Barbara Dane, singer and guitarist who played with Dylan and dedicated her career to Left-wing causes

Louis Armstrong was a big fan, and told Time magazine, ‘Did you get that chick? She’s a gasser!’

Barbara Dane, who has died aged 97, was a folk, jazz and blues singer and guitarist whose career was underpinned by her Left-wing politics; her collaborators over the years ranged from Louis Armstrong and Pete Seeger to Bob Dylan and Memphis Slim, while Fidel Castro was so taken with her that when she toured Cuba – in defiance of the US government – he went to her hotel and spoke to her for three hours while her laundry dried. “He was a gentleman to the core,” she recalled.
She was born Barbara Jean Spillman on May 12 1927 in Detroit, to where her parents had moved from Arkansas. Her father Gilbert was a pharmacist who owned a drugstore, while her mother, Dorothy, née Roleson, was a professional bridge player.
A turning point in her life came when she was nine and served a black customer with a bottle of Coca-Cola in the family drugstore. Her father intervened and threw the man out, telling her it was bad for business. “That Black man and I had both been humiliated,” she recalled. “I took him inside my heart and bonded with his hurt.”
After high school in Detroit she had a short stint at Wayne State University but was more interested in singing folk and the blues; the guitarist and bandleader Alvino Rey wanted her to tour with him, but, she recalled, “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?”
At 18 she started the Detroit chapter of Pete Seeger’s People’s Songs organisation, singing on picket lines, as well as becoming the Michigan director of the Communist Party-backed American Youth for Democracy.
At Wayne State she had met Rolf Cahn, another communist folk singer, and they married in 1946, settling in San Francisco; they were expelled from the Party, however, because Cahn, who gave judo lessons, had taught a police officer in one of his classes.
Barbara Dane hosted music shows on radio and television in the city, and in 1957 she released her debut album Trouble in Mind, which the British critic Leonard Feather described as “Bessie Smith in stereo”. By that time she had already appeared on stage with Louis Armstrong, and in 1959 he invited her on to a TV special he was recording: “Did you get that chick? She’s a gasser!” he told Time.
In 1961 she opened Sugar Hill, a blues club in San Francisco, and led the house band. Three years later she moved to New York and became the unofficial matriarch of Greenwich Village, where she befriended Bob Dylan – “He used to turn up on stage uninvited when I was singing,” she recalled.
He would play her his new songs, and though his fame soon outstripped hers, she was happy to have politics as her driving force. “Bob was hungry for fame and that never interested me,” she said. His manager, Albert Grossman, told her to give him a call when she got her “priorities straight”.
But her priorities remained unwavering, and through the ensuing decade of social and political upheaval Barbara Dane was in the vanguard of the fight for a better world. She sang at demos and peace rallies across the country and became the first American musician to tour post-revolutionary Cuba. In 1970 she founded the Paredon label with her husband Irwin Silber to release protest records; it was later subsumed into the Smithsonian Folkways imprint, part of the Smithsonian Institution.
Barbara Dane married Rolf Cahn in 1946; they had a son, Jesse, who also became a folk singer, but they divorced in 1950. She married, secondly, a jeweller, Byron Menendez, with whom she had a son, Pablo, who became a musician in Cuba, and Nina, who became a leading figure in the world of flamenco. They divorced in 1963, and the following year she married Irwin Silber, a Communist activist and editor of Sing Out! magazine. He died in 2010.
Barbara Dane, born May 12 1927, died October 20 2024