Odetta

The woman who is known simply as Odetta isn't just a singer; she's a presence. She commands a stage with a quiet but unmistakable authority. Whether she's softly humming an old spiritual or belting out a blues, her powerful, resonant voice captures the weights, the joys, and the universal human experiences of four centuries of African-American tradition. Over the years her music has emphasized the common threads that join that tradition with all others, as she adopted into her repertoire a catalog of songs from the British Isles, Appalachian America, and contemporary writers like Bob Dylan. She was a major influence on the generation of folk performers and listeners who came of age in the early 1960s, and she is every bit as vibrant a performer today.

In the course of her 50-year career in the arts, Odetta has sung operatic arias and Broadway show tunes, as well as jazz and pop standards. She has acted in Shakespearean dramas and in movies, composed film scores, and led choirs. She's best known, though, for her vital contributions to the legacy of American roots music, for the way she can capture the heart and soul of classic folk and blues songs and project them to an audience through her own memorably rich voice and her intense, focused, and life-affirming personality. Over the course of an hourlong set she will show the several sides of her multifacted stage presence. She can lead her audience in a gentle singalong as if she were everyone's favorite grandmother, challenge their views as a stern advocate of social justice, offer advice as a wise elder sharing her knowledge, and make everyone smile at a singer having fun with a naughty old blues.

She talked about her music and her philosophy one night last December after a show at the Iron Horse Music Hall in Northampton, Massachusetts. The conversation was frequently punctuated with her hearty laughter and brightened by her warm smile, but when the subjects turned serious, she spoke slowly and with a measured cadence that conveyed an unmistakable strength in her convictions and an experienced fierceness in her opinions.Odetta Holmes Felious Gordon was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on December 31, 1930. Her father died when she was very young, and when she was six years old her family, like thousands of others during the Depression era, moved west to the reputed promised land of California. It was while growing up in Los Angeles with her mother and stepfather that she absorbed many of her diverse influences. It was classical music that first drew her into performing, but she always knew a bigger musical world.

"I was being affected, and infected, by people a long time before I knew folk music. I don't think there is anything that I've heard that hasn't affected me in some way or another, if only to learn what not to do!" she said with a laugh.

"I grew up at the end of the big band era. Fantastic music going on, before television. On the radio we had rhythm and blues stations, we had gospel stations. I had been going to a Baptist church, and hearing and experiencing the music there. As a matter of fact, in church I didn't believe those people until they started singing! I've always been suspicious of religion. But when they started singing, that was a vibration, a level to pay attention to.

"We had the classical pop ballads. They wrote some incredible songs back then, Tin Pan Alley did. We had a classical music station. Saturday was spring cleaning day in my mother's house. Everything had to be washed and dusted and whatever. When it came time for the Metropolitan Opera to come on the radio, we would stop what we were doing. I would sit in front of the radio and listen to them. Then we could get up and finish our work!

"Then, in the evening time, Daddy would listen to the Grand Ole Opry from Nashville. When I started studying voice, it wasn't anything if it wasn't classical, right? I swallowed the whole thing. But because the Grand Ole Opry came from the South and Appalachia, all that came out of folk music. And when I got into folk music, it was amazing how much I remembered of the names of people, the songs and words that we were all singing together. That's what it came from. I hadn't known what I was listening to. I was one of those teenage snobs, right?" she added with another laugh.

I grew up at the end of the big band era. Fantastic music going on, before television. On the radio we had rhythm and blues stations, we had gospel stations. I had been going to a Baptist church, and hearing and experiencing the music there. As a matter of fact, in church I didn't believe those people until they started singing! I've always been suspicious of religion. But when they started singing, that was a vibration, a level to pay attention to.

"We had the classical pop ballads. They wrote some incredible songs back then, Tin Pan Alley did. We had a classical music station. Saturday was spring cleaning day in my mother's house. Everything had to be washed and dusted and whatever. When it came time for the Metropolitan Opera to come on the radio, we would stop what we were doing. I would sit in front of the radio and listen to them. Then we could get up and finish our work!

