'Bob Dylan was a lovable young scallywag!' Barbara Dane, singer who blazed a trail through folk, blues and activism

As a singer-songwriter who was as dedicated to social change as her craft, Barbara Dane, who has died aged 97, was a singularly inspiring figure in American music.

I spoke with him by phone last week as he was cared for at a home hospice in Oakland, California, due to a heart condition. As a singer, songwriter and activist for more than 80 years, finding kinship with everyone from Bob Dylan to Louis Armstrong, she displayed an abundance of courage and compassion, as documented in that new film, The 9 Lives of Barbara Dene.

“That's it,” Dane said when I tentatively asked how he was doing. “I'm struggling to breathe. I don't have much time.” In US folk and blues circles, Dane was revered for breaking down racial and gender barriers and never compromising. “He's always been a role model and a hero of mine – musically and politically,” says Bonnie Wright, Dane. A Dylan blurb graces the cover of his 2022 autobiography: “Barbara is someone who is willing to follow her conscience. She is, if one must use the word.”

In the UK, his star is rather low: he is best known for the northern soul anthem I'm on My Way, recently reissued as a 7in. Dane made 1960s recordings with industry mavericks Lee Hazlewood and Lester Seal. “It was very straightforward,” he said. “When I heard the finished record, he went and added horns and turned it into a dance tune. It got me some airplay but I never thought much of it until I heard how crazy they were about it in England. Then Samsung used it to soundtrack a commercial and I got royalties for the first time – Lee and Lester never paid me royalties.”

Dane was born and raised in Detroit, the eldest child of a pharmacist who publicly admonished nine-year-old Barbara for serving soda to a black man in his drugstore. His and the customer's humiliation led Dane on a lifelong path to fight racism and injustice. A teenage communist, she began singing folk, then blues (“Women blues singers wrote and sang about their lives with such feeling and directness”). In his remarkable autobiography, This Bell Still Rings: My Life of Defiance and Song, Dane recalls interviews with Woody Guthrie, Big Bill Brunzy, Pete Seeger, Earl Hines, Jack Teagarden, Count Basie, to name a few.

Dane released her first album, Trouble in Mind, in 1957 – proclaimed “Bessie Smith in stereo” by British jazz critic Leonard Feather – and in 1959, Louis Armstrong invited Barbara to join him for a TV special, sharing the stage with her. . . “Did you get that chick? He's a carrot!” Armstrong will announce to Time magazine.

Relocating to New York City made Dane the unwitting godmother of Greenwich Village's burgeoning folk scene. Inevitably, he befriended Dylan: “When I was singing he would come on stage uninvited!” He said Dylan would play him his new song, “a great talent hidden in a lovely young scallywag”. An actor is playing Dane in the upcoming Dylan biopic A complete unknown but he dislikes celebrities. “Bob was hungry for fame and that never interested me.”

Instead, Dane turned to activism: vocal in the civil rights and anti-Vietnam War movements. In 1966, he was one of the first US artists to tour post-revolutionary Cuba, then singing during the war in North Vietnam. All the while Dane continued to champion black artists, recording with Lightnin' Hopkins then introducing the psych-soul band The Chambers Brothers at the Newport Folk Festival: the 1966 album Barbara Dane and the Chambers Brothers is perhaps the first US album cover to feature a white woman and equal to black men.

“The Chambers brothers were great talents,” Dane said. “Early in L.A., I suggested that they join me in singing freedom songs for the movement in Mississippi but, since they were originally from Mississippi, there was no way they were going back there. A wise decision on their part.”

While many of his contemporaries went on to make fortunes, Dane fell into the shadows of American music. Partly this was due to his disdain for the music industry – he rejected Dylan's powerhouse manager, Albert Grossman, while he insisted that he should leave politics. His love of vintage blues and trad jazz made Dane old-fashioned during the rock hegemony. He also admitted to self-sabotage: in 1960, when both Capitol and Atlantic offered him contracts, he chose Capitol, thus missing out on joining America's then-premier blues and jazz label. Singing appearances on the hugely popular TV variety show hosted by Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson went awry. His political beliefs meant Dane was blacklisted by the Hootenanny folk TV show, then canceled by the State Department on a goodwill tour with Armstrong and Sonny Terry and Brownie McGee. “It would never happen for a brossy blonde woman to publicly criticize the United States all over Africa, Asia and Europe,” he noted.

In 1970, Dane founded Paredon Records, a label that allowed him to release albums alongside music he embraced from around the world. Her 1973 album I Hate The Capitalist System is brilliantly blunt, an overlooked gem, with Working Class Woman a fiercely protest song. The album feels even more relevant now.

“Capitalism has made things worse than they were then, for sure,” he said. “It has increased economic insecurity and that's why we see people turning to Trump and conspiracy theories and religion, which gives them easy answers. As a Marxist I believe that a period of socialism must 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.”

He outlived most of his contemporaries and remembered Dane comedian Lenny Bruce and folk singer Phil Ochs – both radical artists who died young – fondly. “Lenny was dedicated to taking out all the crooks and they paid him for it. Phil was bipolar. People focus on the tragedy of his life when they should be celebrating his stunning songs.”

Struggling throughout his life, Dane never lost his love for music. “Music has a power that brings people together. You can take a lot of people and make them feel a sense of kinship in a way that nothing else can with a song.”

Fittingly, Smithsonian Folkways has compiled a double CD career retrospective, Barbara Dane: Hot Jazz, Cool Blues and Hard Hitting Songs, while Jasmine Records is reissuing her early albums. With Maureen Gosling's compelling documentary and that Northern Soul 45 mala, it appears Dane is finally getting the respect he's long deserved.

“I was interested in interacting with people, not fame,” he said. “If film and reruns allow me to continue this after I'm gone, well, so be it.”