Folk, blues, and jazz singer Barbara Dane was born in Detroit on May 12, 1927. Smithsonian Folkways released a retrospective of the singer and political activist who has worked with many musical giants of the 1950s, 1960s, and beyond.
In her long career, Dane performed and recorded with artists such as Louis Armstrong, Memphis Slim, Otis Spahn, Memphis Slim, Willie Dixon, Pete Seeger, Mose Allison, Big Mama Thornton, Lightnin’ Hopkins, T-Bone Walker, and many others.
Below she sings with Louis Armstrong on the Timex All-Star Jazz Show, which was broadcast on CBS on January 7, 1959. Armstrong famously described Dane with the compliment, “She’s a gasser!”
She also made a wonderful album with The Chambers Brothers. Here, they perform “I am a Weary and Lonesome Traveler” from Barbara Dane and the Chambers Brothers.
A recent album from Smithsonian Folkways collects a number of Dane’s recordings into a retrospective. Below is a promo for the two-CD retrospective, Hot Jazz, Cool Blues & Hard-Hitting Songs (2018).
More on Barbara Dane
Dane had a long career with great music while also being active politically for such causes as the civil rights, womens, and anti-war movements. Her work for social justice led to the FBI monitoring her. She also worked to provide attention to other artists around the world. If you are unfamiliar with her work, her website is a good place to start. And another resource is the audio documentary, A Wild Woman Sings the Blues: The Life and Music of Barbara Dane.
Dane continued to be active into the twenty-first century. Below is a video of her performing and talking about her career at the San Francisco Library in 2014.
After this article was originally posted, Barbara Dane passed away on October 20, 2024 at the age of 97. In 2023, a documentary film about her life was released entitled The 9 Lives of Barbara Dane.
What is your favorite Barbara Dane recording? Leave your two cents in the comments.
In the Martin Scorsese documentary about Bob Dylan’s early career, No Direction Home, Dylan recounts being inspired when he stumbled upon a record player with a record in it. The song that inspired him was “Drifting Too Far From the Shore.”
When Dylan was in kindergarten (in some tellings he is older), his father Abe bought a house on Seventh Avenue in Hibbing, Minnesota. Dylan ultimately lived in the home throughout his childhood and through high school.
For Dylan, though, something magical happened when they moved into the new home. As they were moving in, the boy found a guitar left behind by the previous occupants. And he found something else with “mystical overtones.”
There was a large mahogany turntable with a 78 rpm record in it. The record was of the song “Drifting Too Far From the Shore,” which was written by Charles E. Moody. The young boy turned on the record player and listened.
Drifting too far from shore, You’re drifting too far from shore, Come to Jesus today, Let Him show you the way You’re drifting too far from shore.
Drifting Too Far From the Shore
Dylan has recounted that the record he found in the house was probably the version recorded by The Stanley Brothers. But he also has noted it could have been the Bill Monroe version.
Here are The Stanley Brothers singing “Drifting Too Far From the Shore.”
Dylan has described how as a little boy turning on the record player, the sound of the record “made me feel like I was somebody else.” The sound disconnected him from his life at the time, making him feel almost as if he were born to the wrong parents.
Dylan later paid his own homage to “Drifting Too Far From the Shore.” He wrote his own song with the title “Driftin’ Too Far From Shore.” That song, which appeared on Dylan’s Knocked Out Loaded (1986) album, otherwise has little in common with the song the young boy heard in the new home.
Of course, with Dylan, one has to be careful about putting too much weight on his tales. He often tells entertaining stories about his early life that are more legend than truth. But still, it is easy to imagine a little boy finding a guitar and a record player that would have an impact on his life, even if a large part of that impact is in memory.
I like to accept the story not so much for Dylan, but to think about the people who lived in the house before the Dylans. I imagine the family moving out and leaving some things behind. Maybe the record player was too expensive to move. Or maybe they forgot the items. Or maybe the items just were not worth much to them.
And then, how could they know that their left-behind possessions would affect history by inspiring the greatest poet of our generation? It is a great story about how we never know how our lives affect others, even people we have never met.
Photo by Chimesfreedom. Leave your two cents in the comments.
