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It was recorded in two and a half days at a small New York studio and that no-frills spontaneity brings the music alive still. The album Yellow Pearl released on Paredon was the poetic and groundbreaking “A Grain of Sand: Music for the Struggle by Asians in America,” which included anthems like “We Are the Children” and “Free the Land,” featuring backing vocals from Mutulu Shakur (his stepson, Tupac Shakur, sang along to “A Grain of Sand” as a child, according to Smithsonian Folkways Magazine). “Barbara had just done an album called ‘I Hate the Capitalist System ,’ and that convinced us this was the right record company,” Miyamoto said, referring to Dane’s 1973 collection with bold cover art.
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Nobuko Miyamoto of Yellow Pearl, the group of Asian-American activists Dane discovered when they shared a bill in 1972, said her band was unlikely to have recorded for another label.
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“It struck me that this stuff needed to be heard in the voices of the people who wrote the songs.” “I saw that whenever the movement in a particular country was strong, there was an emerging music to go with it,” Dane said. Co-founded by Dane and her husband Irwin Silber, a founder and longtime editor of Sing Out! magazine who died in 2010, Paredon was a people’s label through and through, releasing music produced by liberation movements in Vietnam, Palestine, Angola, Haiti, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Greece, Uruguay, Mexico, the United States and beyond. Paredon has often been considered an aside in Dane’s story, but is receiving more attention now: The label turned 50 last year, and is the subject of a new “digital exhibition” by Smithsonian Folkways, the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution, where it has been housed for three decades. (Bob Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman told her to call him when she “got her priorities straight.”) She started Paredon for the explicit purpose of providing a platform to music born of freedom struggles around the world that wasn’t beholden to the whims of the marketplace. Bundled in a winter coat and beret during a recent video interview, she was more eager to show off the wood-carved Cubadisco statuette (the Cuban equivalent of a Grammy) she was awarded in 2017 to honor her early efforts disseminating the political music known as nueva trova in the United States through her label.ĭane learned early on that her outspokenness and politics meant commercial success would evade her. Speaking with the eloquent conviction and blunt resolve of a woman who never compromised, Dane called the F.B.I. “I saw, ‘Oh, you can use your voice to move people.’” “I knew I was a singer for life, but where I would aim it didn’t come forward until then,” Dane said. The earliest entries are from when she was 18, spearheading a chapter of Pete Seeger’s labor-music organization People’s Songs in her native Detroit, and singing on picket lines to protest racial inequality and to support unions. The file doubles as a testament to Dane’s work as an opposition artist for the better part of a century. Dane was the headliner that evening, where she first encountered the soulful folk band Yellow Pearl, whose music she would go on to release through her then-nascent record label, Paredon Records. One night in late December, the 93-year-old singer and activist’s daughter, Nina Menendez, was leafing through it and noticed a page she hadn’t spotted before: a Los Angeles Times clipping from a 1972 concert at the Ash Grove. file in a binder in the living room of her Oakland home. Barbara Dane keeps a copy of her four-inch-thick F.B.I.