Odetta Holmes

Odetta Holmes - Broadcast Jan 2009

The sad death in early Dec 2008 of one of America’s great folk singers gives us the opportunity to mention her today.

In a career of almost 60 years, Odetta sang at coffeehouses and at Carnegie Hall. She became one of the best-known folk-music artists of the 1950s and ’60s. Her recordings of blues and ballads on dozens of albums influenced Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Janis Joplin and many others.

Odetta’s voice was an accompaniment to the black-and-white images of the freedom marchers who walked the roads of Alabama and Mississippi and the boulevards of Washington to end racial discrimination. Although primarily a folk singer she released several blues influenced albums and we will concentrate on these today.

Start off with a well covered Jimmy Rogers number from her first solo album, 1956, showing her fabulous voice

1. Muleskinner Blues - 1956 – Ballads and Blues – Tk 3 – 2.51

Odetta was born Odetta Holmes on New Year's Eve 1930 in Birmingham, AL.

Although she grew up mostly in California, the music of that time and place — particularly prison songs and work songs recorded in the fields of the Deep South — shaped her life. “They were liberation songs,” she said in an interview “You’re walking down life’s road, society’s foot is on your throat, every which way you turn you can’t get from under that foot. And you reach a fork in the road and you can either lie down and die or insist upon your life.”

Her father died when she was young, and in 1937 at age 7, she and her mother moved to Los Angeles. Three years later Odetta discovered that she could sing.

Odetta's mother began saving money and she began voice lessons when she was 13. She received a classical training, and found her own voice by listening to blues, jazz and folk music from the African-American and Anglo-American traditions. She earned a music degree from Los Angeles City College. Her training in classical music and musical theater was “a nice exercise, but it had nothing to do with my life,” she said. “School taught me how to count and taught me how to put a sentence together. But as far as the human spirit goes, I learned through folk music.”

Song credited to the Lomaxes, from her first solo album in 1956:

2. Alabama Bound – 1956 – Ballads and Blues – Tk 12 – 1.43

In 1949, when she was 19 years old, Odetta landed a role in the Los Angeles production of Finian's Rainbow, where she met fellow cast member and blues harmonica master Sonny Terry. The following summer, Odetta was again performing in California. This time it was a production of Guys and Dolls, staged in San Francisco. Hanging out in North Beach during her days off, Odetta had her first experience with the growing local folk music scene.

In 1953, Odetta travelled to New York. Pete Seeger and Harry Belafonte had both taken an interest in her career by this time, and her debut album, The Tin Angel, was released in 1954. From this time forward, Odetta worked to expand her repertoire and make full use of what she has always termed her "instrument" ie her wonderful voice.

Her first solo album, “Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues,” released in 1956, resonated with an audience eager to hear old songs made new.

Bob Dylan, referring to that recording, said in a 1978 interview with Playboy, “The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta.” He said he heard something “vital and personal,” and added, “I learned all the songs on that record.”

Another track from the Ballads and Blues album that has been covered by lots of people

3. Shame & Scandal – 1956 – Ballads and Blues – Tk 5 – 2.23

Odetta’s next album, a year later in 1957 was the first showcase of her extraordinary ability to interpret the American folk song. Whereas the first album featured Odetta accompanying herself on acoustic guitar, for this next outing, she added bass player Bill Lee, father of filmmaker Spike Lee. Although the title -- At the Gate of Horn -- suggests that the album was recorded live at the Gate of Horn club in Chicago, it wasn't. The idea was to offer a replication of her Gate of Horn show at the time.

[And as a side note ….The Gate of Horn was a 100-seat folk music club, located in the basement of the Rice Hotel on the near north side of Chicago in the 1950s-60s, set up by Albert Grossman. Grossman was an entrepreneur and manager scene who was most famous as Bob Dylan’s manager from 1962 to 1970.

After university Grossman worked for the Chicago Housing Authority, leaving in the late 1950s to go into the club business. He set up the Gate of Horn as a ‘listening room’ to showcase various folk singers as the folk revival movement grew. Grossman moved into managing some of the acts who appeared at his club and in 1959, he co-founded the Newport Folk Festival.

