There’s something paradoxical about calling Odetta – or anyone, for that matter – our greatest folk artist. For folk music is, by definition, the music of the people, not a ticket to some higher level of virtuosity yo be admired by those you’ve left behind. It’s not about chops. Certainly it’s not about dazzling lights or choreography. Instead, there’s something in Odetta’s excellence that can’t be so easily defined.
Maybe it’s like this: Odetta showed us not what we could become if only we had practiced harder, been luckier or had famous parents. Rather, her music celebrates what we already are, with emotions as rich as those that any superstar can simulate.
Throughout her long history, Odetta Holmes celebrated America through songs that reflect real lives. She explored a rainbow of traditions, from prison songs to Appalachian ballads. She performed for presidents and paupers, performed operas in Italy and sang spirituals for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The diversity of these venues and traditions makes the point that humanity, not virtuosity, is the great lever, capable of toppling barriers of language and technique.
In the spirit of her friend Pete Seeger, she used music to address issues of social concern – not so much to agitate for change as to gently lead listeners to the well of understanding. In her work, the old values brought listeners together. Like folk music itself, she was both the anchor and the wind.
In this partial transcript, Odetta and I talked about the night she traded her operatic aspirations for a lifetime in folk music, the loss of hope in darker modern music, whether you have to skew left politically to sing folk songs authentically and whatever other topics popped up. For me, the most interesting was the question of what makes a song specifically a folk song. This sparked some lively and ultimately illuminating conversation.
****
Why did your family move from Birmingham, Alabama, to Los Angeles when you were five years old?
My stepfather worked in the steel mills there in Birmingham. He developed a lung condition. This was at a time when tuberculosis was running rampant in this country. He did not have tuberculosis, but the doctors suggested that he move to a drier climate. Now, I’m not sure if that would really be Los Angeles, but I do know that there were family and friends of my family out there. So his brother and he drove out to Los Angeles, and he found a job and an apartment. Then he sent for us.
Did that move actually improve your father’s health?
Well, he was in the hospital an awful lot of the time. I think that was the reason they let him come home, because he missed his family. Our mother told us that his case was unusual and was in medical books: His lung condition turned into tuberculosis only ten minutes before he died.
Could you describe your old neighborhood in L.A.?
We lived where Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards came together, in Santa Monica. It was called the Hollywood Junction, where the Vista Theater was. It was individual houses. We lived in a duplex, next door to a brother of Daddy’s. We were making it, but we didn’t have any extra cushion. Everybody knew everybody else in the neighborhood. It was a U.N.-type, unself-conscious neighborhood. There were Cubans there, and Japanese and Hispanics and blacks and French Canadians.
That diversity obviously made a strong impact on you as a child.
One of the saddest, most frightening days – it still affects me – is when after December 7, 1941, the government decided that they were going to put the Japanese in concentration camps. In our neighborhood, there was a Japanese church. My sister and I went to a Congregational church, and our minister told their minister that we would take care of their church. We had gone to school with these kids, played with them, fought with them … all kinds of things. They were our friends. And we walked down to their church, and their parents were frantically trying to sell their refrigerators and whatever. As I mentioned before, we didn’t have margins of extra money, but we’d buy a little something or other, if we could. We saw them packed on those buses. That is still not only a frightening sight but a frightening possibility that a government can do that to a people – especially growing up in this country, being of the “black persuasion” [laughs].
“Maybe part of being an adult is knowing that nothing is fair, so you get Plan B ready.”
Apparently you learned something important that day.
You know, when we grow up, we always say, “That’s not fair.” Well, we still say that as adults. Maybe part of being an adult is knowing that nothing is fair, so you get Plan B ready. But that might well have been a great big peg in how I was politicized.
This incident taught you about the injustice of stereotyping other people. But then, life in your neighborhood was all about avoiding stereotypes already.
That, along with the minister at our church, Rev. Allan Hunter. He was a great guide in that area, in that he had the Sunday School teacher take the class to mosques and synagogues and talk about it so they wouldn’t be frightened. He was one of the most extraordinary persons who ever passed my way. That also was a great help; one reinforced the other. We’d also go to that church on certain days and pack boxes; our church was a part of the beginning of Care Packages. So that was another way that added that ingredient of being politicized and aware of something that was outside of ourselves.
Your family was Southern Baptist. How did you wind up at a Congregational church?
When we got to L.A., we went to a Baptist church at first. We went to the Second Baptist Church, which was on the east side. When we got to Los Angeles, the “A” trolley car was still running in front of our house, so we would take the “A” car, then we would transfer downtown and go over to the church. Now, along comes the Second World War. A lot of things were going on, but there was one time when there was such a crowd of people, I lost my sister’s hand. It really scared me spitless. I think my mother sensed that this really frightened us, so she sent us to Mt. Hollywood Congregational Church, pastored by Rev. Hunter, which was just walking distance from our house.
