Odetta is an artist whose career I've only really skimmed the surface of. Fifty years of recording have produced a wealth of material across blues, folk and gosple and all stations inbetween. What I've heard of her music interests and fascinates and Odetta is definitely on my must see list.

Fortunately Ivan Collins has been round a good few years more than I so for a more indepth view of Odetta's career, read on.

ODETTA - BLUES, FOLK, AND GOSPEL

I'm sure that all of us who were there during the folk music boom have our own special memory of Odetta--some moment when we heard her sing that defined what we believed and cared about songs and their power to move mountains and change the world. For anyone who went to the old
Newport Folk Festivals, in the halcyon days before the amplification of electric guitars drowned out the acoustic strum, there were the unforgettable moments of Odetta ending the festival on Sunday night's final concert. Odetta took the stage, singing across the audience of fourteen thousand people as if she, and everyone else, had been waiting for this moment. The damp mist that always escended on the evening concerts, chilled the audience as well as Odetta. But there was no sign from her that she noticed anything except that the moment had come to sing. Whatever the mood had been during the long days of the festival, Odetta brought the audience back to what the festival and the folk song
movement was about. She brought to us a sense of dignity and concern, and an optimism that songs like hers were pointing the world in a new direction.

I have so many other memories of Odetta--as a shy, young girl who came to a party in Berkeley in the 1950's with Ramblin' Jack Elliott. She had taken her first job as a folksinger in a San Francisco night club only a few months prior. Jack had been teaching her his "hillbilly" picking of "Railroad Bill." He played it for us, and then Odetta answered him with a warm, sly, slow version that suddenly made the song her own. All of us in the room felt a sudden rush of excitement, that
we had just heard someone who would be important to our lives. I have another memory of a moment when I asked her if she would sing at a small Greenwich Village concert honoring her friend and fellow artist Dave Van Ronk. Even though she didn't know she might be asked to perform, she was more than willing. Did she want to use a guitar?

Tom Paxton offered her his. She shook her head. No, she had her voice and her hands, "the original instruments." And she needed no more than her rich, flowing voice and her softly clapping hands to draw each of us into the song. Some performers insist that we sing with them, they direct us with waving guitars and they insist that we clap along with the music until the song threatens to run down without the energy we're adding to it. Odetta made us feel that it was a privilege if we hum the
melody along with her under our breaths.

I have another memory of Odetta using only her "original instruments" to draw an audience to her. She took her turn late in a long, serious program honoring the composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein in the vast reaches of St. John's Cathedral on the upper West Side in New York
a few months after his death. We had heard choirs and soloists, there had been reminiscences, orchestral selections and Bernstein's compositions. It had been a long evening. But then there was Odetta, standing on a small platform at the front of the audience, her voice reshaping the spaces of the Cathedral, transporting us to a different place.

There are so many words that come to mind when I think of Odetta--presence is certainly one of them. She has such a strong stage persona that sometimes I am left with the irreverent, but irresistible feeling that if Odetta had been the captain of the Titanic the ship wouldn't have sunk.

Other words that have been used so often to describe her are "strength," "dignity," "character," and the word "serious" is also part of the Odetta portrait. In a description she wrote herself about her singing, she emphasized that it is not just the subject of her song that makes it "serious." "It is not enough for words to embody a serious thought, they must evoke a human being. If the words are put together, or belittle the intelligence by the obviousness of their message, I would rather not insult myself and those who listen, by singing them. There must be an artistic lyrical approach."

The songs that have become identified with Odetta are the chants and cries that have risen out of the long travail of African Americans in the United States. The popular singer and actor Harry Belafonte, who was one of the first to discover and help Odetta in her career when she came to New York, felt that even though he was himself African American he had learned from her.

The following is a forward he wrote for her Vanguard album My Eyes Have Seen:"Few ...possess that fine understanding of a song's meaning which transforms it from a melody into a dramatic experience, Odetta, who has influenced me greatly in this area of dramatic interpretation, is just
such an artist. The sensitivity and belief which she brings to her performances surpass even her vocal gifts, which are of the highest quality. Especially in Negro folk song her distinctive touch has
awakened her listeners to the deepest appreciation and most thorough insight into the very core of this music..."

What we feel as her strength, her presence, is the force of Odetta's belief in her music. She is the first to say that each song doesn't necessarily express her own experience, but she is probing with us the common human destiny that brings each song to life. As she writes, "I have never been a migratory worker, but I know how it feels to 'Ramble Round Your City.' Through folk music, history can be closer and warmer. The people become people who possibly lived and breathed, and we need this reaffirmation of human kinship that folk music provides." It is not surprising that Odetta was the idol of the young Joan Baez when she began her career in Cambridge folk clubs.

It is Odetta's musical background that makes it possible for her to make these transformations for her audiences. It is a lineage that paradoxically comes through musical theater, and not the folk
tradition. Although she was born in the South--in Birmingham, Alabama--she grew up in Los Angeles. She was a music student at Los Angeles City College, and her first professional experience was with a touring company of the musical Finian's Rainbow. Her first job as a folksinger came in San Francisco where she quickly won over audiences. She came to New York in 1953 and appeared at the famous Blue Angel, where both Harry Belafonte and Pete Seeger helped introduce her to larger audiences. Belafonte included her in a major television special in 1959 which made her name nationally known, and she has been a part of our consciousness ever since. She recorded her first album in 1954 for Fantasy Records, and in 1963 she released an album titled Folk
Songs' which became one of the year's best-selling folk albums. She then began recording for Vanguard and her career took on new dimensions.

The years with Vanguard were a golden period for Odetta. She worked with Maynard Solomon, one of the two brothers who owned the company, and who produced the label's folk artists. Solomon helped her select a repertoire and worked to record her superb voice with the Vanguard
"classical" sound. Accompanying her was the bass player Bill Lee, father of film maker Spike Lee, and his bass is a strong, but unobtrusive compliment to her voice and guitar. In the song "Meetin' At
The Building" she can be heard with just Lee's bass, and her clapping hands. These were also the golden years of the folk boom, and she was a featured performer at festivals everywhere in the country, but especially at the Newport Folk Festivals, and in her own solo concerts
at Carnegie Hall. Many of the songs from this compilation are from the Carnegie Hall stage, and the audience can be heard with rapt attention and spontaneous applause that has always marked her performances.

For the Carnegie Hall concert she sang "No More Auction Block For Me" with the Choir of the Church of the Master, and on another song on this compilation, "Battle Hymn Of The Republic" she is accompanied by a studio chorus arranged and conducted by Milt Okun. Many of her songs come out of the southern work camps-like "Cotton Fields," "Another Man Done Gone," and "If I Had A Hammer"--and she is drawn to the great southern gospel tradition with songs like "Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child" and "Joshua Fit The Battle Of Jericho." Most often she has only the spare simplicities of her guitar and Lee's bass behind her voice--and time and time again she goes back to her "original instruments," her clapping hands and her voice.

Odetta is known for her wide ranging response to African American traditions, but she has not given us as many blues as she has work songs and spirituals. The previously unreleased tracks on this
compilation present her working with the blues, and filling out her own sound with back-up piano, bass and drums. The blues, like everything else she sings, becomes the voice--as she herself put it--of "...people who possibly lived and breathed, and we need this affirmation of human kinship." Odetta, throughout her long and vital career, has given us this affirmation.