NIGHTCLUBS: A Gasser

The voice is pure, rich and carries the haunting, dusky legato that still echoes the New Orleans of 40 years ago. It growls through the classic wails of Special Delivery Blues, Mighty Rumbling Blues, St. Louis Blues. In the upper register it is nothing more than a hoarse squeak; but down in the subterranean passages it flows, moans, glides and sighs with a power that has been achieved before—by Bessie Smith, Lizzy Miles—but that is still as rare as a 20-carat diamond.

Even more of a rarity than its tone is the fact that the big, black voice belongs to a white, 30-year-old Los Angeles housewife (three children) named Barbara Dane. Back at The Limelight in her home town Los Angeles last week, after her first crack at the East Coast (The Den in Manhattan), she stood on the brink of the big time, one of the few white blues singers who ever belonged there. Ahead of her were further club dates in Chicago, San Francisco and a return to New York, as well as an LP for Dot. Said Record Executive Al Levitt, in what is only a slight exaggeration: “A voice like this hasn’t been recorded in 30 years.”

The daughter of a Detroit druggist, Barbara Dane tried “to sing opera, oratorios and all that jazz” when she was just out of high school, “but I felt it just didn’t fit me.” Meanwhile she had mastered a few folk songs, and because “nobody else in town knew them,” she soon found herself strumming and humming for the glory of organized labor: “I must have sung on every picket line the U.A.W. threw up.” Even after she moved to the jazzy West Coast, she stuck to her guns, occasionally found some unique ammunition. Item: a girl “who was a little bit loony” led her ta a piece called Don’t Sing Love Songs, You’ll Wake My Mother, which (despite its college-musical title) turned out to be an all-but-forgotten ballad sung in the Tennessee mountains for a century or two.

Barbara’s throaty roar has often made critics mention her name in the same breath as Blues Singer Smith’s. She has the same spine-grabbing talent of “bending” a note—hitting her target, then turning on the power as she slides a quarter tone above or below. After Barbara appeared with Louis Armstrong at the Pasadena Jazz Festival last month, the master called an agent cross-continent and gave his own estimate: “Did you get that chick? She’s a gasser.”