Note from Scott Yanow:
Dear Barbara Dane:
I am currently writing a book tentatively titled The Jazz Singers.  It will be published by Backbeat Books in 2005 and will be nationally distributed and available in most bookstores.

In The Jazz Singers, I am writing entries on the 500 top jazz vocalists of all time.  You're one of them!  In addition to the biographical facts and a summary of your career, I'd like to include quotes.  The enclosed questionnaire is your opportunity to communicate to readers who are wondering what makes you tick, what your thoughts are about your life and career, how you see jazz, and what your hopes are for the future.  Feel free to discuss whatever comes to mind.

JAZZ SINGERS QUESTIONNAIRE

Your full name:
Barbara Dane
Born: Barbara Jean Spillman
Married to Rolf Cahn 1946-51
Married to Byron Menéndez 1952-64
Partner to Irwin Silber 1964-present

Birthdate:
May 12, 1927

Birthplace:
Detroit, Michigan

How did you originally get introduced to jazz?
Growing up in Detroit, I heard a lot of great jazz-oriented singers on the juke boxes near my high school: Ella, Dinah Washington, Billie, Bing Crosby, Helen Humes, Jimmy Rushing, jazz influenced pop groups like the Inkspots, the Mills Brothers, the Andrews Sisters and others. I also had a fake ID so that I could get into a magical place called Eastwood Gardens, a big open-air ballroom where they brought the heavy-duty swing bands like Glenn Miller, Harry James, and Tommy Dorsey, but also the jazz bands like Count Basie and Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Woody Herman and more. I was usually crowded up to the bandstand to concentrate on listening, while the rest of my friends were dancing. (Never did get the hang of dancing.)

I collected 78s of musicians from Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker to Claude Thornhill to Louis Jordan to the great boogie pianists like Jimmy Yancey, Albert Ammons and Pete Johnson. I loved the back-up music for blues singers like Big Joe Turner, Lil Green, Jimmy Rushing, Bing and Sinatra and Helen Humes. These were all elements that went into jazz. I stuck my ear in the late night radio too, all kinds of music there including live local gospel, country etc. Those were the glorious radio days before the Clear Channel boys and the strangling of our culture.

What were some of your earliest experiences singing?
I was a pretty alienated teenager, so I didn’t go to high school many days. But at the dances sometimes I got to sing with kid bands, usually “Embraceable You” or “Blue Moon” or something else they would know. My first paid job was at age 14 when I got hired for the Fireman’s Ball. I remember my dad was so proud he bought me a long dress, black taffeta with tiny red polka dots and a red bolero jacket (something I chose because it didn’t look like the fluffy prom queen types). This time it was a full dance band, no rehearsal.

The only tune I knew that they knew was a dumb thing called “Shoo Fly Pie and Apple Pan Dowdy (Makes Your Eyes Light Up and Your Tummy Say Howdy)” so I had to sing it several times that night. I also made a stab at some of the other things they wanted, but since I didn’t know the words I learned right away not to be afraid to invent. I already had a good beat, so I relied on that. Since that baptism I’ve never been afraid of odd backup situations. You just jump into the music and make something happen, and it works.

I was soon encouraged to go see one of the big music bookers in Detroit, who immediately asked me to take off my coat and turn around. I knew I was a pretty hot looking young woman at the time, but I felt insulted when I saw that how I looked was more important to him than how well I sang, so I walked out. However, in 1946 he called and offered me a job on the road with Alvino Rey’s Band. I turned it down, having by this time become a purist who wanted nothing to do with sleazy promoters and pop music. I had found songs with something to say, and had come to value more the respect I was getting from the huge crowds at the labor and freedom rallies where I was singing already.

Have you played any instruments and when?
I studied piano in my childhood but only until I realized I was mostly interested in it to accompany my singing. When I left home to become involved with civil rights, the peace movement and trade union struggles, I learned guitar by myself from little black dots in a box over the words and melody. It was two years before I actually saw someone else play, so I got into the very bad habit of staying on the first three frets and holding my grip, not realizing you should be moving fingers within the chords to make it interesting. I played guitar (I did get a little better) and sang solo for more than 30 years, as a folksinger, an agitator, as a blues singer, even venturing a little into nueva trova, but never played more than pretty good rhythm. This is one reason I loved to sing with great musicians in jazz once I got started with that.