"Then, in the evening time, Daddy would listen to the Grand Ole Opry from Nashville. When I started studying voice, it wasn't anything if it wasn't classical, right? I swallowed the whole thing. But because the Grand Ole Opry came from the South and Appalachia, all that came out of folk music. And when I got into folk music, it was amazing how much I remembered of the names of people, the songs and words that we were all singing together. That's what it came from. I hadn't known what I was listening to. I was one of those teenage snobs, right?" she added with another laugh.

When asked which performers have influenced her the most, she cited the two most prominent African-American opera singers of that period: "Marian Anderson -- she, for me, was the dignity of black women. Paul Robeson -- he was the one from whom, through how I perceived him, I learned that it was not only possible, but necessary, to be responsible to our brothers and sisters on the face of this earth. So he politicized me."

As a teenager, Odetta began taking classical voice lessons and sang occasionally at a Hollywood theater. After high school she entered Los Angeles City College as a music student, and in 1949 she first sang professionally in the chorus of a West Coast production of the Broadway show Finian's Rainbow. The following summer she earned a part in another musical, a San Francisco production of Guys and Dolls. She might well have wound up joining Anderson and Robeson as a star of the classical stage, or perhaps made a career on Broadway, but for a musical encounter one night in San Francisco's bohemian North Beach neighborhood: "I was studying classical voice, and then at the age of 19 I heard an evening of what they called 'folk' songs. And those songs had more to do with what my life was, and my concerns were, than classical lyrics. I still love classical music, but it didn't have anything to do with our lives as we live them."

Back home in Los Angeles she got a guitar from a friend, learned a few chords, and began immersing herself in the music. "I was so busy finding C, G, and F that I forgot to get in my throat and mess up how I made the sounds!" she said with a smile. "I went into folk as a hobby. And as I went into it, and heard the interviews that were given by the people that the music was collected from, I started learning about the history of us as people in this country. In school we learned about all those people who were successful in having their foot on our throats and not paying us enough for our jobs. So I have been heard to say that getting into the folk music and hearing the history, it straightened my back and kinked my hair. What is called 'Afro' or a 'Natural' today was once called an 'Odetta.' That's a big giant step, because this country, many of us as blacks were imitating what the white area was, so we straightened our hair. Now that's a big, big, big step.

"Now I'm really pleased that I studied voice because I know the mechanism of the voice. On my earlier records my voice did sound stiff and trained. I think it's gotten less stiff and less trained as time has gone on, because as I have learned more and more about our history, and more and more about myself, I'm not so much scared or afraid. I'm able to maybe open up even more."

Odetta may have first approached folk music as a hobby, but it soon became her professional focus, and informal shows around Los Angeles led to headlining performances at hip clubs like the Tin Angel and the Hungry i in San Francisco. Her sets mixed African-American spirituals and blues with Southern prison work songs that she learned from Leadbelly records, along with Woody Guthrie covers and familiar Anglo-American folk ballads. She traveled to New York in 1953 and performed at Greenwich Village clubs like the Blue Angel, as Harry Belafonte and Pete Seeger helped introduce her to the East Coast folk community. In 1954 she recorded her first album, The Tin Angel [Fantasy Records], which documented one of her typical shows in those days, followed in 1956 by the more widely distributed Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues [Tradition]. Her national reputation grew quickly, and she was part of the lineup at the first Newport Folk Festival in 1959.

She stood out in the nascent folk scene of the 1950s, certainly in part because she was one of the relatively few African-Americans and one of the few women who had built a wide following within the folk communities of the time, but also because of the emotional power of her voice, the intensity of her personality, and the simple strength of her songs. Between 1959 and 1965, Odetta recorded an amazing total of 16 albums for six different labels, primarily Vanguard and RCA Victor. In his notes to Odetta at Town Hall (1962), Vanguard co-founder Maynard Solomon wrote: "She was the first urban folksinger to break down the barrier of inaccessibility which separated the young folksingers and the general public from the rich contemporary folk song created in the South during our century -- the modern spiritual, work, prison, and protest song."

