A Communist Singer From Detroit

When Dane arrived in Cuba in 1966, she was already a veteran of the US left. Born Barbara Spillman in Detroit in 1927, Dane bore witness to the deep poverty of the Depression, the great triumphs of the city’s labor movement, and the injustices of a metropolis ridden with racial and ethnic prejudice. No surprise, then, that as a child Dane had already decided “that socialism or communism would be a better way to organize things than capitalism, the ruthless effects of which were clear enough everywhere you looked.”

By the age of eighteen, Dane had become an active member of the American Youth for Democracy (AYD), the successor to the CPUSA’s Young Communist League (YCL), eventually becoming the AYD’s Michigan state director.

Music was the other defining feature of Dane’s youth. She often skipped school to go to diners, listening to popular swing hits by Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald, and Duke Ellington on jukeboxes for hours, ordering coffee after coffee. Blues, however, came to dominate Dane’s musical taste. She found herself “permanently hooked” on the genre after discovering the records of Big Joe Turner, Big Bill Broonzy, and Lil Green. Dane became infatuated with the idea of being a singer and convinced her parents to allow her to take voice lessons.

Dane’s position in the AYD allowed her to combine her musical activity with her communist activism. She became a regular feature of picket lines in Detroit, singing trade union songs to workers on strike, and she also produced interracial concerts and dances, at which she would perform, for the AYD. In 1947, Dane was invited to attend the Soviet-sponsored World Youth Festival in Prague as a representative of the United States, and also appeared at the first conference of People’s Songs, the left-wing folk music organization founded by Pete Seeger and other CPUSA-affiliated folk revivalists. Along with many People’s Songs members, Dane lent her musical talents to Henry Wallace’s 1948 Progressive Party presidential campaign, “climb[ing] up on top of many a sound truck to sing,” despite being pregnant with her first child at the time.

With Wallace defeated and a baby on the way, Dane and her first husband, Rolf Cahn, decided to move to California, first to Los Angeles and then San Francisco. Those years in the early 1950s were a time of chaotic retreat for the party. Reeling from years of repression during the Second Red Scare, the CPUSA was racked by internal tension that expressed itself in increasingly paranoid membership purges. Dane and Cahn, both longtime members, were suddenly expelled from the party with no explanation. The resulting pressure would end their relationship. Years later, Dane would uncover that Cahn had secretly given information on Party members, including herself, to the FBI — a possible explanation for their expulsion.

Folk and Blues on the Frisco Bay

The next decade of Dane’s life was dedicated largely to her musical career. After working the clubs in San Francisco, in 1951 Dane entered the Miss US Television Contest, specifically because the prize was a season-long television program that the winner could write themselves, and won. Her show, Folksville U.S.A., featured performances by Dane and her colleagues over thirteen weeks. Dane went on to secure a regular gig performing at Jack’s Waterfront Hangout, a center of San Francisco’s classic blues and traditional jazz revival in the 1950s. In 1957, she released her debut album, Trouble in Mind, to critical acclaim, even attracting the attention of national critics such as Leonard Feather.

Yet Dane’s communist politics often undermined her career prospects. In the wake of Folksville U.S.A.’s success, the show’s producers sought to capitalize on Dane’s popularity by organizing a backing group for her, only to pull out of the project after learning of her communist background. In 1959, Dane was invited to join a State Department–sponsored European tour with Louis Armstrong but was quietly dropped from the band’s lineup in the weeks leading up to their departure, again likely as a result of her unabashed political commitments. In 1960, Albert Grossman, the legendary talent manager of Bob Dylan, asked Dane to join his roster of artists, but implied that she would have to abandon her politics if she wanted to pursue a successful national career. Dane refused him and suddenly found that she was no longer tapped for gigs at the national level.

