By Alice Embree / The Rag Blog / September 8, 2025
Cross-posted from Alice Embree’s Substack.
The documentary portrait of folk and protest singer Barbara Dane will be shown twice in Austin. A post-screening Q&A with director Maureen Gosling and producer Jed Riffe will follow. Details follow:
- The 9 Lives of Barbara Dane
- 7:00 PM, Monday, September 15, 2025
- 6:00 PM, Wednesday, September 17, 2025
- Austin Film Society Cinema, 6259 Middle Fiskville Rd, Austin, TX 78752 (The Linc)
Barbara Dane died at the age of 97 in Oakland California in October 2024. As noted in her obituary in The New York Times she “saw music as fuel for social change, not personal fame.”
She used her strong contralto voice as fuel during the 1964 Mississippi Freedom Summer and to protest the war in Vietnam. She crossed genres from folk to jazz and blues. Her collaborators included Muddy Waters, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Earl Hines, and Louis Armstrong as well as Pete Seeger.
The New York Times reported,
She recalled Albert Grossman, who would later manage [Bob] Dylan, telling her that he would be interested in her professionally only when she “got her priorities straight.”
In that sense, she never did. In 1971, she joined Jane Fonda, Elliott Gould, Donald Sutherland and others in a traveling variety show that performed before American soldiers who had turned against the war.
Early in her career, she had declined an invitation to tour with the bandleader Alvino Rey. As she told The Times, “Why would I want to stand in front of a band with a low-cut dress singing stupid words when I could be singing for workers who are on strike?
The 9 Lives of Barbara Dane, explores this life well-lived with archival footing and interviews with friends and admirers that include Jane Fonda and Bonnie Raitt.
Filmmakers Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon and legendary music producer Chris Strachwitz were Thorne Dreyer’s guests on Rag Radio, March 15, 2013. They discussed their film about Strachwitz, This Ain’t no Mouse Music! See the Rag Blog article here.
