A life of defiance and song
Singer and activist Barbara Dane founded label to provide a platform for music born of freedom struggles
Barbara Dane keeps a copy of her 4-inchthick FBI file in a binder in the living room of her Oakland, California, home. One night, the 93-yearold singer and activist’s daughter, Nina Menendez, was leafing through it and noticed a page she hadn’t spotted before: a Los Angeles Times clipping from a 1972 concert at the Ash Grove. Dane was the headliner, where she first encountered the soulful folk band Yellow Pearl, whose music she would go on to release through her then-nascent record label, Paredon Records.
The file doubles as a testament to Dane’s work as an opposition artist for the better part of a century. The earliest entries are from when she was 18, spearheading a chapter of Pete Seeger’s labor-music organization People’s Songs in her native Detroit and singing on picket lines to protest racial inequality and to support unions.
“I knew I was a singer for life, but where I would aim it didn’t come forward until then,” Dane said. “I saw, ‘Oh, you can use your voice to move people.’ ”
A supercut of Dane’s audacious career as a musician — which, since the late 1950s and 1960s, has encompassed jazz, folk and the blues — would include the mother of three appearing on a televised bandstand alongside Louis Armstrong and singing “Solidarity Forever,” her favorite song, onstage with Seeger supporting striking coal miners. Her ethos was anti-capitalist and adaptable: She wove progressive politics into her sole album for Capitol, “On My Way” from 1961, and brought raw rock ’n’ roll verve to the protest doo-wop of her 1966 Folkways album with the Chambers Brothers. She performed in Mississippi church basements during Freedom Summer and with anti-war GIs in coffee houses.
Dane learned early on that her outspokenness and politics meant commercial success would evade her. She started Paredon for the explicit purpose of providing a platform to music born of freedom struggles around the world that wasn’t beholden to the whims of the marketplace.
Paredon has often been considered an aside in Dane’s story but is receiving more attention now:
The label turned 50 last year and is the subject of a new “digital exhibition” by Smithsonian Folkways, the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution. Co-founded by Dane and her husband, Irwin Silber, a founder and editor of Sing Out! magazine who died in 2010, Paredon was a people’s label through and through, releasing music produced by liberation movements in Vietnam, Palestine, Angola, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Greece, Uruguay, Mexico, the United States and beyond.
“I saw that whenever the movement in a particular
country was strong, there was an emerging music to go with it,” Dane said. “It struck me that this stuff needed to be heard in the voices of the people who wrote the songs.”
Taken together, the 50 albums that Paredon released from 1970 to 1985 form a staggering archive of art and dissent, of resilience and sung histories within histories. The music reflects civil rights, women’s rights and anti-colonial movements, and illustrates the interconnectedness of these revolutions. Dane had been a venue owner, concert
booker, radio DJ, television host and writer. With Paredon, she became a folklorist of resistance.
“Paredon didn’t put out music about politics. They put out music of politics,” said Josh MacPhee, the author of “An Encyclopedia of Political Record Labels” and a founder of the Brooklyn-based Interference Archive, which chronicles the cultural production of social movements. “These are not artists commenting on political issues. These were sounds that were produced by people in motion trying to transform their lives.”
Nobuko Miyamoto of Yellow Pearl, the group of Asian American activists Dane discovered when they shared a bill in 1972, said her band was unlikely to have recorded for another label. “Barbara had just done an album called ‘I Hate the Capitalist System,’ and that convinced us this was the right record company,” Miyamoto said, referring to Dane’s 1973 collection.
The album Yellow Pearl released on Paredon was the poetic and groundbreaking “A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America,” which included anthems like “We Are the Children” and “Free the Land,” featuring backing vocals from Mutulu Shakur (his stepson, Tupac Shakur, sang along to “A Grain of Sand” as a child, according to Smithsonian Folkways Magazine). It was recorded in 2 ½ days at a small New York studio, and that no-frills spontaneity brings the music alive still.
“Barbara was a pretty brave soul to offer to do this,” Miyamoto said. “And because of that, our music was preserved. So I was very grateful. If it weren’t for her, that music really would have been lost.”
Defying a government ban, Dane’s travels in Cuba initially inspired her to found Paredon. In 1966, she was one of the first artists to tour post-revolutionary Cuba, and she returned to Havana a year later as part of an international meeting of artists, where she met musicians from around the globe who were writing social justice songs.
Back home, Dane told everyone, “I’m going to start a record label,’ ” she recalled. “I just kept saying that and saying that. ‘But I’m looking for the funding.’ ” A friend came through, connecting Dane with a “wayward millionaire” who sent her $17,000.
The first release was “Cancion Protesta: Protest Song of Latin America,” which opened with a field recording of Fidel Castro invoking the power of art to “win people over” and “awaken emotions” recorded by Dane herself. Paredon also released spoken-word albums featuring speeches and statements of Huey Newton, Che Guevara and Ho Chi Minh. Mostly, Dane continued to discover music “on the fly,” she said, as she traveled the world singing out against the Vietnam War. Material from Chile and Northern Ireland came to her in a clandestine fashion by some artists who remained anonymous.
Reflecting on the label’s legacy now, Dane is hopeful it holds lessons for the era of Black Lives Matter. “One must participate in the emerging struggle around them in order to make art that reflects it,” she said.
“If you’re an artist, you’ve already got tools. 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.”
Debut author Nancy Johnson wanted to tell human interest stories when she was a broadcast news journalist years ago, but she recalls there were too few opportunities to do that.