YouTube often can help you find artists you have never heard before. I start with a search for a musician I like, and then I start clicking through other artists’ videos on the side. That is how I recently ran across Arlo McKinley & The Lonesome Sound.
The band released its self-titled debut album in 2014. But there is not a lot about them on the Internet. There is no proper Arlo McKinley & The Lonesome Sound website beyond the Bandcamp site.
There is a Facebook page keeping fans updated about their performances (around 2,300 Likes so far). But the band — whose members are from the Cincinnati area — was recently listed as the most popular band in that Ohio city.
Their Arlo McKinley & The Lonesome Sound album is darn good, featuring a great country lead voice from McKinley with great backing vocals and band. It might remind you a bit of Whiskeytown.
Sure enough, Arlo McKinley & The Lonesome Sound list Whiskeytown among the band’s influences, along with Neil Young, The Band, Otis Reading, Circle Jerks, The Ramones, Larry Sparks, Keith Whitley, Chamberlain, Whiskeytown, Gram Parsons, and Misfits, George Jones. There is maybe a little similarity to Tyler Childers, who is the artist I started with on YouTube.
That is a good mix of influences, and Arlo McKineley & The Lonesome Sound delivers. Do not take my word for it. Check out some of their music. One of my favorites is “Just Like the Rest.” McKinley’s voice perfectly conveys the heartache in the heartbreak song. The following performance is from the 2014 Bellwether Live at Buckle Up Music Festival.
Arlo McKinley & The Lonesome Sound is made up of McKinley, Tyler Lockard, Brian Pumphry, Zac Roe, Sylvia Mitchell, and Sarah Davis. Their live performances often concentrate around the Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia area. But with their talent, look for them in your neck of the woods one day, hopefully with a new album. What is your favorite song by Arlo McKinely & The Lonesome Sound? Leave your two cents in the comments.
On a Friday the 13th, one of the greatest songwriters of all time, John Prine, took the stage at Radio City Music Hall to launch his first album of new material in thirteen years. With some help of a great band, opener Sturgill Simpson, and special guest Brandi Carlile, the 71-year-old showed that he remains a great entertainer too.
The April 13, 2018 show began with Sturgill Simpson opening for Prine, taking the stage alone with a guitar for about an hour. Few performers can command such a large audience alone, but Simpson is one of them, even as he admitted being nervous before coming out.
Simpson’s set included many of his best songs, with a highlight being his performance of “Turtles All the Way Down” back-to-back with “Just Let Go.” Both of those songs appeared on Metamodern Sounds in Country Music (2014). Other songs included a moving rendition of “Oh Sara.” And he played the opening song from A Sailor’s Guide to Earth (2016), “Welcome to Earth (Pollywog).”
Simpson also played some traditional songs and covers, including When in Rome’s “The Promise,” which he had included in Metamodern Sounds, and the Bee Gees’ “Come on Over.” And he began “Long White Line” with a riff that took a detour into Bruce Springsteen’s “I’m On Fire.”
One has to admire Simpson, who could fill the seats just on his own, having the respect for Prine to be his opener. Simpson is one of the best music artists today, in or outside the country genre, so it was great to see him in this context.
Simpson also announced that while he will be playing a number of festivals until September, after those shows he plans to take a year off from touring. His wife is having another son and he wishes to spend time watching his children grow.
John Prine Takes the Stage
John Prine took the Radio City Music Hall stage for the first time in his career with a sharp band, including new members Ken Blevins on drums and and Fats Kaplan playing fiddle, mandolin, and lap steel guitar. At one point Prine explained how much it meant to be on this stage when he recounted seeing Bette Midler at the venue performing his song “Hello in There.” At the time, he dreamed of one day playing here.
Because the show was the album-release show for The Tree of Forgiveness (2018), many of those new songs made it into the set. But there was plenty of room for old gems.
Early on, Prine played a wonderful rendition of his classic “Bruised Orange (Chain of Sorrow).” And there was a fun performance of “Grandpa Was a Carpenter.” But the audience was just as welcoming of the new songs from The Tree of Forgiveness, sometimes helped by a humorous introduction, as in the case of “Egg & Daughter Nite, Lincoln Nebraska, 1967 (Crazy Bone).” Everyone in the audience will be receiving the new CD in the mail after buying a ticket for this show, but they had not received the album yet.
