The most influential folk singer you may have never heard of?
Odetta!!
In 1961, when Bob Dylan was 19, he decided to drop his rock ‘n’ roll act and to become a folk musician after hearing Odetta's Ballads and Blues album in a record store in Hibbing, Minnesota. He unslicked his hair, traded his electric guitar for an acoustic and started learning traditional folk songs. Soon after, he moved to New York City and recorded classic hits such as “Blowin' in the Wind.”
Odetta Holmes inspired and influenced many other artists of that time, including Joan Baez, Mavis Staples, Johnny Cash, Carly Simon, and Janis Joplin. In our current time, artists such as Tracy Chapman and Rhiannon Giddens carry on her legacy.
But beyond her influence on individual artists, Odetta made a lasting mark on American music itself.
A folk singer most well known in 1950's and 1960's, Odetta was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1930. At the age of six, she and her mother moved to Los Angeles where she started singing and performing in musical theater.
Inspired by Paul Robeson, she soon discovered folk music, spirituals, work songs and the blues. By 1953, she was playing clubs in New York City and Chicago. She sought to share the African-American experience through songs such as “Waterboy,” “John Henry” and “No More Auction Block for Me.” Pete Seeger was an early fan and helped launch her career.
She also sang about the experience of Black men on chain gangs. In “Take this Hammer,” she sings of an inmate who prepares to escape the chain gang.
You can take this hammer, down to the captain
Take this hammer, down to the captain
Take this hammer down to the captain
Tell him I'm done, tell him I'm gone
I don't want your cold iron shackles
I don't want your cold iron shackles
I don't want your cold iron shackles
On my legs boy, on my legs
In “Another Man Done Gone,” a tune she sang a capella with only hand claps, she told the story of the man who escaped the chain gang and is then hunted down and killed.
In addition to promoting songs about the African-American experience, Odetta played a major role in the music of the civil rights movement. She was the favorite movement singer of Rosa Parks and was called “the queen of American folk music” by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. She sang at many of the major events of the movement, including the March on Washington and the march from Selma to Montgomery in 1965. She popularized great movement songs such as “This Little Light of Mine,” “Oh Freedom” and "Got My Mind on Freedom." She was a favorite of the great Harry Belafonte, who gave her a TV debut in his 1959 TV special.
In her early recordings, she typically performed solo with a guitar, or accompanied by Bill Lee on a stand up bass (Spike Lee's father and a well regarded session musician of that era). As a guitarist, she was known for a double thumb bass line that gave her music a driving rhythm.
As the civil rights movement lost momentum, and as the commercial music industry focused on rock n roll and pop music, Odetta, like many folk singers, struggled to get her music out there and to play top venues. She was always true to herself, and resisted commercialization. From the beginning of her career, she did not follow the norm of straightening her hair, and instead wore an Afro, which was highly unusual in the 1950's and early 60's.
Toward the end of her life, Odetta was inspired by the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. Her dream was to sing at his inauguration. Sadly, she passed away in December of 2008, a month before that monumental event.
Odetta, in her singing and her performances, radiated soulfulness. She sang with her whole soul, bringing her whole self into her music. She powerfully expressed the human longing for freedom and liberation.
So much of popular music just skates along the surface, like jingles in a commercial, often dictated by marketing and advertising. Odetta was a deep river, truly a great soul singer.
In 1960, Odetta appeared on a Boston T.V. show hosted by the "jazz priest"," Father Norman O'Connor. Earlier that week, 6 year-old Ruby Bridges and three other black girls had tried to integrate a whites-only elementary school. They were met with hostile crowds and violent threats. Father Norman asked Odetta to sing a song dedicated to those girls. She sang, “He's Got the Whole World in His Hands.”
As a child growing up in the 1960's and 1970's, I learned that song at church. As I listened to that song again, for the first time in many years, I came to see how much this song encapsulated everything she believed in. She sang
He's got you and me brother, in his hands
He's got you and me sister, in his hands
He's got you and me brother, in his hands
He's go the whole word in his hands.
Odetta believe that God holds everyone in His hands.
That is a message sorely needed in our world today.
For more on Odetta, check out Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest by Ian Zack