Who have been some of your main inspirations?
As a kid, I was a fanatic of opera singers like Amelita Galli Curci, Lily Pons, Tito Schipa and Lawrence Tibbet, Caruso of course, and Jan Peerce. I used to hang out in the glass listening booths they had in classy record stores just drinking this stuff in, instead of going to school. They served to convince me that the human voice knows no limits.

The earliest jazz and blues records I can remember are Big Bill Broonzy and Lil Green on “Why Don’t You Do Right” (his brief understated but matchless guitar solo) and then Big Joe Turner singing “Piney Brown’s Blues.” But at length and long-term, it was Leadbelly (Huddy Ledbetter). Once someone loaned me his records, I couldn’t get enough and soaked up his rhythms, his passion and his eclectic repertory that proved to me you don’t have to put borders on your choice of songs. Later, Pete Seeger was an influence that way too, although his rhythmic sense was very different from mine.

At one point I became known for unearthing and reviving a lot of classic blues, the work of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, Ida Cox and Sippie Wallace etc. But I had a fear of being too influenced in my singing by what any one singer was doing, so I would only listen to a record once or twice, long enough to get the words and an idea of the tune, and then no more. On the job, I developed my own style, flying by the seat of my pants but based on my strengths learned from vocal training in my teens as well as my weaknesses. I couldn’t just hit certain top notes reliably, so I invented a sort of slide up to them. Then once on the note I could open up the power.

I have been greatly inspired by Mikis Theodorakis, the great Greek composer and anti-fascist activist. His songs helped his country in a thousand ways, to reconnect with their heroic past and face up to the demands of their times. I find his principle female singer Maria Farandouri to be one of the most moving voices on the planet. The early songs of Silvio Rodriguez and Pablo Milanés in Cuba, Victor Jara and Violeta Parra of Chile, and so many others of the Nueva Trova movement made me believe even more deeply in the power of song to shape lives as well as reflect them. All over the world, heroic singers and songwriters have given hope and strength to their struggling brothers and sisters through their music.

Who do you consider some of the giants of jazz singing, and the ones you enjoy listening to the most?
Without question Louis is the source for all of us. His innate musicality saturates any piece of music, no matter how trivial, and makes it swing and bring joy. I don’t remember ever studying what he does, but rather took him for granted like earth and water, a reliable and essential element. When you do take time to examine what he was actually doing, and think about how music was before he came along, he knocks you clean out. Dizzy took it on ahead, and should have sung more too. Jack Teagarden was a giant of a singer, low-key as he was, with a great nose for material. Jimmy Rushing was always so hot and swinging, as was Big Joe Turner. And Mose Allison’s musical richness and homeboy sensibilities showed me that hipness and whiteness were not completely discrete characteristics.

I owe a lot to Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, Ida Cox and Sippie Wallace, Memphis Minnie and Hociel Thomas (Dick Oxtot introduced me to her songs via tapes just after she died in Oakland!). Estella “Mama” Yancey was a friend and a mentor from whom I learned a lot about the blues attitude. Lizzy Miles came to sing in the Bay Area often in my formative days and I loved everything about her: her voice and the way she stirred up excitement as well as the warm way she handled sweeter material, the way she moved and dressed, and her personal kindness and generosity. These women formed the basis of my work in blues, along with Leadbelly. I loved to hear Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton when she would visit my Sugar Hill club. She could make any material sound real, but she was the greatest blues singer around. And my respect for, and enjoyment of, Bonnie Raitt is deep. Without doubt, Mahalia Jackson was the most authentic and moving of them all, and her technique was without peer.

Of the best-known jazz women, Ella and Sarah mostly seemed too busy being “nice ladies” for me, and Billie too often the victim, Dinah too seduced by pop, but they all gave us lessons in how to touch people with their voices, and all will remain timeless. At the end of her life, I realized how much I love listening to Carmen sing the Monk material, and what a great musician she was. Shirley Horn of course is divine. But the outlaw genius of song was Nina Simone, who turned her art into a cry of justice that will ring forever.

Nowadays, I’d have to say my favorite female jazz singer is Abbie Lincoln and this has a lot to do with her ability as a composer too. I like Diane Krall for her musicianship and intimate connection with the listener. Cassandra Wilson has done amazing reworking of traditional blues material. Joan Osborne continuously surprises me, and her writing is not as prolific but almost as fascinating as the other Joanie…Mitchell. Eva Cassidy could sing anything and make me like it. And now there is Lila Downs, who does sing everything and part of it is jazz of a new kind.