First Notes
How did you learn to sing?
Well, I’ve always been a pack rat, so when we got to Los Angeles I found a music book in the garbage and a little stub of a pencil. I would walk around and scribble in this book, pretending that I was writing. I always pretended with music; I do remember doing that in Alabama. Then someone discovered that I had a voice. I was in grammar school, about eleven. Mom was going to give me voice lessons but the teacher said, “Better wait ‘til she’s thirteen.” So at the age of thirteen I became serious about it and started studying classical voice.
What kind of music did you hear as a child?
When going to the Baptist church, we did hear the music of the black church. But in growing up, on the radio there was the rhythm-and-blues station, there was the Top Ten – they didn’t have Top Forties in those days – with the popular ballads, there was the classical station. In the afternoon every Saturday, there was the Metropolitan Opera on the radio from New York, which we listened to. And on Saturday nights, there came from Nashville The Grand Ole Opry, which Daddy listened to. But when I became interested in classical music, if it wasn’t classical, it wasn’t music. I was a snob [laughs]. Even regardless of what color you were, there was quite a snobbery in the classical field. Many of the wonderful, magnificent voices had to go to Europe to get discovered. At one point all they did was Porgy and Bess, so there was a bias over there as well. But that has loosened up. So I thought that I would learn the scores of the different oratorios: The Messiah, The Seasons or whatever. We would get four soloists together, and we would offer ourselves to sing with schools and church choirs and also to work to the point where I could perhaps have concerts.
What was your range?
When I started? I was a coloratura soprano.
Are there disciplines that you learned from classical study that you can apply to folk performance?
Oh, yes, indeed! I’m not sure that I would have been able to survive the days when I was singing prison work songs, had I not studied and learned at least how to stay out of the way of the instrument, staying out of your throat and letting the diaphragm do the work. Because of knowing how to use the body or the voice, I didn’t wreck the instrument.
Isn’t the kind of vibrato one develops for classical performance a barrier to interpreting certain folk repertoire?
As a matter of fact, vibrato might be a dirty word [laughs]. You know what was a problem? The corset, let me put it like that. I had to learn how to free up rather than sing with the feeling of a metronome.
So it was a question of phrasing.
Interpretation. In classical music, what you do is really set down. There are rules and regulations if you sing this piece or that piece. In there, you can sneak around a little bit. It gives you a lot to depend on, as long as you don’t break their rules. But in folk music, where we’re talking about our hates and our fears and our loves, the giggles and the funny things, it has more to do with the life that we live than classical music does. Now, I still love classical music – not all of it, but I still do listen to some symphonic things and to voice. I especially like the voice. But folk music deals with the people as people and puts forward what we or our forebears went through to get over or beyond or through the kind of muck that people in power were giving us.
The Folk Epiphany
You reportedly decided to become a folk singer because of something that happened to you one night in San Francisco. Can you describe that night?
I think this was around the end of the Bohemia days in San Francisco. It was the same population but they then became the Beats. A woman who I went to junior high school with – her name is Jo Ann Mapes – was up there. She heard on the grapevine that I was in town, so she came with her husband Paul and took me under their wing. Now, Jo, through the time I’d known her, had talked about folk songs. But in school we had music books: One song would say “Stephen Foster,” another would say “Public Domain” and another would say “Folk Song.” It was sort of scattered like that. But that night in San Francisco, when they threw us out of Vesuvio’s [bar and restaurant in North Beach], Jo and Paul took me to their apartment. People there had their guitars, and they sat and sang. Some of them would play with each other and harmonize. That was the night I was captured. Many of the songs sung were prison work songs that got into the anger that I felt and the hate that I felt and the self-consciousness that I felt. There was one song someone sang that I still haven’t found. It was called “I Am My Mother’s Child.”
“With a capo, honey, you can go hog-wild.”
How old were you that night?
I was nineteen years old, so you couldn’t tell me I wasn’t sophisticated [laughs]. I was away from home and on my own. But that song happened and I started crying because I was so homesick for my family, my mom and my sister. Now, I’ve found through the years that as you get interested in something, angels or guides come along. They don’t even know they’re guides or angels, but they direct you to places and people. So when I got back to Los Angeles, I started meeting people who were involved with folk music. I was loaned a guitar and shown three chords: C, G and “easy F.”
The non-barre F?
Yes. Are you a guitarist?
A bad one.
