This Bell Still Rings: My Life of Defiance and Song - Softcover

Dane, Barbara

9781597147354: This Bell Still Rings: My Life of Defiance and Song

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1597147354 ISBN 13: 9781597147354

Publisher: Heyday, 2026

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The autobiography of a courageous singer-songwriter, activist, and American icon.

"Barbara Dane is someone who is willing to follow her conscience. She is, if the term must be used, a hero."—Bob Dylan

A renowned folk, blues, and jazz singer who performed with some of the twentieth century’s most celebrated musicians, from Louis Armstrong to Bob Dylan. A proud progressive who has tirelessly championed racial equality and economic justice in America, and who has traveled the world to sing out against war and tyranny. An organizer, a venue owner, a record label founder, and a woman who has charted her own creative and political path for more than ninety years. Barbara Dane has led an epic, trailblazing life in music and activism, and This Bell Still Rings tells her story in her own adventurous voice. Dane’s memoir charts her trajectory from singing in union halls and at factory gates in World War II–era Detroit, to her rise as a respected blues and jazz singer, to her prominence as a folk musician frequently performing at and participating in civil rights and peace demonstrations across the US and abroad—from post-revolutionary Cuba to wartime Vietnam. This Bell Still Rings illuminates “one of the true unsung heroes of American music” (Boston Globe), and it offers a wealth of inspiration for artists, activists, and anyone seeking a life defined by courage and integrity.

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About the Author

Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

EXCERPT FROM CHAPTER ONE: "Memories Don't Fade"

[...]

One of the few diversions from the hard-pressed life around us in those deep Depression days was the hope of going to one of the magnificent movie palaces that sprang up around town. In the neighborhood around our drugstore, we saw hungry people every day, saw the difficulties they had just getting food on the table. I remember often seeing this one little boy trudging along to the Kroger store, and noticed that he regularly made his way back home with what looked like a single loaf of bread. I worried about what his family might have to put between the slices, and how many of them would be sharing that loaf. I’d served single-scoop ice cream cones to the neighborhood kids and watched them share it, each taking a lick in turn. I wondered why their lives were so different from mine. I doubted that any of them ever got to go to the picture show.

My mother took my sister, brother, and me to the movies on Dish Night whenever possible. The idea was that you could build up a whole set of nice dinnerware by coming every week and collecting the plates and cups and saucers they gave away free. You got to see a double feature, a cartoon, and the newsreel—covering world events, politics, sports, and fashion.

The newsreels took us to the various hot spots in the world and taught us new words, like Wehrmacht, Luftwaffe, Il Duce, and der Führer. We watched Mussolini’s Black Shirts marching off to Greece, Albania, Ethiopia, and Libya, and Hitler’s thugs, the Brown Shirts, “keeping order” in the streets of Germany while his armies marched into Poland, Austria, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Norway, the USSR, on and on. Long lines of refugees trudged endlessly toward hope of some sort, dragging their children and pathetic bundles, while terrifying planes strafed them from the sky, causing them to dive into the ditches or underbrush that lined the roads. The visual images of all this turmoil in the world came at us children from huge screens, far bigger than life, in black and white and in two-to-three-minute snips, often blurry and out of focus, with stentorian music and announcers sounding like “the voice of god” interpreting events. By 1936, people had begun to cringe at Hitler’s constant ranting about his master race, and the sight of his goose-stepping troops filled the movie house with catcalls.

Movies were important, but my whole life really ran on a parallel track with the rise of the radio, a new and thrilling entertainment that was free for just the click of a knob, and so intimate because everything it gave you was happening inside your own head, no screen needed. The radio console in the living room brought me music from local singers and musicians with their guitars and country-style songs, popular dance tunes, crooners with dreamy lyrics, sometimes live Black church meetings down at the far end of the dial, and late at night even big swing bands from some faraway city.