Despite these setbacks, Dane was able to build a successful local career in San Francisco, becoming a fixture of the city’s music scene. In 1961, she opened Sugar Hill, a blues club in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, with her second husband, Byron Menendez. She also recorded two more albums, On My Way and Anthology of American Folk Songs, and began to host a local blues- and folk-oriented radio show.

The Long 1960s

Dane remained open regarding her political identity through the 1950s, even as she had been cut off from the infrastructure of the CPUSA. At the turn of the decade, she found another outlet for political activity. Like many others of her generation, Dane was reactivated by the appearance of the civil rights movement on the national stage, the growing movement against the Vietnam War, and the emergence of the New Left.

In the summer of 1964, Dane participated in one of the most important musical moments in the history of the civil rights movement, the Mississippi Caravan of Music. Organized by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) as a part of the 1964 Freedom Summer, the caravan brought a group of well-known progressive folk musicians to the South. The group, which included Dane, Seeger, Phil Ochs, Judy Collins, Peter La Farge, and Len Chandler, traveled with SNCC organizers and assisted their activities through performance and song-leading.

Dane’s return to activism strained her relationship with Menendez, and the two eventually parted ways. However, Dane had recently reconnected with Irwin Silber, an acquaintance from her time in the CPUSA and People’s Songs. Silber, like Dane, had joined the YCL as a teenager in the 1940s, becoming involved in the left-wing folk revival scene in and around the party. Following the summer of 1964, Dane married Silber and moved to New York City.

By the time Dane found herself performing in Havana in 1966, she had already led a life filled to the brim with music and politics. But this was just the beginning.

The International Conference of Protest Song

Dane’s 1966 tour of Cuba was a major success. Members of the Cuban Cultural Council, the body that had been responsible for organizing Dane’s performances, were so impressed by her reception that they invited her to return a year later to participate in an event that would mark a critical turning point in Dane’s life: the 1967 International Conference of Protest Song. The conference was scheduled to occur concurrently with the first meeting of the Organización Latinoamericana de Solidaridad (OLAS), and aimed to bring together the world’s best-known left-wing folk musicians as a cultural auxiliary to Cuba’s ongoing diplomatic outreach to nationalist revolutionary movements around the world.

Many of the time’s most dynamic revolutionary musicians, especially those from Latin America, attended the conference, including Carlos Puebla of Cuba and siblings Ángel and Isabel Parra of Chile, as well as representatives from Angola, Australia, Argentina, East Germany, France, Haiti, and Vietnam. Dane was especially impressed by the large delegation of Uruguayan musicians led by the young singer-songwriter Daniel Viglietti. Although the conference had been intended as a supplement to OLAS, it quickly took on a life of its own. Over the course of a week, attendees discussed and debated the nature of “protest song,” eventually producing a collective resolution on the role of music in revolutionary movements.

Dane returned to the United States more politically invigorated than she had been at any other point in her life. Inspired by the deep internationalism represented by the conference, she embarked on what would become her most important musical and political project: Paredon Records.

A Revolutionary Record Producer

Founded by Dane and Silber in 1969, Paredon Records was an unrepentantly revolutionary, left-wing recording label that aimed to “collect th[e] outpouring of music and poetry flowing from movements all over the world and put it where it belongs: into the hands of the people struggling to change it.”

Paredon’s first release was Canción Protesta: Protest Song of Latin America, a compilation of recordings Dane had made of her colleagues at the 1967 conference. The album was a success among the US New Left public, and Paredon went on to release over fifty more albums of revolutionary music from around the world. Dane, as Paredon’s founder and chief producer, sometimes went to great lengths to acquire recordings. For instance, the tracks for Paredon’s sixth release, a 1971 album by the Irish Republican singing group Men of No Property, were recorded in secret, and Dane was only able to receive them through an intermediary.

