“I was very timid about approaching the blues,” Ms. Dane said in an interview published in the November 1959 issue of Ebony that was said to be the magazine’s first profile of a white woman. But, she added, “if there is a moment of doubt or insincerity in my own mind, it will show.”
Ebony clearly approved of her efforts. “Through this pale-faced young lady,” the article said, “a lot of dark-skinned people hope to keep the blues alive and the royalties flowing.”
Still, five-star reviews and gold records were never the point. Ms. Dane often said that she saw music as fuel for social change, not personal fame.
In what became known as the Freedom Summer of 1964, Ms. Dane traveled to Mississippi to rally civil rights activists registering Black voters. Around the same time, she climbed atop a police car parked on the campus of the University of California, Berkeley, to serenade Free Speech Movement protesters.
Even more audacious, she defied a government blockade to tour postrevolution Cuba in 1966. Fidel Castro was apparently so moved that he and a top aide dropped by her hotel without warning, engaging her in a three-hour conversation about politics while her laundry was drying.
“We started talking as I took down my dyed, raggedy purple underwear,” Ms. Dane said in a 2010 interview with The Oakland Tribune. “He was a gentleman to the core.”
Barbara Jean Spillman was born on May 12, 1927, in Detroit, the eldest of three children of Gilbert Spillman, a pharmacist, and Dorothy (Roleson) Spillman, a professional bridge player. (She would later adopt her stage surname from a street sign in the San Francisco Bay Area.)
Raised during the Great Depression, Barbara helped out in her father’s business. At 9, she got a harsh lesson about racism when she served a Black man a Coca-Cola, only to watch her father burst from the prescription room and hustle him out to the sidewalk.
As she recounted in her 2022 memoir, “This Bell Still Rings: My Life of Defiance and Song,” he then turned his ire toward her: “If we start letting them in here, we’ll lose all our business. Times are tough enough as it is!”
It was a watershed moment. “That Black man and I had both been humiliated,” she wrote. “Unknowingly,” she added, “I took him inside my heart and bonded with his hurt, identified with the denial of his personhood.”
At 18, she organized a Detroit chapter of People’s Songs, an organization founded by Mr. Seeger and others to spread labor songs to the masses. She also became the Michigan teenage director of American Youth for Democracy, backed by the Communist Party USA.
The Detroit News ran an article about an event she organized at a local high school that “made me out to be some kind of teenage red menace,” she wrote, “which in fact I was.”
After graduating from Redford High School in 1945, she briefly attended Wayne State University in Detroit. It was there that she met Rolf Cahn, a student who had returned from World War II aflame with the teachings of Marx and Lenin.
An F.B.I. agent filed a report on their wedding in June 1946, noting their Communist affiliations — another addition to her swelling file. After settling in San Francisco in the late 1940s, they were stunned to receive a letter from the Communist Party telling them they had been expelled for a list of minor infractions, including that Mr. Cahn, who taught judo, had instructed a policeman in one of his classes.
Ms. Dane was crestfallen. Without her comrades, she wrote, “you have no family, no community of shared interests, no ideological home.”
During her more than a decade in San Francisco, she hosted local radio and television shows presenting folk music and blues to the mainstream public and built a reputation as a rising jazz singer of note. She and Mr. Cahn divorced in 1950, and she soon began a relationship with Byron Menendez, a jewelry maker, who became her second husband. They divorced in 1963.
In 1961, she opened Sugar Hill, a popular blues club in the city’s North Beach neighborhood, where she also led the house band. Three years later, she moved to New York City, where she married Mr. Silber. They were together until his death in 2010.
In 1965, she brought the Chambers Brothers — a gospel group from Mississippi that later ventured into psychedelic soul — to New York, recording protest songs with them and performing with them at that year’s Newport festival.
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Dane is survived by her sons, Jesse Cahn and Pablo Menendez; her stepchildren, Josh Silber, Fred Silber and Nina Silber; a grandson; and three great-grandchildren.
Although she had tasted mainstream fame with appearances on “The Tonight Show” with Johnny Carson, “Playboy’s Penthouse” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” her focus on politics over commercial success affected her career.
She recalled Albert Grossman, who would later manage Mr. Dylan, telling her that he would be interested in her professionally only when she “got her priorities straight.”
In that sense, she never did. In 1971, she joined Jane Fonda, Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland and others in a traveling variety show that performed before American soldiers who had turned against the war.
Early in her career, she had declined an invitation to tour with the bandleader Alvino Rey. As she told The Times, “Why would I want to stand in front of a band with a low-cut dress singing stupid words when I could be singing for workers who are on strike?”
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