Album Review: Barbara Dane – When I Was a Young Girl / On My Way

With a strong and sonorous voice, Detroit-born singer and guitarist Barbara Dane launched her recording career in the late 1950s. An impassioned political activist, Dane’s music was suffused with an earnestness matched by her confident, assured delivery. Though today at age 97 Dane is retired from music, her career spanned several decades.

After gaining a high profile thanks to well-earned association with blues and jazz giants like Willie Dixon and Memphis Slim, in 1961 Dane opened her own club in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood.

And though she had built her reputation as a blues singer, in 1961 (some sources say ‘62) she released a folk record, When I Was a Young Girl. The booklet accompanying this new single CD pairing of that album with 1962’s On My Way reproduces the text of the former’s liner note essay. As that piece explains, Dane’s interest in folk actually predated her immersion in blues. According to the essay, the songs on When I Was a Young Girl had been part of Dane’s live repertoire for many years. And in fact the session that yielded the record had taken place years earlier, in 1959.

That same essay features quotes from Dane herself, in which she briefly explains the background of each of the record’s 15 songs. (One of those tracks, “I Know Where I’m Going,” has been omitted from this collection due to space considerations.) Every single cut is a traditional song, with arrangement by Dane.

As is the case with many of the songs on the record, the title track features Dane accompanying herself on acoustic guitar. But other cuts like the lively “Little Maggie” find her joined by Tom Paley, later of the New Lost City Ramblers, on banjo or guitar. Familiar traditional works like “Nine Hundred Miles” get a soulful reading by Dane. Slight re-titling yields a memorable and stirring reading of “Girl of Constant Sorrow,” a song that was popular among other folk artists of the era (Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, etc.)

On My Way is remarkably different. A jazz-inflected approach to the blues finds Dane in a saucier, much more upbeat mood. “Take it Slow and Easy” is a sexy tune with sparkling piano and lively rhythm section accompaniment. That approach informs all of the 12 cuts on the LP. Soulful horn work and spirited, sassy backing chorus vocals give “I’m On My Way” a flavor that will please fans of Ray Charles’ early work. The rocking blues of “Goodby Daddy Goodby” is one of the album’s many highlights.

On My Way steers clear of Dane’s strongly-held sociopolitical concerns (a later album would bear the pointed title “I Hate the Capitalist System”), instead concerning itself with showcasing Dane’s versatility as a bluesy singer par excellence.

As a window into the varied artistry of Barbara Dane, this pairing of two early ‘60s albums is superb, but the radical difference between the styles found on When I Was a Young Girl and On My Way may be jarring to some listeners.