On October 20, singer, songwriter and activist Barbara Dane died at the age of 97 in Oakland, California, where she had lived for decades. She was suffering from heart failure and died through assisted suicide.
Dane experienced racial and class antagonisms in her earliest years growing up in Detroit during the Great Depression. From her teens on she hated the capitalist political-economy that both fed on and encouraged these hatreds and divisions, and throughout her life she called herself a socialist or communist or Marxist.
She loved music and became a professional singer, but her style or genre was hard to categorize. She sang jazz, the blues, R&B and folk equally well, and performed with music legends as diverse as Louis Armstrong, Muddy Waters, Sweet Honey and the Rock, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and more. Her voice itself ranged widely and was equally at home in those different genres: it could be cheery and upbeat on a big band jazz recording, deep and soulful when she sang blues or R&B, worn down and sad when she sang blues or songs about working class struggles, but explosive and powerful when she sang protest or political songs.
She threw herself into social struggles more deeply than almost any other artist of her time or any other, performing at marches, rallies, teach-ins, even travelling to Cuba and North Vietnam to support their struggles against imperialism. She was equally at home in the struggles for Black liberation, workers’ rights, women’s rights, free speech and students’ rights, and against the Vietnam War. Her favorite song was Solidarity Forever, the rousing anthem of workers and union power, which she often sung with fellow folk singer and activist Pete Seeger. Reflecting on the relationship between art and politics, she once said that “one must participate in the emerging struggle around them in order to make art that reflects it…if you don’t know what to write about, remember that truth and reality is what we’re after. You have to know reality to tell the truth about it. You got to get out and be a part of it.”
And to a greater extent than probably any artist in her time or ours, she was explicitly Marxist. In 1973 she released an album bluntly entitled I Hate the Capitalist System. On it, songs like Working Class Woman is sung as a working woman with depth, pain and understanding, while Ludlow Massacre tells the violent tale of the massacre of striking miners in 1914 Colorado. She understood that the roots of much of the racism, sexism, warfare, violence and oppression in the world could be found inherently in the capitalist system, and she knew that it had to go.
She discussed these views in an interview in the last weeks before she died. She said: “Capitalism has made things worse than they were then, sure…It’s increased economic insecurity and that’s why we find people turning to Trump and conspiracy theories and religion, the stuff that gives them easy answers. As a Marxist, I believe that a period of socialism has to follow. If I’m wrong, well, I won’t be here but our world can’t survive. Capitalism and climate change have created a crisis.”
Today we remember and honor Barbara Dane, an artist and freedom fighter who wouldn’t give up or give in even in her final days.
