She fits neither the Dave van Ronk nor The Mighty Wind mold.
But where Inside Llewyn Davis would have us believe that folk singers of the time were either authentic bohemians or simply jumping a bandwagon, Dane (and Dylan too, for that matter) poses a problem.
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There is footage of Dane circa 1963 on a hilariously hokey TV special, Folk Songs and More Folk Songs!, sharing a bill with a baby-faced Dylan. Listen to Barbara Dane Sings the Blues (1964) and ask yourself: what other white singer, pre-Janis Joplin, was leaning so heavily on the legacy of Bessie Smith? What other white singer, pre-Karen Dalton, was digging such a deep furrow between black jazz singers and folk-blues? (Incidentally, right now, they’re playing Bonnie Raitt where I’m writing this, and you can hear the same talky dips in phrasing that Dane was always throwing into her blues, making her voice go from roadhouse to dimly lit back room in a single word.) But Dane nevertheless seemed happy to draw, wildly and un-prettily, all over the ven diagram of jazz, blues, and folk. Following Odetta (either on stage or on record) was ill-advised–nobody else was going to match the history embedded in that voice or the majesty of the delivery. Most women, admittedly, found themselves falling somewhere between the quiet Appalachian of Jean Ritchie or the soapbox arias of Joan Baez. It might seem, at a glance, that there existed only a narrow range of vocal registers available to white folk singers in the early 60s. Androgynous and deep, tough and sad, there was no way that this voice was coming out of the era of martini-shaker. When I first heard Dane’s voice–on the soundtrack of the French film, “Love Like Poison” ( Un Poison Violent)–it sounded back-to-front, like someone singing folk standards in light of Sibylle Baier’s minimalism and Nina Simone’s melancholy. To modern ears, the effect is disorienting. There was still a willingness to tread the path of John Jacob Niles as opposed to the Weavers. In other words, this was not a hootenanny safe for the suburbs. Although folk was just beginning to cross the pop threshold, Dane’s readings of standards like “Silver Dagger”, “Who’s Going to Shoe Your Pretty Little Foot”, and even “Greensleeves” sound peculiarly low-key, more Grimm Fairytale than Hans Christian Andersen. With its nod to Harry Smith, that album was a time capsule (recorded in 1959), freezing in time the pre-Dylan coffeehouse songbook.
Late last year, you may have caught our coverage of Barbara Dane’s “When I was a Young Girl,” a somber cut off her 1962 album Anthology of American Folk Songs.
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