When I was eight years old, I made a nonnegotiable demand: I need a piano! Since I was such a cooperative and hard-working little kid, my mom found a decent secondhand upright and hired the local teacher, Miss Savery, to give me weekly lessons. I loved to practice, but would never do it when anyone else was in the house. This was my thing, and I didn’t want to chance any interference. I would ride my bike to the big Woolworth’s five-and-dime where they had an ample music counter filled with sheet music and books. Instead of looking for the latest individual songs, I found myself searching for collections of older songs, with piano parts simple enough for me to sight-read. Gradually my practice time found me singing much more than playing piano.

In our Sunday school class at St. James Methodist Church, the teacher was a stout old prune who wore an America First badge prominently on her dress, broadcasting her allegiance to Charles Lindbergh’s right-wing isolationist views. I loved to read, and devoured the newspaper scandals from a very young age, so I knew that America First was somehow related to the Black Legion, a white supremacist group connected to those horrifying pictures of lynchings that were turning up in the papers all the time. That made me somewhat afraid of the lady with the badge, but, worse than that, her hypocrisy gave me a pain in the stomach. How can you tell us in one breath to love Jesus because he called all the little children to come unto him, and with the next breath deny the personhood of any child who doesn’t look just like us?

By May 1936, the Black Legion, with its Ku Klux Klan (KKK) ties, had nearly thirty thousand members in Michigan. An article in Hearst’s Detroit Times described the Black Legion like this: “Cults of this nature with their hocus pocus oaths and their ‘fe-fi-fo-fum’ passwords are throwbacks to medieval times. . . . Unhappily there will always, it seems, be poor dupes to swell the membership rolls of these evil cults. They are invariably of the same stripe: workaday people of limited advantages and intelligence to whom the ceremonials, the silly gibberish, and the spooky trappings promise adventure and romance.”

One day I was working at the drugstore when I witnessed a scene so disturbing that it has stayed with me my whole life. Think of the atmosphere on an unbearably humid and blistering midday in a city where no store would permit a Black person and a white person to sit down together for a cool drink of water. Think of my daddy, a young white man striving since his shoeless days on an Arkansas farm to lift himself and his young family up, unremittingly working long hours seven days a week. Think of a cohort of Black men so new to the territory and so desperate for survival that they are working outdoors on this sweltering day in a road-grading gang sponsored by the WPA, the Works Projects Administration created by FDR to keep Americans from starving.

One man steps cautiously inside the door. Softly, he asks the little girl at the soda fountain for a Coke and puts down a nickel. She is hesitant at first, thinking of the training her daddy recently gave her about the exact right way to serve a Coca-Cola: take down one of the special curved glasses with that name on it; open the ribbed, hourglass-shaped bottle; and pour about three-quarters of the way up the glass. Set the bottle and glass down on the counter, side by side.

The man is confused. He doesn’t know what is expected of him in this new northern town in the midst of what is clearly “white” territory, so he hesitates. The girl is intent on doing this right, so gives a welcoming smile and indicates that he should sit. He’s still not sure, takes a step, and . . .

My daddy comes streaking out of the prescription room, shouting, “Get out of here! You know you can’t drink that in here! Get back outside!” The Black man quietly vanishes, but my dad continues to scream at me. “Listen, you can’t do that! If we start letting them in here, we’ll lose all our business. Times are tough enough as it is! Do not ever do that again!”

I don’t remember what I did next, but the scene ended, and my nine year-old psyche took all of it deep, deep inside. For one thing, my dad had treated me unjustly. He had failed to recognize how well I followed his instructions about how to serve the drink, even screamed at me for doing it. That wasn’t fair. More important, my father had refused a thirsty man a drink and had humiliated a grown man before a child. That Black man and I had both been humiliated. He and I had both been refused and denied. Unknowingly, I took him inside my heart and bonded with his hurt, identified with the denial of his personhood.

I identified with the Black man, understanding my white father to be the unjust person in the drama. Unaware of how definitively the die had been cast in those moments, I have spent a lifetime searching for fairness, measuring events by those standards, fighting for justice wherever I could, with whatever tools I could find.

[...]

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