Do you know Barbara Dane? Legend of jazz, blues, and folk music who moved millions with her dusky alto? Veteran of myriad American social justice movements, going strong and hitting hard through her mid-90s? The 9 Lives of Barbara Dane is an underground history of a trailblazing singer-agitator whose conscience served her and tripped her up, rerouted her and ultimately carried her through nine decades, somehow landing on her feet.

The film begins as 89-year-old Dane slowly enters a stage, smiling and regarding the thunderous applause that greets her. She sets her walker aside and with a quick “One, two…” launches into an upbeat, brassy jazz number, “This Is So Nice It Must Be Illegal.” The concert footage dissolves into an interview with Dane at her kitchen table with a thick dossier, reading a litany of her identities as delineated by the FBI: maiden name, stage name, the names she took with each of her three husbands. She is described as an “itinerant jazz vocalist,” prompting another cut to 1950s archival footage in which Dane showcases her extraordinary vocal talents in a gutsy blues number. Dane was a standout in numerous genres but carries herself and her voice fully into each.

Born in Detroit in the 1920s and raised during the Great Depression, Dane cites the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as what shocked her at a young age to pursue peace and justice movements. A frequent singer at union picket lines and anti-Fascist marches and a favorite of local music promoters, Dane was also vocal member of the Communist Youth. The camaraderie she felt within these movements satisfied her dream of a world where racial justice and economic equality would prevail. But when she and first husband Rolf Cahn were kicked out of the Communist Party for their refusal to tow the party line, she re-calibrated her attitude. She would fight for her beliefs, guided by her own moral compass. And she would always use her voice in the fight.

Inspired by 1920s blues legends Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith — groundbreaking Black women who took no guff and sang with bone-deep feeling amidst tremendous adversity, Barbara embraced blues and jazz. Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines and Jack Teagarden all sought out Dane to lend her deep, powerful voice to songs of pain and soaring beauty. Dane, was the first white performer to be featured in Ebony magazine, in an article packed with photos of her working with Memphis Slim, Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters, Clara Ward, Mama Yancey and Little Brother Montgomery. She was a budding celebrity now, but she refused to play the role expected of young white women in the music business. She performed with who she wanted to, when and where she wanted to, and fiercely eschewed the bitter, violent codes of segregation while emanating a confident ease with herself and others.
In the decades that followed, Barbara turned her attention to her family and her vocal talents toward singing out for peace and social justice in the Civil Rights Movement and in opposition to the Vietnam War. She sang at Freedom Schools in Mississippi, shared the stage with Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Phil Ochs at massive peace rallies in Washington D.C., and worked with activist/actress Jane Fonda in the anti-Vietnam War GI Coffee House