Throughout the early 1960s, Odetta lent her powerful voice to the civil rights movement, which was changing American society, especially in her native South. Among many other appearances, she sang before several hundred thousand people at the 1963 voting rights rally in Washington (along with Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Peter, Paul & Mary), and walked with Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in the landmark 1965 freedom march from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama. "The music followed the social movement," she explained, "the music didn't make the social movement. The atmosphere -- what needed to be done, what people were doing -- helped others realize what they would be in favor of. And they would write songs about what they would be in favor of. It was a very exciting time; it truly was. Looking back on it, it was even more vital than we knew. I guess I started finding out how exciting it was when people started asking me about the 60s. And I have to remind them that life started before the sixties!" She continues to perform regularly at benefits for causes she supports, such as Amnesty International and the Folk Music Archives at the Library of Congress.

When asked about her favorite songs over the years, she mentioned "Kumbaya," the familiar, gentle spiritual with which she usually opens her performances. "There's something about that one," she said, "and I know people make jokes about it. But I'm in an area where I've not had a million-selling hit, where I have to sing that one over and over again. So all the songs I do have been chosen by me -- for one reason or another. I like them. I mention 'Kumbaya' because that's a song where, as we come together, singing that song helps us get into that room together. It's almost like erasing the board, and then we can write on it.

"There are songs that have left me, and 'John Henry' was the first one. Just got up and walked out of my door! When I came into the area of folk music, I hated. I was resentful, and there was no way to say 'I hate you,' or 'I'm resentful.' But if I was doing those prison songs I could get my rocks off! Nobody knew where the prisoner ended and I began. So through that, I was purged. I remember at the Tin Angel, when I would finish singing a prison song and people would stand up and scream and applaud, an awful lot of that I think was shucking off the negative imagery that I put out there.

"I remembered what it was like to be that prisoner while I was singing it. After a while, as I was being healed by doing that, I would have to act out the song, and I couldn't settle for that. I knew what it was when it was for real, and I could pretend, but it just wasn't right. It just was not right. And 'John Henry' was the first one. Then 'Water Boy.' Some wonderful songs, but I'm not there anymore. I've been healed."

She selects her songs largely on the basis of their lyrics. "With a newly written song, the words make an awful lot of difference. There can be wonderful words and an awkward melody, or awkward words and a great melody. I stay away from those. The prison work songs brought me into this area of folk. The words are not a wide spectrum of storytelling, [but] there's an emotion there." She also mentioned the importance of "...how the song affects me as I hear it, emotionally. There's an Irish rebellion song called 'The Foggy Dew' that is absolutely gorgeous. I've heard songs that come from Ireland, and prose from Ireland. So many people there are so gifted with putting these words together. It must be in the water," she laughed.

Although much of her back catalog is available on CD, Odetta has made relatively few new recordings in recent years. A 1998 disc called To Ella (dedicated to the late Ella Fitzgerald) captures a live set from the Kerrville Folk Festival that includes a 27-minute medley of classic American folk songs. Her latest album, Blues Everywhere I Go, features songs from the repertoire of singers from the generation that preceded her own, women like Bessie Smith, Sippie Wallace, and Memphis Minnie. These are mostly women's blues, and while the songs sometime speak of suffering, they also speak of strength, resiliency, and the will to keep on going. "I was very much interested in getting past some of the stereotypes," Odetta said. "As young men of college age collected from the black community the blues and whatever, they were interested in the prurient, in the double entendre. They were interested in what they 'knew' of blacks, and what they 'knew' was that they would shoot each other and kill each other and knife each other. Blacks were drunks and they were going to leave, and whatever. There are other areas in the blues field, that address what our lives have to do with."

As an example, she mentioned "W.P.A. Blues," written by Big Bill Broonzy about the Roosevelt Administration's Depression-era public works agency that created employment for tens of thousands of men, most of them white. "I had always thought of the W.P.A. as the saving grace," she explained, "but Big Bill Broonzy called it 'The Mean Old W.P.A.' The wrecking crew would go through neighborhoods and evict people in order to make the roads. Those kinds of facts may not change your life, but for me it's most interesting to hear and to know how those who came before us got over, around, through, underneath, whatever."