As far as you know. With a capo, honey, you can go hog-wild [laughs], changing those keys. Now, around this time, as I was in Los Angeles, getting interested in folk music and studying my C, G and easy F, we were taking petitions around to save the Rosenbergs [Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, accused, convicted and eventually executed on charges of leaking nuclear secrets to the Soviets].
So that would be in the early Fifties.
Yes. Another hero of mine is Paul Robeson. I found through him that it was not only possible but necessary to stand up and support and be of some kind of help to your brothers and sisters on the face of this Earth.
“When the folk music boom started happening, people went out and started making up little cutesy-poopsy groups.”
Is a political element essential to folk music, or is that just how it’s developed in America?
Wonderful question! I may be off here, but always around the area of folk music was the area of social concern. In Los Angeles, we would get together in somebody’s living room and try to tune our guitars together – that’s where the expression “that’s close enough for folk music” comes from [laughs]. I remember we were over at a man by the name of Jimmy Gavin’s house. We were playing and singing together. When we took a little break, someone popped up and said, “Does anybody know of a conservative folk singer?” We all put our minds to that question. Quite a while went by. Then someone said, “Well, so-and-so might be, but we’re really not sure.” We were all Reds and pinkos; we were certainly not conservative. We were working toward the downtrodden being brought up. But this does not mean that a folk singer can’t be a conservative; it’s not like the guardian angel for folk singers won’t allow a conservative to sing [laughs]. As a matter of fact, when the folk music boom started happening, people went out and started making up little cutesy-poopsy groups.
You’re referring to the hootenanny craze of the early Sixties.
That’s right. We might have found some conservatives in there.
Those groups were generally apolitical, with the exception of Peter, Paul and Mary. Did this dilution of the political essence ultimately harm or help real folk music?
It was good in that it put the spotlight on folk music. As people listened to that, many of them went deeper than those groups took them. They would not have been introduced to it had it not been for these groups. But we were real snobs too. I remember when Burl Ives was working a lot. We decided he had sold out because of what we thought in the bank. But Burl Ives never did sell out, and through people hearing him they found other things: Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, you know? It’s kind of like a key that is given, and if someone uses that key, they can find some delicious things.
One Song at a Time
As you began exploring folk music, did it challenge you in ways for which your classical training hadn’t prepared you?
Oh, no. Let’s go back a bit. I would go to my voice lessons and do my scales. Then I’d work on song assignments. That was the only place where I ever did that. Now, with folk music, I learned my C, G and easy F. It was amazing, back in those days, how word of mouth … the grapevine was fantastic! So the life was made very easy in the area of folk music. I would have probably, in classical music, had to go and audition, and I may or may not get whatever I was auditioning for. I wasn’t around a community. But in folk music it was a community. Then the grapevine started working for you. I never would have approached a club to go sing there, but I was approached. And since they were asking me to sing – my life’s love – well, of course I said yes. There was really no challenge, because there was always someone there to help me with whatever it was that I was doing.
How did you build your folk repertoire? Did you go out and listen to a lot of singers?
No. I’m a collector of collectors. Never would you find me in a camper nor a tent, out amongst the mosquitoes, collecting nothing [laughs]. Also, as we would get together and try to tune our guitars, we would hear something different – new songs. It truly was, back in those days, an example of what folk music was: It was an oral tradition, passed on in that way.
But you did research some particular old tunes, no?
Oh, yes. One very helpful agency is the Folk Music Department in the Library of Congress, and they’re so willing to help you. Now, always, when going to Washington, D.C., and I have a little time there, I kidnap someone from the Folk Music Department, and we go and have lunch or some coffee.
Years before, if you don’t mind my going back, I was on a concert with Peter, Paul and Mary at the Carter Barron Theater in Washington, D.C. In part of one of my introductions I mentioned one of my most favorite places in the world, which is the Library of Congress. I said something about how they are treated like a stepchild: The FBI goes in and gets all the money, and there’s just a few crumbs left over for the library. Anyway, after the concert, some of the people working at the Folk Music Department came back and said, “Thank you for mentioning us!” I said, “Do you know how much you are loved? I mean, admired and loved? I know there are many of us who would give concerts to amass the money it would take for you to get the music.”
Can you give us an example of how the Library helped you look into a particular song?
I was in D.C., running around like a chicken with its head cut off. It was time for me to leave D.C., so I called over [to the Library] and said, “I need to know who wrote the words to his song. I’m gonna be in a taxi, going to the airport. But I’m gonna run in on the way, get whatever you have and run back out.” So the cab stopped at the Folk Music Department, I ran in … and they gave me a stack of papers with every time the melody was used, who wrote the words to that particular version, their mother’s and father’s names, and their grandfathers’ and grandmothers’ names.