Did you attend college or music schools (please state where and when)?
I went to Wayne State in Detroit, right after WWII for a few weeks. Then I realized there was very little there for me and asked for my money back. I guess I already knew my path would have to be hacked out in my own way, since I couldn’t see any models for it.

When did you know that you were going to try to be a professional singer?
As soon as I realized, as a teenage dropout, that I had no way to build my own theater company to say all the things I thought needed saying. Actually, it never occurred to me to see myself as anything other than a singer, whether I would be paid for it or not. There was no “trying” about it. It felt like a calling, not a choice.

What have been some of your most important musical associations (please include years)?
Pete Seeger’s coming to Detroit in 1946 and encouraging me in what I was doing with the folk and union songs was fundamental. But he also said “some of us ought to get deeper into jazz” so that was a kind of license to go where most folkies dared not tread.

It was a Bay Area musician and bandleader named Dick Oxtot who in 1954-55 pushed me into traditional jazz. It didn’t take a big push. Soon I was sitting in regularly with Bob Mielke’s Bearcats, Kid Ory, and George Lewis. I was hired by Turk Murphy for an appearance at the famed waterfront jazz joint known as the Tin Angel during the 1956 Republican Convention in San Francisco, which was covered by Life magazine.

The first ‘beat coffeehouse’ in Los Angeles was opened in late ’57 and I was hired to move down there from Berkeley to be the house trade-mark blues singer (on the assumption that I symbolized the beat scene, which in fact I always disdained because of its misogynist tone). Some of my first co-artists there were the incredible Bob Dorough, then putting musical settings to the poetry of Langston Hughes, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and others, and the folk duo Bud & Travis, who were also amazing. Cosmo Alley was frequented by film actors and musicians and other show folk because it stayed open long after the clubs, with the new poetry and jazz explorations and lots of jamming. There I got to know Lennie Bruce when he’d informally try out his new “act” on me and a few friends after hours, while he was still working in burlesque. I identified completely with what he was trying to say with his satire, which I saw as a real jazz take on life. (He was a serious jazz lover, by the way.)

One night after closing time at the Ash Grove, my second Hollywood “home”, it must have been late ’58 or early ’59 when someone came to the dressing room and said “Well, I’ve brought you your piano player.” After trying every trad jazz player in L.A. I’d been asking audiences for more than a year to let me know if they heard any good blues players. I was dog tired, but went out to the dark hall where someone was noodling at the piano. Kenny Whitson, one of the true unsung geniuses of this medium, was at the keyboard, and I knew immediately that this was in fact the musician I was looking for. An added bonus was that Kenny often played deep, hot and soulful cornet while continuing to play left-handed piano. He also was a “recovering Jehovah’s Witness” who loved to talk ideas and was profoundly anti-war and anti-racist. He turned out to be my real musical brother and we worked together from then on almost exclusively.

I have had the world’s best luck with bass players. My first was Pete Allen, now in his 80s, who was in the Bearcats and who still plays with me on occasion. I recorded with the great Pops Foster and also sang with legendary traditional players Slow Drag Pavageau, Montudi Garland and Al Hall. I recorded with more modern players Leroy Vinegar and Red Mitchell. In Chicago I had stumbled onto the blues king Willie Dixon who then backed me for a year. But after I started working with Kenny and he came up with the idea of asking Wellman Braud to come out of retirement to play with us, that was it. Tops!

Wellman had sold his bass and retired some years before Kenny discovered he was living in the L.A. area. It took him a week or so to get up to speed, but oh my, all those years with Ellington were locked in there and they came out with us. He told me he wouldn’t play with anybody else, but would play with me as long as I wanted because he believed in what I was doing. I only found out years after he died that during that time both Louis and Duke had tried to hire him back.

I can’t leave out the times I sat in with Muddy Waters at Smitty’s Corners back in ’59, and later in Detroit when we shared a bill and he had to lay off because of his blood pressure. He simply gave me the band for the week, so I had the great Otis Spann on piano along with the rest. Then one night when I was doing a solo concert in New York Spann just strolled in unannounced and started playing piano with me and my guitar as I broke into the blues part of the evening. Call me lucky!

Please name a few highpoints and turning points of your musical career.
Here are some milestones, but there were too many to mention every one. Each event felt like a new road opening for me, and I wanted to explore them all. There was:

Winning the “Miss Doll Face” contest at the biggest movie palace in Detroit singing “Someone to Watch Over Me” in 1945. My first concert in a big auditorium, with Pete Seeger and three other folksingers in Detroit, at age 19 in 1946. Singing in Cadillac Square with a big demonstration against a restaurant that refused to serve black people. Traveling to the first World Youth Festival in Prague 1947, where I heard young singers from all over the planet and learned songs in Czech, Yugoslav, Yiddish and Spanish, one from South Africa, etc., all beautiful and useful. This gave me a sense of the international world of song.

