This Bell Still Rings – My Life of Defiance and Song
Barbara Dane, Heyday, £24.99

TO write an autobiography in your mid-90s would be a daunting task for anyone, but when that person has led a life like Barbara Dane’s it would be a great shame not to have a chronicle of her life, music and involvement in progressive causes in the United States and internationally. 

Starting as a folk singer in the 1940s she got to know Pete Seeger and became associated with People’s Songs, the left-wing musical project associated with Seeger and Woody Guthrie. Later on, she also included jazz and blues in her repertoire, gaining the admiration of Louis Armstrong and Lenny Bruce, among others.

Becoming outraged at racism and inequality at a young age she joined the Communist Party USA, becoming an active member and marrying a fellow member, Rolf Cahn. However, this was the time of McCarthyism when the party had to contend with repression and infiltration from agent provocateurs, and Dane recounts how, on reading her FBI file in recent years, she was to find out that her first husband had been an informer, even showing the FBI a copy of her party card. This was something which she would have been proud to show them anyway.