dirty linen

Odetta
An American Voice
by Tom Nelligan

Odetta Holmes Felious Gordon was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on December 31, 1930. Her father died when she was very young, and when she was six years old her family, like thousands of others during the Depression era, moved west to the reputed promised land of California. It was while growing up in Los Angeles with her mother and stepfather that she absorbed many of her diverse influences. It was classical music that first drew her into performing, but she always knew a bigger musical world.

"I was being affected, and infected, by people a long time before I knew folk music. I don't think there is anything that I've heard that hasn't affected me in some way or another, if only to learn what not to do!" she said with a laugh.

"I grew up at the end of the big band era. Fantastic music going on, before television. On the radio we had rhythm and blues stations, we had gospel stations. I had been going to a Baptist church, and hearing and experiencing the music there. As a matter of fact, in church I didn't believe those people until they started singing! I've always been suspicious of religion. But when they started singing, that was a vibration, a level to pay attention to.

"We had the classical pop ballads. They wrote some incredible songs back then, Tin Pan Alley did. We had a classical music station. Saturday was spring cleaning day in my mother's house. Everything had to be washed and dusted and whatever. When it came time for the Metropolitan Opera to come on the radio, we would stop what we were doing. I would sit in front of the radio and listen to them. Then we could get up and finish our work!

"Then, in the evening time, Daddy would listen to the Grand Ole Opry from Nashville. When I started studying voice, it wasn't anything if it wasn't classical, right? I swallowed the whole thing. But because the Grand Ole Opry came from the South and Appalachia, all that came out of folk music. And when I got into folk music, it was amazing how much I remembered of the names of people, the songs and words that we were all singing together. That's what it came from. I hadn't known what I was listening to. I was one of those teenage snobs, right?" she added with another laugh.

When asked which performers have influenced her the most, she cited the two most prominent African-American opera singers of that period: "Marian Anderson — she, for me, was the dignity of black women. Paul Robeson — he was the one from whom, through how I perceived him, I learned that it was not only possible, but necessary, to be responsible to our brothers and sisters on the face of this earth. So he politicized me."

As a teenager, Odetta began taking classical voice lessons and sang occasionally at a Hollywood theater. After high school she entered Los Angeles City College as a music student, and in 1949 she first sang professionally in the chorus of a West Coast production of the Broadway show Finian's Rainbow. The following summer she earned a part in another musical, a San Francisco production of Guys and Dolls. She might well have wound up joining Anderson and Robeson as a star of the classical stage, or perhaps made a career on Broadway, but for a musical encounter one night in San Francisco's bohemian North Beach neighborhood: "I was studying classical voice, and then at the age of 19 I heard an evening of what they called 'folk' songs. And those songs had more to do with what my life was, and my concerns were, than classical lyrics. I still love classical music, but it didn't have anything to do with our lives as we live them."

This is an excerpt. Read the full article in Dirty Linen #87 (Apr/May '00).

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