‘The 9 Lives of Barbara Dane’: Documentary on a progressive culture superwoman

Barbara Dane with the Chambers Brothers

You might be asking, “Who is Barbara Dane?” The most overlooked “superwoman” of progressive music culture performed onstage with the likes of Bob Dylan, Phil Ochs, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, and Peter, Paul & Mary, toured the world with famed cultural icons including Jane Fonda, Donald Sutherland, Bonnie Raitt, Louis Armstrong and the Chambers Brothers, to name a few, yet somehow managed to elude the front page news.

This lack of much deserved attention in history books is now being corrected with the timely release of The 9 Lives of Barbara Dane edited by the accomplished Maureen Gosling, a veteran who cut her teeth with the likes of Werner Herzog (Burden of Dreams) and Les Blank (Chulas Fronteras). She’s no stranger to politics and music, as exemplified in This Ain’t No Mouse Music.

After years of fundraising and gathering priceless photos, video clips and interviews from the many places Dane performed in the world, Gosling delivers this moving documentary framed with excerpts from Dane’s final concert at the age of 95. The film is loaded with reference to the many lives Dane has lived (presumably 9), spanning her early years as a young folk guitarist/singer in her hometown of Detroit, singing the Blues in Chicago and New York, while eventually settling in California performing traditional jazz along with the many other styles she mastered throughout her long and active career.

So you might now be asking, “Why is she relatively unknown?” It might be that fame and attention were never her goal. She preferred rather to perform live for local peace and justice events than being on the big stages around the world, though she ended up doing that also. Another reason might be that it’s in the capitalists’ interest to keep her revolutionary messages as far away from the masses as possible. It wasn’t accidental that her big planned European State Department tour with Louie Armstrong was canceled because of her political activities. The provocatively titled I Hate the Capitalist System is just one of her many progressive releases, also an album featuring her and Lightning Hopkins that broke racial barriers for being the first to show a Black male and white woman holding arms on the cover.

Dane was involved in the GI Movement of the Vietnam War Era and traveled with the FTA Show (Free the Army) along with Fonda and Sutherland among others. She was quoted during those days about her lack of fame: “I was too stubborn to hire one of the greed-head managers, probably because I’m a woman who likes to speak for herself. I always made my own deals and contracts, and after figuring out the economics of it, I was free to choose when and where I worked, able to spend lots more time with my three children and doing political work, and even brought home more money in the end, by not going for the ‘big time.’ I did make some really nice records, because I was able to choose and work with wonderfully gifted musicians.”

She traveled to places where our government didn’t want Americans to go, like North Vietnam and Cuba, where she became the first American artist to perform after the victorious Cuban Revolution in 1959. She chose to send her son, Pablo Menéndez, to school there, where he stayed and later became one of the country’s best known musical artists, leading the highly popular band Mezcla.

An opening scene in the doc shows Dane flipping through the pages of a massive looseleaf binder that contains her entire FBI Red Squad files. The many names she sported (thanks to her three husbands) was considered by the FBI as using deceptive aliases! She was under surveillance since her early days as a folk singer, and thanks to our government, many of her political activities and accomplishments have been recorded for history.

Her accomplishments are endless. In 1961, she opened her own club, Sugar Hill: Home of the Blues, on San Francisco’s Broadway. In 1970, Dane and her writer husband Irwin Silber founded Paredon Records, which produced over 50 amazing one-of-a-kind revolutionary titles, such as Huey Newton Speaks, poetry from Ho Chi Minh, speeches from Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, music from the Spanish Civil War and so many more, which are now all preserved, along with liner notes that you can download, in the Smithsonian Folkways Collection.

I personally had the honor to work with Barbara Dane on several occasions, including a 1999 Detroit concert with guests including Motown’s Martha Reeves and folksinger Josh White, Jr., featuring chronological samplings of the styles of music she performed throughout her varied career—folk, Blues, jazz, Greek music, spirituals, and more. Reeves commended Dane (who left Detroit before the Motown music phenomenon) for helping to set the stage for the upcoming Black artists who went on to become world famous.

Director and editor Maureen Gosling has pulled off an amazing task, similar to herding cats (another gloss on 9 Lives), covering the life of a committed woman activist with an open mind, a determined personality and the desire to effect social change. It should also be noted that any film associated with the venerable actor/director/producer Danny Glover deserves serious attention from the progressive community. Dane’s daughter Nina Menéndez, artistic director of several flamenco festivals and producer on this film, deserves tremendous credit for monitoring her mother’s health and work schedule while assisting in bringing her story to a larger audience.

The fact that Dane chose to end her life at the age of 97 through legal assisted suicide after years of deteriorating health is a final statement from a loving woman who made serious choices in her life, who knew her purpose on earth and was content knowing she gave everything in the struggle for a better world for all. Now the world will have an opportunity to learn about this extraordinary human being, thanks to this seminal film and the efforts of those who knew and loved her.

Read a memoir of his friendship with her by our Berlin correspondent Victor Grossman, and this book review of her recently published autobiography.

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CONTRIBUTOR

Bill Meyer

Bill Meyer writes movie reviews for People’s World, often from film festivals. He is a keyboardist at Bill Meyer Music and a current member of the Detroit Federation of Musicians. He lives in Hamtramck, Michigan.