As a singer-songwriter who was as devoted to social change as she was to her craft, Barbara Dane, who has died aged 97, is a singularly inspiring figure in American music. Amid a crop of reissues and a new film, I spoke to her just last week over the phone as she was cared for in a home hospice in Oakland, California, due to heart disease. As a singer, songwriter and activist over almost 80 years, finding kinship with everyone from Bob Dylan to Louis Armstrong, she demonstrated formidable quantities of courage and compassion, as documented in that new film, The 9 Lives of Barbara Dane.
“This is the end,” Dane said when I tentatively asked how she is. “I struggle to breathe. My time ain’t long.” In US folk and blues circles, Dane was venerated for breaking down racial and gender barriers and never compromising. “She’s always been a role model and a hero of mine – musically and politically,” Bonnie Raitt, one of Dane’s many famous admirers, has said. A Dylan blurb graces the cover of her 2022 autobiography: “Barbara is someone who is willing to follow her conscience. She is, if the term must be used, a hero.”
