1 Interview with Barbara Dane and Irwin Silber of Paredon Records

Interview with Barbara Dane and Irwin Silber of Paredon Records, December 1991 Tape 1, Side A Jeff: Okay, It’s the ninth of December, 1991 Oakland CA. Interviewing Irwin Dane and Barbara Silber about Paredon records and the transfer of Paredon to the Smithsonian office of Folklife Programs Archive. First we’re going to talk about the history of label and philosophy behind it what started what was the rational for starting it in the first place and so on. Barbara? BARBARA: Okay Jeff, talking to Jeff Place, right? In my place. JEFF: … BARBARA: Right. The genesis for doing this label, was really, well in advance of it’s actually getting into the planning stages because I was, really since 1947 when I went to the Prague World Youth Festival, which was the first world youth festival that ever happened and then subsequently those became a major world events which are very little known in U.S. because of our penchant for ignoring what happens behind our imaginary iron curtain. That ‘47 festival was my introduction to a whole world of music and musicians and a reason for singing, you know, that I had never imagined was out there. Well I guess I had, by the time I went to it I had begun to get a clue. It was a very shaping event in my life because it was a chance mingle with people who had lived basically all through World War II. This was happening in ’47, the war still very real. Some people, I mean a whole group of Greek partisans came from a war situation which was going on in Greece at the time. Dressed in their, you know those little white skirts and long stockings that the Greek soldiers wore then dressed like that. Some people came from Spain which was very very heavily under fascist Franco domination, and I think went to jail for going to it. Anyway, met a great variety of singers and got the sense that what I was trying to do in my little old way in Detroit was connected to a worldwide impulse of putting your musical abilities at the service of a world wide movement toward peace and understanding, and you know just the linking up the good guys in the world through their songs. And so quite a few years of my life were spent doing that kind of traveling around and singing. I have also been a jazz singer. It’s like two separate lives though because in the jazz turf I couldn’t really mix in all this commitment. You know you’re supposed to be hanging loose and be sort of existential and not have a brain your head whatever, or a thought for tomorrow is how I should put it. So I had to basically create two different personas in a sense and live two different musical lives. I went back and forth from one to the other as my personal economics allowed and JEFF: What kind of material were you singing for this festival in Prague? 1 BARBARA: In Prague I was singing Detroit labor songs. I was born and raised in Detroit, and no idea why I wanted to be a singer but I wanted to be a singer all my life. And I took a little training when I was 12 or 13 and learned how to breathe, so I could belt out the song pretty good. All they knew to teach me were the usual things for girls and for. They thought I was a soprano - which I’m clearly not and never have been - but they had me singing “Ave Maria” and you know little light sopranoish songs and I really had no idea what you could do with song except that I began to see that as a female it was a road to some kind of respect. You know, if you could stand up and sing a song well people would take you seriously to some extent. But there was a real clash in the fact that as soon as I began to get good at it, you know, then you get into all the girly stuff and that wasn’t for me. I wasn’t about to become someone’s pretty little object on the stage and all that. And I started singing pop songs and all that stuff and going and I tried and get up and sing whenever there was a band at the school dance or whatever it was. And I liked to sing “Embraceable You” or whatever it was and tried out for some contests. I found out that that was one way in those days you could, it was a route to breaking into work, you know, situation. They’d have all kinds of contests, just crazy things like, oh they had something called Miss Doll Face in Detroit which was tied to a movie that came out called Doll Face. And so I said, “Oh I’ll go ahead and try out because then I’ll be heard by some of people who were looking for singers.” I guess. I didn’t know any other way do that. So I did and I won and I got called down to the booker’s office. In the booker’s office the first thing they say is, “Take off your coat and turn around.” And I said, “I think I’m in the wrong place,” you know. And I found out what a basically demeaning situation it was to be a female singer in the commercial world. Nothing in my experience since then has disproven that first hit, you know. But right about that time I started to be drawn to the social movements that were sweeping Detroit. And Detroit, you know, has always been a volatile place. It was always the center for a lot of racial strife and all the labor organizing and struggle that was going on there had it’s impact out. I lived way out in the northwest section which was basically, one part we lived in was known as a Arky or hillbilly ghetto, you know. It was poor white trash basically, you know. And then the neighborhood next to us was really kind of a step up and a really nice neighborhood. And my dad had a drug store in the poor neighborhood, but he had us go to school in the nice neighborhood because he thought we should grow up to be examples of, you know, somehow for the less privilege which is where he came from, the Arkansas farm boy. So I right away saw sort of the difference in that sense. Difference between what life was like right around us during the depression this is, we’re talking I’m born in 1927. So we’re talking all through the depression. I worked in my dad’s store an awful lot since I was about 5 years old. I used sell candy when I was five and then as I got older took on different jobs. So I, you know growing up in the store I could see how people came in there with very very, you know strained, even spending a nickel was a big deal in those days, you know, very tense about how they’re going to spend their money and all that. 2 All that up until World War II and then economics started to boom around Detroit and things really changed radically. But I meant I saw all that, you know. So I was aware of the pressures and the tensions and all even though as a child you don’t know what’s making it happen. But there were WPA road gangs working right outside the drugstore and I saw that my father didn’t want the, that was a very marking effect on me was that one time a guy came in and asked for a coke and asked me to, I mean he didn’t, you know it’s just a very humble request. He wanted to buy a coke. He’s thirsty. It’s very hot out. He’s working on this road gang. And so I opened it and set it on the counter and poured it in a glass the same way my dad taught me to do it for everybody. And my dad came rushing out of the back room absolutely horrified and screaming at me. Smacked me and told the man to get out of there and then he berated me for a long time and berated the man on his way out. And I didn’t see anything but later looking back on it but fear on my dad’s part because he had come up to Detroit, you know, in a very very well it was, he was touch and go every day, you know, every day of his life. And he was working in the store from 8 in the morning til midnight every day literally. I know he came home for dinner for about half an hour and the rest of the time he was in the store. So the man was under tremendous tension, and economic tension, and this represented a threat to, you know, he explained to me. He says, “well you know it, we might lose customers if people know that we would serve a black man in the store.” I didn’t even realize up until then that there was a different in skin colors. It didn’t dawn on me, you know.

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