 |
|
|
|
Odetta—still making music after 50 years. Photo courtesy
MC Records.
|
Odetta: Giving Voice
To Lives and Struggles
By Frank Dexter Brown
SeeingBlack.com Contributing Writer
Talk
about Black music! Click here!
For more than fifty years, Odetta, the phenomenal singer, guitarist,
historian, researcher, storyteller and musicologist, has stirred
audiences worldwide with passionate, caring songs about the lives
of everyday working folk who might otherwise be forgotten or ignored.
She honors the downtrodden, the homeless, the struggling, the not-so-powerful.
She shares stories of common folk's joy and pain, suffering and
hopefulness, fighting spirit and ability to overcome. Hers are stories
told in a uniquely powerful voice and varied genres—blues,
jazz, and spirituals, prison work songs, field hollers, sea shanties,
western campfire and Appalachian mountain songs. And she was able
to make them all fit into her embrace of the style commonly referred
to as "American folk."
Today, Odetta is still recognized as the "queen of folk music,"
though she's now in her early 70s. Indeed, she remains strong and
in magnificent voice, and just as expressively powerful as at the
beginning of her career. She's displayed this throughout the summer
while playing to packed audiences and drawing rave reviews during
the world tour she launched in July (her tour runs through November
2002— go to mc@mc-records.com
or to www.mc-records.com,
or call (631) 754-8725 for schedule information). And to think,
it was only three years ago that she began garnering new attention
with the release of Blues Everywhere I Go (MC Records), as
she was celebrating her 50th anniversary in show business.
For those confused that a sister has made her mark in a music style
not often connected with African Americans, Odetta explains: "[Folk
is a] unique music form, because it is derived from a combination
of different peoples. It came from almost every continent and country—from
all those who immigrated to America, because everyone came here
from somewhere else with his own music—American music became
a blend of all people's music."
And Odetta's sense of history and social consciousness is in the
tradition of some of the nation's most revered African American
activist vocal artists—Paul Robeson, Nina Simone, Sam Cooke,
Abbey Lincoln, Gil Scott-Heron, Sweet Honey In the Rock, and more
recently, Chuck D and Public Enemy.
Pete Seeger, one of the finest American folk voices ever, has said
of his first time hearing her: "In 1952… someone told me there was
a young woman who really knew how to sing Leadbelly's songs. [She
was] very shy, but when she was persuaded to sing—power, power,
intensity and power! I told her she was the first person since Leadbelly
had died to do justice to the song, 'Take This Hammer.'"
So it is only fitting that Odetta just last year brushed-off those
folk/blues roots by producing the album Lookin' for A Home: Thanks
to Leadbelly (MC Records), in tribute to Huddie Ledbetter, the
man better known as Leadbelly—singer, social commentary poet
and magnificent guitar player (he's remembered for playing the 12-string
guitar with rare skill). On Home, her phrasing is immaculate
as always and her southern, rough, country-edged word-styling is
powerful. Hear her rock with feeling on the opening cut and long-time
standard "Goodnight Irene," her haunting, sorrowful rendition of
"How Long," the pain of loss on "Mother's Blues," the sense of spirituality
on "In the Pines," and her real and soulful rendition of "Midnight
Special," in which you get a sense, despite the many, overplayed
rockers' versions over the years, of what this now American-standard,
truly meant to Leadbelly.
A classically trained singer and self-taught guitarist, she has
always explored a great depth of feeling whether singing African
American work songs, blues, and spirituals, white Appalachian songs,
or older English folk songs. From the beginning of her career, she
researched the content for her songs, learned about the people,
the region of the world the songs originated from and developed
what eventually became her repertoire through visits to the archives
of folk music at the Library of Congress. Of her research she has
said: "I'm an interpreter of folk music, which encompasses more
than folk songs handed down from the generations. It includes work
songs, game songs, children's songs, gospel and blues—songs
from people who had to entertain themselves outside of their daily
work, and songs for people and their emotional needs."