Odetta tours these days with blues pianist Seth Farber, who provides a solid accompaniment for the songs from the latest album. "Seth is a blessing," she said with another smile. "As he's playing, there's a two-way street going on there. When I'm just there with the guitar, I have only my own self to bounce off of, and when I'm with another musician that's a whole 'nother vocabulary, so to speak. And as I hear what he's doing, something happens that makes me go someplace where I may not have thought of going before."

At the Iron Horse, she opened her set with an instruction to the audience. "If you talk, you can sing," she began, sounding like a grandmotherly school teacher, "and if you sing, put it out there!" Her solo voice on "Kumbaya" then filled the room, quickly joined by a harmonious chorus from nearly everyone there. She pumped her guitar with a tasteful, syncopated urgency on songs like "If I Had a Hammer" and "Somebody's Talkin' About Freedom," and let Farber's piano fill bridges between her carefully timed phrases on old blues songs like "St. Louis Blues" and "Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out." When a baby started crying during one quiet song she welcomed the child to the concert and talked about the importance of passing on the music to the next generation, but when someone's cell phone rang a few minutes later she briskly instructed its owner to take it outside. She encored with Leadbelly's driving "Midnight Special," and then finished with Sippie Wallace's winking "You Gotta Know How," complete with some sly body language that would have made Bonnie Raitt envious.

When asked afterwards if she had any advice for young musicians, she seemed initially reluctant to comment, but then offered her suggestions. "I don't presume that I could advise anybody anything, but the thing is, be ready. If you're into whatever it is you're into, do not wait until you get a job doing it. You hone your ax so that when that particular moment happens, you're ready for it. And there's so many levels, you have to really love what you're doing. If you're looking for a bottom line, you're going to be out of luck, honey!" she laughed.

"There are no guarantees. I think that performers are some of the biggest gamblers going, because our parents need a certain something from us, our siblings need a certain something, our friends need something, our lovers need something. Everybody needs something from you. And so it is very difficult to say 'yes' to yourself, that you're all right, that what you're thinking about is okay, that what you want to do is okay. So it takes a heavy gambler to get out there and say, this is what I want to do. And they gamble on the fact that what they're doing is needed by, accepted by, liked by someone outside of themselves."

Aside from her performances, Odetta has recently been sharing her lifetime of experiences as an Artist in Residence at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. Teaching a class called "Bridging the Gap Between Art and Music" was as much of a learning process for her as for her students, she said: "There's nothing I can teach; I'm just sort of the excuse. People talk to me and everyone else hears. We can be helpful to each other. One of the things I'm sensing fairly recently is that secrets are the most dangerous things in the world. We hold something in, and it's going to come out in some sort of way, in something more serious than that. If we can just turn it loose from hiding... I'm not saying that I've done that, or I found out how to do that, but I think I'm on the path of trying to find out.

"I didn't want just music people in the class; I wanted people who were going into computers. I thought, we're going to turn our thinking over to computers, and if we push two and two and it comes up five, we won't even know how to disprove it! The class was a huge success. You could speak on anything as long as you wanted to speak. When you were finished, you reaffirmed, 'I am.' It didn't change anything; it's just that you were able to include your own selves in on what your considerations were. Oh, they were splendid. That's the way to learn something, to sit up there and say you're going to teach something." she said with a broad smile. "I guess it was through that that I learned that secrets are dangerous, they're dangerous to your health."

Over her long career, Odetta has received numerous honors saluting her contributions to American music. She has received several honorary degrees, as well as the Duke Ellington Fellowship Award from Yale University, and she is a member of the Alabama Music Hall of Fame. Most recently, in September 1999, she was awarded the National Medal of the Arts, which was presented by President Bill Clinton. "I'm so very happy to have received it," she said, and then quietly added, "I don't necessarily agree how Clinton has done his stuff, and changed midstream, and all kinds of things. I thought about that before receiving the medal. And then I thought, this is a medal from the nation, and he just happens to be the president presenting the medal.

"Here's another kind of connection. Constitution Hall was owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution. When Marian Anderson was booked there [in 1939] and they heard she was a 'colored lady,' they said, 'No! no! no! Colored ladies don't get in here.' So Eleanor Roosevelt had the concert moved to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, in objection to them. Because it was raining that day [of the Arts Medal awards] we didn't have it on the lawn on the White House... they went to Constitution Hall! Aretha Franklin and I -- there were some colored ladies there!" she said with a sly smile. And then getting serious, she added: "There have been changes, and I bless the changes. But there's so much work left to do."

