Seventy-one year-old singer/guitarist Odetta has been performing for more than half a century. She's been hailed as a protest-movement icon and folk inspiration for nearly as long, and has been cited as an influence by artists ranging from Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin to Nick Cave and (shudder) Jewel. But when asked if she's acutely aware of the impact her life and art have made on some of music's most prominent names, the septuagenarian's answer is quick, concise and self-effacing: "Only when they tell me," she replies with a short laugh.
Odetta's career is something much more than can be summed up as an aside in some pop star's biography. Born in Birmingham, Ala., in 1930, her family relocated to Los Angeles when she was 6, where she began taking voice lessons and studying classical music at the age of 13. But, coming of age more than a decade before the Civil Rights Movement, she realized the limitations placed on a black woman, however talented, at the time, and joined a series of road-show musicals while cultivating a love of folk and blues. She learned how to play guitar and, at 19 and appearing in Guys & Dolls, began playing around San Francisco's pre-beatnik North Beach coffeehouse/folk-club scene.
While vocal training and stage experience doubtlessly contributed to her strong, ringing voice, Odetta believes they had less to do with shaping her individual style than the joy of discovering and performing roots music.
"It was the other way around," she stresses. "Classical music is so strict and structured. It's a girdle. The only thing the lessons did was teach me how to keep my voice. It was when I began singing prison songs and songs from the fields, that I found my own."
Her first album, Live at the Tin Angel, was released in 1953. The young performer's renderings of gospel standards, blues classics and traditional Negro folk music sparked a large word-of-mouth following and garnered much praise from within the tight-knit community of her peers. When Odetta began traveling East, she was greeted in musical and cultural centers such as Chicago and New York by players much more famous than she, all eager to make her acquaintance and help spread the word. One celebrity, in particular, was instrumental in breaking the songstress beyond the '50s equivalent of the underground circuit.
"I'm eternally grateful to Harry Belafonte for introducing me to the world. I was singing for 10 years before he had his television show," Odetta clarifies, "but when he put me on television, it opened a lot of doors."
The artist's notoriety and fanbase continued to swell throughout the '50s. She recorded albums for celebrated blues and folk labels like Tradition, Fantasy and Vanguard, and appeared regularly on that cutting-edge entertainment medium, television. She performed at Carnegie Hall and appeared at music festivals worldwide. It was during the '60s, however, that Odetta made the largest impact on America's cultural consciousness, when she emerged as a high-profile outspoken voice of the Civil Rights Movement.
She marched with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma. She lent her voice to 1963's March on Washington. She serenaded President John F. Kennedy and a nation of TV viewers on the landmark Dinner With the President program. And she inspired thousands of young men and women unsure about the reality of the American Dream — Dylan and Joan Baez included — to give voice to their concerns in song. Odetta hit her stride in the midst of America's most tumultuous decade, setting a pace she hasn't let up in more than 30 years of commitment.
"(Music is) my life," she says. "It's nurtured me. It's been my school — it's where I began learning to philosophize."
Odetta has been earning lifetime achievement awards and accolades for some decades now. She was among the very first recipients of Yale's Duke Ellington Fellowship Award in 1975; she received Women in Music Inc.'s Touchstone Award and dined with President Clinton (a fan since his teens) last year as a recipient of The National Medal of the Arts and Humanities. Incidentally, her touring schedule hasn't changed much since the Vietnam War — she still hits the road nationally, appears at traditional music festivals around the globe, and is always willing to donate her time and talent to any number of humanitarian causes and benefits anywhere.
Kind of makes that whole, endless KISS farewell tour thing look kind of silly, doesn't she? "The traveling I'll never get comfortable with," she admits. "But working with all the people that put the shows together, playing the shows and meeting people is always wonderful."
As far as the current popular music scene goes, Odetta searches the radio dial "for country and western music" when she's on the road, but bats away the subject of particular likes or dislikes. "No, I don't want to do that," the singer demurs. "Ask me something else."
Obviously, questions about whether or not Limp Bizkit could beat up Weezer are inappropriate, at best. Still, as a performer who has witnessed the rise, fall, obscurity and possible second coming of more cultural and entertainment trends than even your oldest, coolest friend, Odetta is fairly aware of the art form's slide from multidimensional means of expression toward vapid, disposable product. And discussing it, one gets the feeling that she is of the opinion that it's all in the eye of the beholder, that the pandering and presupposition and final-quarter estimations in the world are irrelevant. The people define what goes, and ultimately get what they want.
"Performers have been told that they can tell what an audience wants, and that's bull-hockey," she says. "Whenever somebody goes to hear a band, they bring their own stuff, and that makes them get what they get out of it, from their own experience."
And what of contemporary youth culture?
"I don't know. But I can tell you that I wouldn't be a teenager today for anything. (They're getting) so many mixed messages."
These opinions fall remarkably short of the type of cynicism one might expect from a woman who's spent the last, oh, 55 years or so making music. But it's exactly that belief in the positive, uplifting aspects of music which makes Odetta's muse such a compelling one. She still believes that it can inspire action, that it can change the world.
"Of course," she says. "Because when politicians are politicking, what do they do? They call on a band."
This article appears in Jul 19-25, 2001.