Sometimes recordings would simply arrive at Paredon’s New York City headquarters. In 1978, a box of recordings arrived from Luanda, capital of an Angola recently liberated from Portuguese rule, with no information beyond a few untraceable names, titles, and a statement claiming they were revolutionary songs from that country. Dane released the album under the title Angola: Forward, People’s Power, lamenting the lack of information but confident that the musicians were “known, loved, and honored by the people of Angola.” Indeed, the recordings were actually from a 1975 album recorded by Agrupamento Kissanguela, a well-known music group affiliated with the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola.

Dane recorded her own revolutionary music for Paredon in the early 1970s. In 1973, she released the most explicit musical-political statement of her career, I Hate the Capitalist System. The title track, Dane’s cover of singer-songwriter Sara Ogan Gunning’s 1937 anti-capitalist ballad “I Hate the Capitalist System,” has become the standard recording of the song.

Paredon’s releases dominated the soundscape of the latter period of the US New Left. By 1978, the label had sold tens of thousands of records, and Dane had built a massive musical archive. Without her efforts, much of the music of the international revolutionary movements of Asia, Africa, and Latin America produced during the turbulent 1960s and ’70s would have been virtually unobtainable in the United States at the time and would likely be far more difficult to find today.

Dane and Silber both stepped down from their leadership roles in Paredon in the early 1980s. However, the momentum of the New Left had dissipated, and the remaining organizations the movement had produced were beginning to disintegrate. Paredon was no exception. In 1985, the label shut its doors. Its final release, Por Eso Luchamos: Songs of the Salvadoran Struggle, was an album of Salvadoran revolutionary nationalist music recorded by Cutumay Camones, a band affiliated with the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN).

Dane, afraid that the archive of revolutionary music she had built over the course of fifteen years would be lost to time, eventually donated the label’s catalog to Smithsonian Folkways in 1991, with the stipulation that Paredon’s releases would never be allowed to go out of print.

By the 1990s, Dane had come to the end of an incredible thirty-year stretch of intense political activity, which had begun with her political remobilization in the early 1960s. The last three decades of her life were marked by another period of musical growth that saw her return to the blues and jazz style she had developed during her early career.

In 1996, Dane recorded an incredible album of standards with the legendary blues guitarist and singer Lightnin’ Hopkins. This was followed by a solo album of jazz classics titled What Are You Gonna Do When There Ain’t No Jazz?, as well as a duo album of covers and originals with jazz pianist Tammy Lynne Hall.

Communism and Commitment

The shape of Dane’s life as a communist was a double arc, with two peaks of political activity in the late 1940s and late 1960s. Indeed, the contours of Dane’s political activity mirrored the periods of left-wing insurgency that occurred in the United States in her lifetime, with lulls at times when left-wing ideas became relegated to the political wilderness.

In an early chapter of her autobiography, Dane claims that the power of the 1940s CPUSA was in its ability to “unit[e] five fingers into a fist.” In other words, the Party brought people of like mind together to work collectively for revolutionary change. The notion that organization and collectivity are prerequisites of revolutionary politics is a sentiment that Dane expresses again and again in This Bell Still Rings. In music as in politics, Dane stressed the primacy of collaboration. She never recounted a musical performance or recording without elaborate descriptions of the key roles played by her fellow musicians.

The 1950s were a moment in which it was almost impossible for US communists to work together or with others as communists, and Dane was never one to hide her political commitments. Indeed, she didn’t, and her career suffered for it during that time. The 1990s were also a period in which organizing as a communist was similarly difficult, and Dane’s political action decreased as a result. Yet her commitment to communism never diminished. Rather, Dane’s refusal to renounce her leftist identity made her a pariah, and this helps explain why she seems to have been forgotten even by much of the socialist left.

Dane’s commitment weathered those periods in which structural forces outside her control made her bold communist identity a liability. And when a growing Left needed Dane’s dauntless brand of political dedication, she was already there. At the first signs of a resurgent, revolutionary politics in the early 1960s, Dane threw herself into the fray, committing herself to it entirely until its final collapse, providing it day after day with the greatest gift she could give: her music.