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 in2 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.”
Scientists may have discovered why cold sores caused by herpes simplex virus (HSV) are triggered by stress, illness and sunburn.
The finding could lead to new ways to prevent recurring cold sores and herpes-related eye disease, U.S. and British researchers say. More than half of Americans are infected with herpes simplex virus. It is spread through close contact with someone who has the infection and can re-emerge at any time.
“Now (that) we understand more what can induce HSV to come out of hiding and reactivate, we can start to understand how this works at the level of the infected nerve cell,” said researcher Anna Cliffe, an assistant professor of microbiology, immunology and cancer biology at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.
Current therapies against HSV act to prevent the virus from replicating once it comes out of hiding. No therapies yet can target the infection in its latent stage, Cliffe said.
“Herpes simplex virus hides in nerve cells for life, so once you have herpes simplex, you always have it,” she said. “Sometimes, it comes out of hiding, and this can cause clinical disease, like cold sores, eye disease and genital lesions.”
But scientists didn’t fully understand what may act on the cells and cause the virus to come out of hiding.
“We found that if the neurons become more prone to fire impulses, then the virus can come out of hiding,” Cliffe said.
A cytokine called interleukin 1 is released into the body when people become stressed or have a fever. It is also found in skin cells and can be released when they are exposed to ultraviolet light, including the sun. All of these can reactivate the herpes virus and trigger cold sores, she said.
Repeated reactivation of HSV can also affect the eyes. The virus leads to herpes keratitis and can result in blindness if left untreated. HSV infection has also been linked to Alzheimer’s disease progression.
It’s not clear if these findings have implications for treating HSV or preventing it, Cliffe said. But this and future research might identify targets that can alter the way the virus responds to stress.
The findings were recently published online in the journal eLife.