In 1950 winning the talent search on the “Horace Heidt Show” with a national radio appearance as the prize. Turning down their idea of what song I should sing because it wasn’t a “real folk song.” I found out then that you get more respect by knowing what you want and sticking to it than by caving in to the hot-shot New York producers. Then in the same year, winning the “Miss U.S. Television” competition in San Francisco, with a TV series of my own for the prize, called “Folksville, U.S.A.“

Starting a folk group called The Gateway Singers, only to abandon it a year later under difficult circumstances, just before it hit the local big-time at the Hungry Eye. Changing musical direction and reinventing my life at this point. Meeting Dick Oxtot and being asked to sing with Bob Mielke’s Bearcats. Learning by doing, that is, by sitting in with Ory, Lewis and others.

Recording my first album in 1957, classic blues with some of the best musicians in San Francisco traditional jazz. In ’58 and ’59 singing several times on Bobby Troup’s Stars of Jazz. Becoming a regular at the Ash Grove in Hollywood, where I worked opposite Rev. Gary Davis, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Jesse Fuller and so many other blues greats, and where I started singing with the Chambers Brothers for my backup on special occasions (they weren’t a rock band yet).

Going to Chicago regularly where I sang at the Gate of Horn in Chicago, with dream back-up musicians Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon as well as Little Brother Montgomery. Getting to know Mama Yancey, Tampa Red, Big Joe Williams and other great blues people, and inviting them join me on stage each closing night for a special show. Working with Art Hodes several times, and later producing an album with Mama Yancey singing and Art playing piano.

Being featured in Ebony magazine November ‘59, the first time they ever ran a story about a white woman. An eight page article with lots of great photos too, singing with Memphis Slim and Willie Dixon, with Little Brother Montgomery, jamming with Muddy at Smitty’s Corner, with the great gospel singer Clara Ward, with Mama Yancey etc..

In 1959 singing with Louis Armstrong on the Timex Jazz Spectacular TV show, and being invited to tour Europe with him. The tour didn’t happen, probably blocked by the State Department because of my activism, but just the invitation was a thrill. Later I toured the northeast with Jack Teagarden, who then had the great Don Ewell on piano. Such a joy to know Jack and work with him, one of the world’s kindest and most talented people.

Touring Western Canada and the West Coast’s biggest theaters with Kenny Whitson, opposite rising comic Bob Newhart. Later opening my club Sugar Hill, Home of the Blues in San Francisco, which I believe was the first purely blues club for a “mainstream” audience. Bringing in Mama Yancey, Tampa Red, Lonnie Johnson, Brownie McGhee & Sonny Terry, Jimmy Rushing, Mose Allison, etc. in pursuit of my mission to provide a wider platform for these artists and the music.

Fast forwarding, after I moved to New York in late 1964 I started to sing in many other countries. I toured all over West Germany for the Easter March anti-nuclear movement with a caravan of great singers in 1966. That was also the year I was invited to tour Cuba, and only after I got there (greeted at the airport by the newsreel cameras of Santiago Alvarez, beginning a special about my visit that was later shown in movie houses all across the country) I found out that I was the first North American to do this since the revolution. At the end of my month-long tour I met Fidel Castro, with whom I had a three hour dialogue, mostly about the peace and civil rights movements in the U.S.

In Cuba, I was interviewed several times a day for every newspaper and magazine, and treated everywhere like a mega-star. I was given an entire Saturday evening on national TV, live from the famed Roldán Theater where my concert included guests such as Joseito Fernandez (composer of the Guantanamera), Carlos Puebla (composer of Hasta Siempre Comandante, the most famous song about Che Guevara), Alfonso y Justo (a beloved duo of décima singers, the music kept alive by the small farmers of Cuba) and the great jazz pianist Frank Emilio with Cachoito Lopez on bass (later of Buena Vista Social Club fame.) I have returned over the years to sing at many festivals and concerts, usually with my son Pablo Menéndez. After my first visit, I had arranged for Pablo (then about to start high school) to study music in Cuba at the National School of Art. He decided to stay for life, and has become a famous, respected and loved musician and leader of his band Mezcla, which tours internationally.

