Barbara Dane won the respect of Black America with her voice as well as her activism. Over the course of her career, she worked with a great number of Black American blues icons including Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Memphis Slim, Otis Spann, Mama Yancey Clara Ward, Lightnin' Hopkins and others. In November of 1959, she became one of the first and few white singers to be featured in a seven-page spread in Ebony Magazine.

In 1966, Dane released a stirring Civil Rights directed album with the Chambers Brothers. That same year, she was invited to tour Cuba by the new Cuban government led by Fidel Castro and satisfied his curiosity on the US Civil Rights movement, personally in a face to face meeting.

A stalwart of the peace, freedom and justice movements of the 1960s, Dane had associations with actor/activist Paul Robeson and playwright Lorraine Hansberry. She worked both as an artist and in citizenship alongside the peace and freedom movement singing at rallys and anit-ward GI coffehouses and with her husband, Irwin Silber, established a record label devoted to protest music. An artist such as Barbara Dane, who chooses a life devoted to the establishment of peace and civil rights, does so at great personal and professional risk and deserves our attention and recognition.

Barbara Dane will appear with other special guests at Brava this Saturday, October 14 with her son, Cuban musician Pablo Menendez and his band Mezcla. Tickets to this historic event are sold out!