In 1961, he put together the folk group Peter, Paul and Mary. As well as PP&M, Grossman's client list included at various times John Lee Hooker, Gordon Lightfoot, Richie Havens, Todd Rundgren, The Band, the Electric Flag, Janis Joplin, and as we have mentioned, Bob Dylan].

Leadbelly numbers from this album

4. Gallows Pole – 1957 – At the Gate of Horn – Tk 1 – 2.52

5. Midnight Special – 1957 – At the Gate of Horn – Tk 5 – 2.36

In 1961, Martin Luther King, Jr. anointed her "The Queen of American folk music". In the same year the duo Harry Belafonte and Odetta made #32 in the UK Singles Chart with the song There's a Hole in My Bucket.

Odetta's most productive decade as a recording artist came in the 1960s, when she released 16 albums, including Odetta at Carnegie Hall, Odetta and The Blues, It's a Mighty World , and Odetta Sings Dylan.

In the 1962 album ‘Odetta and the Blues’ she drew from the classic female blues singers and traded in her acoustic guitar for a six-piece jazz band. Upbeat New Orleans jazz track…

6. Believe I’ll Go – 1962 – Odetta & The Blues – Tk 2 – 3.05

Two more tracks from ‘Odetta and the Blues’ with trumpet, trombone, and clarinet providing great accompaniment to Odetta’s voice

7. How Long Blues – 1962 – Odetta & The Blues – Tk 4 – 2.06

8. Yonder Come the Blues – 1962 – Odetta & The Blues – Tk 8 – 2.48

Odetta’s fame hit a peak in 1963, when she marched with Martin Luther King to Washington. But with King’s assassination in 1968, much of the wind went out of the sails of the civil rights movement, and the songs of protest and resistance that had been the movement’s soundtrack began to fade. Odetta’s fame flagged for years thereafter.

9. Go Down, Sunshine – 1962 – Odetta & The Blues – Tk 11 – 2.17

Odetta released only two new albums in the 20-year period from 1977-1997. But beginning in 1998, she re-focused her energies on recording and touring and so re-launched her career.

A 1998 CD dedicated to her old friend Ella Fitzgerald was followed by three more all of which gained Grammy Award Nominations The first, from 1999 was blues/jazz band tribute album dedicated to the great lady blues singers of the 1920s and 1930s titled Blues Everywhere I Go,

Track from this album:

10. Can’t Afford to Lose My Man – 1999 –Blues Everywhere I Go – Tk 7 – 2.57

The tracks on Blues Everywhere I Go tell what Odetta calls "the other side" of the African-American blues story. She chose tracks with the lyrics concerning lost love, unemployment, homelessness, and hard times — no knives, no guns, no chasin' women, no double-entendre lyrics in this collection.

11. Unemployment Blues – 1999 –Blues Everywhere I Go – Tk 4 – 4.06

12. Look the World Over – 1999 –Blues Everywhere I Go – Tk 10 – 3.38

Two more albums followed in 2002 and 2007. In 2003 she received a Living Legend tribute from the Library of Congress and a National Visionary Leadership award.

She toured North America, Latvia, and Scotland and was mentioned in Martin Scorsese's 2005 documentary, No Direction Home. That same year Odetta released Gonna Let It Shine, which went on to receive a 2007 Grammy nomination for Best Traditional Folk Album.

She was still performing at concerts and festivals right through to Oct 2008, and had hoped to perform at Barack Obama's inauguration on January 20, 2009, but on Dec 2 she died of heart disease in New York, aged 77.

Odetta married at least twice – both marriages ending in divorce, and according to her NY Times Obit, a third time in 1977, to the blues musician Iverson Minter, known professionally as Louisiana Red. Other sources say they were just ‘companions’. She had no children.

Finish off with a few more minutes from Blues Everywhere I Go. Big Bill Broonzy song about FDR’s Works Progress Administration, a ‘make work program set up in the 1930s

13. WPA Blues – 1999 –Blues Everywhere I Go – Tk 14 – 4.12