As she approaches the age of 70, Odetta expects to keep busy as always, carrying on her music and spreading her hopeful approach to life. "I think the next record we're going to do will be fairly contemporary composers," she mentioned, "and we'll be looking towards the words. I'm a half-assed historian, musically speaking, and now I'm wanting to tie things together.

"Things are going so fast; time is going so fast. There are probably adults now who if you said 'Beatle' to them they would think of the critter. They wouldn't know of the Beatles. So it goes so fast, and I would like to be helpful in putting somewhat of a pen knife on what our history is. Hopefully that kind of area might bring people together, so we won't be so afraid of each other.

"Someone said that somebody got to the moon and walked on it. Where did they get to? We still have our basic emotions to deal with and to go through. Wherever technology takes us, we still have our loves, our fears to deal with. And so I think we are forever in need of soothing and being together."

Odetta
Blues Everywhere I Go
M.C. Records MC0038 (1999)
M.C. Records P.O. Box 1788/ Huntington Station, NY 11746

A true American roots music original, Odetta has chosen a set of the blues for her first studio recording in 14 years. Her rich, warm, full-bodied voice puts a unique stamp on every song, and the 15 selections come from the repertoires of a wide variety of blues icons: Bessie Smith, Big Bill Broonzy, Sippie Wallace, Brownie McGhee, Victoria Spivey, W.C. Handy, and Memphis Minnie. The material chosen for inclusion here, in combination with Odetta's deep, smooth, well-worn singing, gives an especially distinctive, mature, adult air to the proceedings. Indeed, music writer Robert Gordon's liner notes, which occasionally are mired in a morass of political correctness, hit the bullseye when he says, "What sets this album apart from the many blues albums which inundate the marketplace today is its reclamation of the soul of the blues. The focus on good times which has popularized the genre feeds into our culture's escapism, and while the blues initially came about as a way to mentally flee the oppressive burdens of rural, working laborers, it also served to remind them of their own worth and righteousness. ... Blues Everywhere I Go... [motivates] listeners toward a familial and class unity, a togetherness at the hearth instead of the whiskey still."

The backing band on most cuts includes guitarist Jimmy Vivino and pianist Seth Farber, accompanied by various drummers and acoustic bassists. Although the instrumental arrangements are quite supportive and provide a solid framework for Odetta, the musicians were slightly too polite at times; they could have turned up their energy just a notch without becoming overbearing or intruding on the special atmosphere of the session, but thats a quibble. Farber and Vivino cook on a Professor Longhair-ish approach to the depression era "Unemployment Blues," and "Dink's Blues," the only cut with brass or reeds, features classic, on-the-mark sax and trumpet underpinning the searing slide guitar work from Vivino. Two tracks have pianist Dr. John as Odetta's only accompanist: "Oh Papa" is an evocative number about the plight of a woman who's stuck in a bad relationship, and both the good doctor and Odetta sing on a gorgeous, after-hours piano bar version of Percy Mayfield's "Please Send Me Someone to Love" that oozes with feeling. Overall, this CD is a fine effort and totally enjoyable from start to finish.

- Al Riess (Buffalo, NY)

Selected CD Discography

Much of Odetta's landmark music from the 1950s and 1960s has been re-released on CD and is available along with her more recent albums. Dates indicate the year of the original recordings.

Recent recordings

• To Ella [Silverwolf 1012 (1998)]
• Blues Everywhere I Go [M.C. Records MC0038 (1999)]

Compilations and reissues

• The Best of Odetta: Ballads and Blues [Tradition CD 354 (1956)]
• At the Gate of Horn [Tradition CD 1063 (1957)]
• The Essential Odetta [Vanguard VCD-43/44 (1960/1962)]
• Best of the Vanguard Years [Vanguard 79522-2 (circa 1963)]
• My Eyes Have Seen [Vanguard 2046-2 (1963)]
• One Grain of Sand [Vanguard 2153-2 (1963)]
• Christmas Spirituals [Vanguard 79079-2 (1963)]