Now, the Lake Meadows native has all the opportunity she can handle with her first book, “The Kindest Lie.” The novel tells the story of Ruth Tuttle, a Black engineer living in Bronzeville with her husband. The couple are celebrating the 2008 presidential election of Barack Obama when a truth from Ruth’s youth is revealed: Before she went off to get an Ivy League education, she had a child that she gave up for adoption. The secret sets Tuttle on the path home to fictional town Ganton, Indiana, to track down the child’s whereabouts. During her search for answers, Tuttle takes readers on her journey, a journey that brings a white boy nicknamed Midnight into her life and raises questions of class, race, identity, forgiveness and sacrifice.
“The Kindest Lie” took Johnson six years to perfect, and the result has been critically lauded. It appeared on several 2021 must-read lists, including ones in Oprah, Elle and Good Housekeeping as well as the Chicago Tribune.
“It’s surreal and a lot more than I expected,” she said. “I don’t know how to describe it, except that it’s just been wonderful to see the acclaim that the book is receiving. But most importantly has been the response from readers, people who read it and connect with it. I’ve heard from people with some tragic stories. Someone messaged me about the fact that her mother or grandmother committed suicide, and there were a lot of things that weren’t dealt with in their family and reading my book just provided a certain degree of understanding and healing for this woman. When I hear these personal stories from people, and seeing how my book has brought them some new understanding or new insight, that’s more than I could ask for.”
We talked with Johnson about her novel and the conversations that started in 2020 about class, race and hope. The following interview has been condensed and edited.
Q: Why this novel now?
A: I actually started writing it around 2013. I was inspired by the events of 2008 with the presidential election of Barack Obama. It was a time of such palpable hope for a lot of people in the country, because we were transcending a barrier by electing a Black president for the first time. And it was very hopeful for me too, kind of bittersweet.
My father was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer in 2008. I convinced him to vote early, which he did. He cast his last vote for Obama; he died about two weeks after the election. At the same time, I kept hearing people say that we were now entering a post-racial era, because we had a Black president, and I knew that was not true. I could see how divided we were on social media feeds. I was just seeing the vitriol there, particularly between Black and white America. And so I was interested in exploring that in terms of how far apart we are as people as well as looking at some of what we have in common too. At that time, we were going through the Great Recession. So it was a time of economic anxiety. And I believe that economic anxiety exacerbates racial tension. There are so many parallels with these two periods mirroring each other, because we were making history with our election of Obama in 2008. In 2021, we’ve elected a Black and South Asian woman as our vice president, which is historic. We see racial tensions in both periods of time. Just so many parallels between the two.
Q: Who is the audience for the book?
A: Because I’m Black, quite often I’m writing for our community, because growing up I didn’t see myself on the page, in the books that I read very often. I really wanted to write a book for Black people to read, and for us to see ourselves in our full complexity, that there’s not just one way to be Black in America. As I kept going with the story and thinking about the racial divide, I was interested in white America reading it — and connecting with the story and understanding the Black community, understanding racism in a new way. As I was revising and editing this last year-and-ahalf, because we were going through all of this racial violence in the country, so many white people started their anti-racism curriculum. They started reading all these anti-racism books, and a lot of those books are nonfiction. And I started thinking about my audience being some of those white people who were reading those anti-racism books, because this was a work of fiction and I think there’s a power in a piece of fiction, to build empathy and to help people walk in the footsteps of somebody whose life experiences are different from their own. Because when they’re reading these anti-racism nonfiction books, there’s this tendency among some to say, “OK, well, that’s somebody else’s problem. I’m not racist. I wasn’t alive during slavery.” So not really taking that accountability and responsibility for how they’re benefiting from it. I think through a book like this, it’s not preaching anything to them. I’m not being didactic at all, but they can just fall into the characters in a story, and understand issues of race and class that way, and it’s a lot less threatening and a better way to engage.
Q: Can you tell me more about the title?
A: When I say “The Kindest Lie,” I’m talking about the lies that we tell for the best reasons, with the best of intentions. And the lies that we tell to protect the people we love; those are the kinds of lies that you see Mama and Eli telling in the book and the lies that Ruth is telling others in her life all these years, that lie of omission, not talking about the fact that she has a son that she walked away from and the lies that she tells herself because she wanted this better life. Also on a macro level, it’s about the lies that America has told itself, that it is more honorable and decent and equitable than it really is.
Q: Everybody started having these conversations about race in 2020; do you think people are really in it?
A: I do fear that a lot of what we see with the dialogue around race may be more performative. I do think there are some people who want to have a real dialogue, but they don’t know what to do, because we can talk about race and racism all day long, but what are the solutions? How do we move beyond that? How do we fix it? I think part of it is acknowledgment — acknowledging racism, acknowledging white privilege. Once you acknowledge it, then we can start the conversation about how we fix it. I think as long as we stay in that echo chamber of talking to the people who agree with us, that we’re never going to move beyond where we are today. We’ve had this 400-plus-year history of America, with its foot on our necks and so it’s going to take more than just talking for us to be able to rise.
Q: Do you think the conversations we are having about race and class now are different from the conversations we were having when Obama was first elected? Have we evolved at all?
A: I would say in the Black community we’ve evolved to the point where we’re tired of just talking. We want to see action. It’s about moving beyond the talk and putting some plans and some action behind the rhetoric. At least from what I could see this past year, I feel like there are more people who are beginning to recognize and understand white privilege and what that means. I think they’re starting to understand it more and to see it. The next step is really about what are we going to do about it.
Johnson will talk about her book with “The Great Believers” author Rebecca Makkai on March 8 at Volumes Bookcafe, 1474 N. Milwaukee Ave. at 7 p.m.
By Nancy Johnson, William Morrow, 336 pages, $27.99