In the 1950's and 1960's, she recorded groundbreaking singles and
albums. Her renditions during that era of "He's Got The Whole World
In His Hands," "Kumbaya," "Goodnight Irene," and "Amazing Grace,"
became folk and spiritual classics throughout the world and inspired
an entire generation to better understand the struggles of common,
everyday working people globally. Her live performances were historic
as she played before huge audiences at the Newport Jazz Festival,
Carnegie Hall and other of the world's greatest stages. She was
also one of the few Blacks to perform on national television and
was one of the significant artist/activist voices in America's Civil
Rights Movement, which included Nina Simone, Harry Belafonte, and
Abbey Lincoln. She marched with Dr. King in Selma, Alabama, sang
at the massive 1963 Black freedom struggle March on Washington,
DC, and also performed that year for President John F. Kennedy and
his cabinet on the nationally televised special civil rights program,
"Dinner With The President."
Odetta was also earning respect as an actress, as her stage performances
led to TV roles, then films and stage productions. She made her
film debut in William Faulkner's Sanctuary, appearing 1960
with then world-famous stars Yves Montand and Lee Remick. On stage,
she was cast in the role of Tituba in "The Crucible" for the Stratford
Shakespeare Company in Ontario. But at the same time, she met with
criticism over her music—complaints that came not because of
the working class/proletarian viewpoint of her songs, but because
some "folk purists" were offended that she had recorded her first
blues album, Odetta and the Blues. Meanwhile, she continued
touring internationally, and released landmark albums for Vanguard
and RCA Records. while her celebrity lessened into the '70's, '80's
and '90's, Odetta kept sharing her stories.
Her 1999 release of Blues Everywhere I Go was her first
blues band album in almost forty years. The album, which kicked-off
her collaboration with MC Records, received a 2000 Grammy nomination
and two W.C. Handy Award nominations from the Blues Foundation as
the top blues recording of 1999. The set pays homage to Black female
blues originators Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, and Victoria
Spivey, and their notable stories of social relevance from the 1920s
and '30s. These are not blues that are sorrowful tales of woe. No,
instead these are songs of social relevance. Just check the titles:
"Rich Man Blues," "Unemployment Blues," Homeless Blues," "WPA Blues,"
and "Can't Afford to Lose My Man."
At the release of the album, Odetta was among 19 honorees that
President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton presented
with the National Medal of the Arts and Humanities, at Washington,
DC's Constitution Hall Odetta noted that the ceremony was especially
moving for her since Marian Anderson, her childhood singing influence
and eventual dear friend, was prevented from performing on that
very same stage sixty years earlier. Later in 1999, Odetta also
appeared on a video Odetta: Exploring Life, Music and Song,
(Homespun Tapes & Video released the instructional), hosted by Dr.
Ysaye Barnwell, of Sweet Honey in the Rock, This connection was
also fitting since Barnwell and Sweet Honey are among the many folk-oriented
African-American voices that have been influenced over the years
by Odetta. Others include Richie Havens, Joan Armatrading, Tracy
Chapman, Vance Gilbert, and more recently, Ben Harper.
Today, it is fortunate that many of the Birmingham, Alabama-born
singer's classic recordings (28 solo LPs since the early-'50s) have
been re-released on CD, including the recordings Odetta at Town
Hall, 1963 (Vanguard, 1999), Odetta at Carnegie Hall
(Vanguard, 1999), and Best of the Vanguard Years (Vanguard,
1999). On each of these, take note of the only accompaniment to
her voice and guitar—that of the brilliant string bass work
of a young Bill Lee, the father of filmmaker Spike Lee.
But her 1996 live performance tribute recording To Ella
(Silverwolf Records, 1998), performed at The Kerrville Folk Festival,
Texas, the night of Ella Fitzgerald's passing, is particularly memorable
as it shows her in excellent voice and just as vibrant and conscious
as ever. This is especially so on her signature pieces, "Black Woman,"
and "Suite: Ancestors I," which weaves together her famous "900
Miles," "Red Clay Country," "Another Man Done Gone," and "Poor Wayfarin'
Stranger" into a down-home quilt of hardship.
Such heralding of struggle and sisterhood is also core Odetta.
This is only one of the reasons that the United Nations World Economic
Assembly of Women honored her in 2000 with its Lifetime Achievement
Award. As friend and equally significant sister seer Maya Angelou
says: "If only one could be sure that every 50 years a voice and
a soul like Odetta's would come along, the centuries would pass
so quickly and painlessly we would hardly recognize the time."
Related Sites:
-- August 29, 2002
© Copyright
2001-05 Seeing Black, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
|