I can’t conclude this history without mentioning my association with Mikis Theodorakis. In the early ‘70s, during the time of the U.S.-backed fascist colonel’s regime in Greece, I wrote English lyrics for three of his songs, part of a longer work called Romiossini which depicts the courage of the Greek people in the face of tyranny throughout their history. I sang these for Maria Farandouri as I sat beside her waiting to rehearse my own set and watching Theodorakis rehearse his orchestra at the Festival of L’Unita in Florence, Italy. She insisted that I sing them for him, and in turn he insisted that I sing them on stage with his group next day.

Later I did these same songs in New York with Theodorakis, after a huge campaign to obtain his U.S. visa which had been denied for some time because of his years of anti-fascist activity. I also produced a 2-record set of Mikis singing and playing songs he had written under his then recent and lengthy detention under house arrest in Greece. He later invited me to tour Australia with him but an illness forced me to cancel. I think I’m the only singer who was ever invited to tour by Louis Armstrong and by Mikis Theodorakis!

What do you consider your best and most representative recordings thus far?
I wasn’t anybody’s music mill, so my recorded output is sporadic and skips from label to label. My first recording was “Trouble in Mind” on the Barbary Coast/San Francisco Jazz label (in 1957) and on it the great Pops Foster played bass. He was the first black person who gave me a license to sing the blues. He told me not to be concerned (about being white), that I had as much right as anyone, and that he was happy someone like me loved the music as I clearly did. The other musicians were P.T. Stanton on cornet, Bob Mielke on trombone, Don Ewell on piano, and the veteran Darnell Howard on clarinet. Because of the unusually high level of musical synchronicity this record became a trad jazz classic. I myself was pretty green, but I’m not ashamed of what I did. The lp now sells for a bundle on Ebay, but I have reissued it as a CD and it keeps on moving.

I was asked by a well-known jazz producer named Tom Mack to do what he defined as a jazz record. He was, at the time, frustrated by being stuck at Dot with Randy Boone and the musical neo-cons. He could only make this record by hoarding studio time from other sessions and by agreeing in advance that promotion would be non-existent. But we got Earl Fatha Hines, Benny Carter (on trumpet!), Plaz Johnson, Leroy Vinegar, Shelley Manne and Herbie Harper to play, and with less than four hours together in the studio to create and record it, we made a really nice album called “Living With the Blues.” A tour de force by all concerned.

Capitol records and Atlantic came looking for me, and I innocently chose Capitol because they were near my house in Hollywood while Atlantic was in New York. Later, Leonard Feather wrote a whole column about the cultural incongruity of this match and how it would be a miracle if I could get that label to really get behind me, and he was right. But meanwhile, with a wonderful producer called Kermit Walter, and none other than Kenny and Wellman to anchor things, we added such tasty elements as Earl Palmer on drums, Billy Strange on guitar, Rocco Wilson on congas and a group of gospel singing teenage girls I brought from Berkeley called The Andrews Sisters to sing backup on some spirituals related to the civil rights movement then raging through the country. We recorded over forty shellac-ready songs within a week’s time, but only one lp was issued. I still think it’s a hell of a record. Title is “On My Way.”

My most recent recording was made partly in New Orleans in 1988 and partly in Berkeley in 2000. The title is “What Are You Gonna Do When There Ain’t No Jazz?” and it was issued by George Buck’s GHB label in New Orleans. I love it because somehow we achieved a hot quality rooted in traditional jazz but closer to a Chicago/New York feel from the first half of the last century. We used some great tunes to carry out a subtext which might amuse the listener too. The players on both sessions are Bob Mielke (tbn), Richard Hadlock (reeds) and Pete Allen (bass). We had the superb Butch Thompson on piano in New Orleans, along with guitarist Les Muskutt and trumpeter Scott Black. Back in Berkeley we had the west coast piano genius Ray Skelbred, Clint Baker on guitar and Mark Caparone on trumpet. I don’t get tired of hearing this CD, and am pleased and amazed at how well the two sessions blend.

The recording that best represents the musical scope of my life as a singing activist is called “I Hate the Capitalist System” and it doesn’t really fit in a jazz story. It wasn’t a product of any studio, but rather a patchwork of moments on my flight through events of the mid-seventies, and it is very special to me for what it captures of the times. There are some recordings available through Smithsonian/Folkways that fill out this picture in some ways. “Barbara Dane and the Chambers Brothers” is songs from my experiences in the civil rights movement. “FTA (F… the Army)” was recorded in three of the coffeehouse centers set up to support the GI Resistance to the Vietnam War, and you can hear the GIs singing along with me.

