TRIBUTE
Remembering a force of nature
Civil rights, folk music icon Odetta dies at 77
The career of Odetta, the powerhouse folk singer and icon of the civil rights movement in America who died Tuesday at age 77, mirrors the civil rights struggle in this country.
It is ironic that her death, from heart disease, comes just as the first African- American to be elected president prepares to take over the Oval Office.
Born Odetta Holmes in Birmingham, Ala., just as the Great Depression commenced, the singer immersed herself in slave songs, prison chants and the already deep strains of African-American work songs and blues as a child, before eventually earning a degree in music from Los Angeles City College.
That schooling would come in handy, for it was certainly a factor in the power, luminosity, and sureness of pitch that would come to mark her work. Her voice was often described employing strength-related metaphors –as a “force of nature,” harnessing the “power of a hurricane,” etc. But Odetta was a sublime musician who exercised consummate control of musical dynamics as both singer and guitarist, an ability that allowed her to pull listeners in with her subtlety, before slamming them with her raw force.
Perhaps no single album more ably demonstrates the depth of Odetta’s power than her 1956 debut, “Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues,” a haunting collection of spirituals, blues songs and topical pieces that the singer made her own through the conviction of her delivery.
That album — given its definitive CD remastering in 2005 and now rightly viewed as a timeless classic — towered above the folk music movement that would explode within a few short years of its release. The movement’s progenitors — from Pete Seeger to Dave Van Ronk — knew and loved Odetta’s work, and were heavily influenced by it.
The man now most directly associated with ’60s folk and “protest” music — Bob Dylan — told Playboy in a 1979 interview: “The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta.” He cited “something vital and personal” in the music heard on “Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues” as a primary motivating factor in his early work.
That’s not surprising, considering that the album includes pieces like “Jack of Diamonds,” “Water Boy,” “Mule Skinner” and “Another Man Done Gone,” songs that clearly summoned and drew upon the “old, weird America” that critic Greil Marcus would one day discover in Dylan’s work.
Having grown up amid the barely glossed-over racism at the heart of segregation, Odetta almost effortlessly captured the zeitgeist of the civil rights movement, not only in her choice of material, but in her delivery, which was marked in equal parts by an unflinching sense of dignity and a just-below-the-surface righteous rage. It was this tornado of proud fury that was heard echoing from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial during the 1963 March on Washington, when Odetta sang for the assembled after being introduced by the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The singer offered her “Spiritual Trilogy,” a piece from the “Ballads and Blues” album comprised of “Oh Freedom,” “Come Along With Me” and “I’m On My Way”.
Appropriately, a very young Dylan also performed at this historic event, as did another Odetta acolyte, Joan Baez. One needn’t stretch to understand this as a symbolic passing of the torch.
Odetta’s manager, Douglas Yeager, told the Washington Post that it was the singer’s passionate wish to perform at the inauguration ceremonies for President-elect Obama in January — that indeed, it seemed like this desire was the only thing that kept her alive weeks longer than her doctors had predicted.
Yet, even with the physical manifestation of Odetta gone, her presence will be felt whenever a voice is raised with confidence and dignity in the face of oppression.
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