While there was not much politics in the show, there was a nod to the political climate with “Caravan of Fools.” And Prine introduced his old gem “Your Flag Decal Won’t Get You Into Heaven Anymore” by saying that he normally dusts off the song only for election years. But he said that after the last election, he is keeping it in his set.
While some may have wondered how Prine’s voice would hold up at his age and after two bouts of cancer, he eliminated any doubts by generally being in great shape. His voice got a little hoarser as the show went on and he missed a few of the high notes on “Hello in There.” Yet, any voice cracks gave more emotion to the song, and guest and backup singers helped out in the last part of the show. And with all that, Prine was still going strong at the end.
In the middle of Prine’s show, all of the band members left to take a break. And the 71-year-old entertained us with just his voice and guitar for several songs, including the best version of “Sam Stone” I have ever heard.
Special guest Brandi Carlile helped out with Prine’s new song “Summer’s End,” which she also sings with him on the new album. She also did a great job trading verses with Prine on what may be his most recognized song, “Angel From Montgomery.”
And one of the highlights of the entire show was when Prine and Carlile came to the front of the stage for “In Spite of Ourselves,” a song from Prine’s 1999 duets album of the same name that had featured Iris Dement on the tune. Prine introduced the song by saying that his wife said he could do another song with Carlile if he did not talk too much during the show.
Sturgill Simpson returned to join Prine too. The two men sang “Please Don’t Bury Me” and a touching “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness.” With the band, the whole group gave a rousing performance of “Pretty Good.”
The latter song transcends well in a live setting with multiple electric guitars and the power of Simpson’s voice, while “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness” was a quieter moment befitting the lyrics.
Finally, it was time to say goodbye. Prine closed with with his wonderful epic “Lake Marie,” backed up by the band along with a few guests that included Carlile, Prine’s son, and Prine’s wife Fiona. Then, they finished with another song of spoken words and choruses with “When I Get to Heaven” from Tree of Forgiveness. The final song, referencing lost loved ones and looking with joy toward death, was a touching and humorous finale.
It was my first time seeing Prine perform live, and as in the case anytime I have seen a long-term favorite artist perform, I could count a number of songs I wish he would have played. But with such an amazing catalog, there is no way he can play even a significant portion of his great songs. Yet, during the show, I never spent any time wishing for anything else besides what was going on at the stage. It was a fantastic celebration by one of America’s gems.
Photos by Chimesfreedom. Leave your two cents in the comments.
In this segment from The Ronnie Wood Show, songwriter Steve Cropper discusses co-writing “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of the Bay” with Otis Redding. Cropper tells how Redding approached him with the opening, and then Cropper added information from Redding’s own life (“I left my home in Georgia. . .”).
Redding died in an airplane crash on December 10, 1967 before he could see the song become a hit. Cropper also explains how Redding never got to hear the electric guitar part in the song too. Check it out.
Surprisingly, some were concerned that “(Sittin’ On) The Dock of the Bay” was too different from Redding’s catalog to be successful. But Redding was happy with the somewhat different sound.
After Redding’s death in December 1967, the song was released on January 8, 1968. It became a number one song in the U.S. and the U.K. And it was the first posthumous single to chart that high in the U.S.
The song’s universal appeal is one of Redding’s final gifts to us. One can understand how an organization like Playing for Change, dedicated to inspiring and connecting the world through music, would make the following video.
The Playing for Change version features people singing the timeless song all over the world. Otis touched a lot of us.
The band released its 
On a Friday the 13th, one of the greatest songwriters of all time, John Prine, took the stage at Radio City Music Hall to launch his first album of new material in thirteen years. With some help of a great band, opener Sturgill Simpson, and special guest Brandi Carlile, the 71-year-old showed that he remains a great entertainer too.
(2014). Other songs included a moving rendition of “Oh Sara.” And he played the opening song from A Sailor’s Guide to Earth (2016), “Welcome to Earth (Pollywog).”
, sometimes helped by a humorous introduction, as in the case of “Egg & Daughter Nite, Lincoln Nebraska, 1967 (Crazy Bone).” Everyone in the audience will be receiving the new CD in the mail after buying a ticket for this show, but they had not received the album yet.
