Barbara Dane Was Definitely Not In It For the Money
From 1976 to 1988, radio station WKCR at New York’s Columbia University carried “Cowboy Joe’s Radio Ranch,” a show on which host Paul Aaron played every version he could find of the song “Ragtime Cowboy Joe.”
That was a lot of versions. “Ragtime Cowboy Joe” was written in 1912 by Grant Clarke, Lewis F. Muir and Maurice Abrahams and became the second-best selling record of that year, thanks to a recording by Bob Roberts. Since then it has become the marching song of the University of Wyoming and has been sung by, among others, Jimmy Stewart, Betty Hutton, Dan Hicks and the Chipmunks.
One version Paul Aaron was never able to play, however, was Barbara Dane’s, because she wouldn’t sing it.
Barbara Dane, who died October 20 in her Oakland home at the age of 97, was a lovely singer, a powerful contralto who by the 1950s had been attracting critical and folk-circle attention for years, but was still relatively unknown to national audiences. Then she got the kind of offer that can change that situation.
“I was invited on a big national radio show,” Dane said in a 2003 interview. “But I blew it because I wouldn’t sing ‘Ragtime Cowboy Joe.’ “
What she got from the experience instead was what she called a valuable life lesson.
“That’s when I learned,” she said, “that you could say ‘No’ to a guy in a suit.”
Truth is, Barbara Dane spent much of her performing life literally or figuratively saying ‘No’ to guys in suits.
Around that same time “Ragtime Cowboy Joe” stayed in the corral, she was invited to front Alvino Rey’s band, a gig that in those days still mattered. That one too she turned down.
“I’d had a little taste of that musical world,” she said. “I knew all about ‘Wearing a low-cut dress, girlie?’ And I would have been singing pop standards like ‘Embraceable You.’ Life is bigger than that. Somehow it seemed better to sing for striking workers outside an auto plant.”
Dane didn’t hate popular songs. Over the years she recorded classy versions of faves like “Besame Mucho,” “My Melancholy Baby” and “Since I Fell For You.”
But her wheelhouse was songs about social and economic issues, like “Brother Can You Spare a Dime,” “Joe Hill” and the unsubtle “I Hate The Capitalist System.”
As if to underscore that last assertion, early in her life she was an actual Communist, and she never stopped pushing for things like workers’ rights.
“I cut my teeth singing for striking workers at the auto plants” near where she grew up in Michigan, she said. “That was where I learned to really project my voice. I’d studied bel canto singing, but with me it’s really like I’m singing from the balls of my feet.”
While many of her songs would loosely fall into the folk idiom, she said she never cared much for the term.
“A lot of people consign ‘folk music’ to songs around the campfire,” she said. “Even tough songs are sometimes sung in a very happy way. The [original intention] needs to be revived. These songs are an important part of America.”
Ironically, she mused, “While most of these songs never made the top 10, they’re known by more people than the commercial stuff.”
Like a good anti-capitalist, she added that some songs are too important to be owned by anybody. “To me, a song like ‘Brother Can You Spare A Dime’ is part of our common vocabulary. I know that goes against the ‘intellectual property’ discussion, but one is either profiting from them or trying to make the world a little better.”
That assigns songs considerable power, which Dane said they have. “Sometimes just the act of singing creates a sense of community,” she said. “Incredibly valuable songs, like ‘We Shall Not Be Moved,’ you feel in your heart. Every country in the world has its own verses to ‘We Shall Not Be Moved.’ “
So Dane spent her life singing about things she felt were wrong or just needed changing, from the segregation and low pay for Detroit auto workers after World War II to the Civil Rights movement of the ’50s to anti-war movements of the ’60s and then again in the early 2000s.
She received steady critical praise over those years as she blended socially conscious songs with traditional jazz and blues. Still, it wasn’t a combination that pleased everyone.
Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman “wanted to manage me before he signed all the famous people,” she recalled, and one of his moves was arranging for her to join a State Department international musical goodwill tour, where the government showcased some of America’s most appealing products.
“I was set to go out with Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry,” she said, referring to the long-time blues team. “The State Department cancelled it.”
Like “Ragtime Cowboy Joe” and “Embraceable You,” Grossman too fell by her roadside, and Dane never did get the big popular breakthrough.
Did that bother her? What do you think?
“I have zero regrets about the choices I’ve made,” she said. “I’ve met all the best people through the movements I’ve been involved in. I’ve sung about things that matter. I’ve been connected to the whole stream of life.”