Each recording I’ve made represents a very different turn in my path, and comes from whatever I was living through at the moment. The style of music changes and flows with my life. Most recordings were made under stress of time and circumstance and I always wished for time to do more careful work, but this was seldom possible. I’m happy with them all now that time has passed and I have developed some degree of objectivity. My website details these and other recordings I’ve made, and one can purchase the ones available as CDs there too. There is also a link to my discography at

What are your future musical goals?
Several performances this past year proved to me that I can do plenty of interesting things with my voice even at 77 years of age. I want to do a lot more performing, but someone else will probably have to organize it. In 2002-3 videos were made of my birthday concerts, and there is a team of people gradually working to turn them into one DVD. I plan to put in time now helping to see this through to completion, and probably a companion CD. I have more material I’d like to record with the jazz band I now call the Golden Gate Hot Seven and maybe there is a way to find the money to do this too. I also plan to start work on writing my autobiography, but live music work will always take first place if it comes along.

What is it about jazz that makes you particularly enjoy performing it?
The thing about the traditional jazz band form that moves me so much is the way it forms a perfect democracy. Several musicians start together, laying out a theme. Then each in turn “speaks” his piece while the others listen and lend their support. Then they all agree to wrap things up together, to go forward joyfully and with confidence and swing. I want to live like that.

I love never knowing exactly what I’m going to sing, how I’m going to bend a note or phrase a line. I love the way good musicians can hold me up, like a pool of water in which I can swim as I choose, trusting them as they trust me to make it come out alright. I love the freedom to never have to repeat yourself. I would have died if I had to sing the exact same thing the exact same way every night! Well, I never would have been able to do it either.

I’m going to include blues in this, because it is the foundation of jazz. I think of the blues in some ways as a big mass of damp clay where you can pull out what you need and shape it to express something, and the next day shape it another way. I love the subtlety of the real blues, with its layers of meaning and possibilities of interpretation. “How Long” will I have to wait to see my baby; to get proper treatment; for that next paycheck; for an end to all this misery etc. etc. without limits. I’m disappointed and frustrated with today’s so-called blues, with their emphasis on what will sell, as opposed to what will heal.

Learning to understand and sing the classic women’s blues of the twenties helped me reshape my attitudes as a woman of the fifties. They were women who, because of growing up black in the USA, had had to cultivate a strong sense of their own worth both in relation to men and to the society at large. They did not seem ashamed of their bodies or their sexuality, as were my peers, and many things that were “scandalous” for the white women around me were simply things to be faced and dealt with for the black women of these songs. If I had not integrated their attitudes into my thinking early on, I don’t think I would have been able to survive as an attractive woman in a male-dominated business for very long. Psychologically, they taught me that I had a responsibility to myself and a right to my own sense of integrity, a right to define myself and to make my own choices, that there is no free lunch, and that nobody else owed me a damn thing. Real jazz attitudes, don’t you think?

One of the almost ineffable joys of jazz and blues music is when your sense of swing matches some other musicians’ sense of it and your hearts beat as one, without ever having discussed or planned it. To the core of your being at that moment you feel it, you know that a better world is possible, that we humans have much more in common than we can imagine. If I have any spirituality, this is where it is expressed. That great sense of release and freedom we get when we’re all cookin’ at once is as close as I come to prayer.

Please add any comments or information that you consider relevant to your life history or to understanding your music:
I feel humbled by the privilege of living my life as a singer. I have raised three children and they are all singers, each very different from the other and each with a deep sense of the meaning and value of song. The oldest, Jesse (Nick) Cahn, sings blues and writes beautiful American songs. The second, Pablo Menéndez, was a founder of the Nueva Trova movement in Cuba and sings many kinds of songs with his band Mezcla. The youngest, Nina Menéndez, is a flamenco singer, with a masterful command and understanding of this complex music. Whatever else their lives may hold in store, I know they will be enriched every day by these gifts.

Music is as important as any other element: air, water, earth, food, family, home. We need it like we need all of these. It is far too important to leave to the virtuosos alone, or the scholars and especially to the merchants. To the extent we can each own our music, individually and collectively, we can thrive and be happy. How sad to know there are those who will live and die with their only music thrust on them from the outside, or sold to them. All the great social movements of history have produced great songs, and I wish I could know them all. Sing every day, whether you think you do it well or not. Who cares? Do the best you can, but do it anyway. As some New Age healer said, it’s the only way you can massage yourself from the inside out!