What song was that?
It was “Amazing Grace.” Now, that’s an endangered species!
Folk or No Folk?
When does a song become a folk song?
Once we know who wrote it, it’s not a folk song.
So nothing that Bob Dylan wrote can be considered a folk song?
Now, I’m not quite sure what rules and regulations we’ve made up for that one. Of course, always, somebody has written each folk song, so don’t get me wrong there. And someone else has heard it and liked it, and then they do it in their own way. So always, things are either being taken away or added to the song. Now, as we go further on, maybe thirty years down the line, we’ll hear some kids singing “Blowin’ in the Wind” in a way that Dylan didn’t write it. We might call that the folk process; the song is in the folk process of changing.
These days it’s almost impossible not to know who wrote this or that song.
Well, now, that’s a very interesting area. Before the early Fifties and probably way before then, folk songs were songs that everybody knew. We would teach each other the songs, so it was participation, for sure. The cutoff spot in this area is Bob Dylan. That’s not to say anything negative about him or what he did – he’s brilliant, man! But that’s when we started listening to the singer/songwriter and we didn’t know the songs. In a way, that was like separation.
Dylan wasn’t the first, though. Woody Guthrie was writing songs before him.
But I’m not sure Woody ever wrote an original melody. He used other melodies. We knew the melodies and we learned the words that he put to them. It gets into the area of poetry and abstractions.
People who are called folk singers today often produce material that is so personal and idiosyncratic that it’s hard to imagine anyone else singing it.
Yeah, but I think they’re called folk singers because they have been influenced, say, by different peoples. Dylan was affected by Guthrie, so their point of view is via the folk music as opposed to Tin Pan Alley, as opposed to opera, as opposed to show tunes or as opposed to the Top Forty.
So is it appropriate to call, say, Tracy Chapman a folk singer?
Yeah, I would put her in the folk music area. I mean, where else would we put her?
Well, she writes most of her own repertoire …
But she’s been affected by folk music – or infected [laughs]. Now, I may be way off here, and I’m certainly open to discussion. Always it’s been difficult for people to sit down and, in three days or less, tell you what a folk song is.
Do you prefer singing pure folk material as opposed to songs whose authorship is modern and identifiable?
No, because I’m very greedy [laughs].When we were growing up, we had some of the most fantastic lyrics with pop songs. Folk music has been like my university, but it’s been through finding it and involving myself in it that I have learned a great deal. That is the mainstay.
The True Blues
How has your folk music experience informed your approach to the blues?
Where should I start with this one? First of all, I have to thank Alberta Hunter for being such a great teacher. When this younger one heard Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and some of the women blues singers, we heard energy. And I thought, “Ah! Energy! That means yell and scream and holler.” The first blues record I did, that was more or less the modus operandi.
I was lucky enough to be in New York City when Alberta Hunter came out of retirement for the third time in her life and was singing in the Cookery in the Village – not a place set up for performance. There she was, with the piano, in front of the grill, where they were cooking something. And this little bitty lady didn’t yell, scream or holler one time. I swear, I saw her dig her feet into the floorboards there and bring up what it was that she wanted to underscore.
I went several times to see her. She never gave me any pointers specifically; her whole thing was pointers. So I’m working on that part of me, of trying not to say everything, just leaning back and saying it. And also, I think, maybe leave space for the person hearing it to interject their own stuff. Because when I’m hollering and screaming on people, all they’re doing is duckin’ and dodgin’ [laughs].
How do blues lyrics and stories differ from those in folk songs?
Thank you for bringing that out; this happens to be a soapbox of mine. Young college students started collecting the blues [songs] many years ago; they were teenagers or just out of [being] teenagers. They were fascinated by the prurient and the double entendre, and they were also very much into continuing or projecting with the stereotype of what blacks are. So I am looking for the songs that are talking about the rest of our lives in the black community. We didn’t just go into a love relationship with somebody and then leave them. We didn’t just beat up on folk. We didn’t just cut and we didn't just shoot.
The blues area is such an area of getting through the longing for something better in life. I do not want to cut out that other part, but it’s about time that we start bringing in the poor-man blues, the homeless or unemployment blues. You know, we were suffering a lot. We still are. As a matter of fact, I’m kind of a half-assed musical historian in the area of folk and in the area of the blues. So I would like to, in whatever way, encourage people to look back – or, even today, people may be writing songs in the blues area that have to do with the whole of our lives.
You’re saying that the preconceptions that people bring to hearing the blues stifle the potential of that music to make a strong contemporary impact.
Well, I don’t know if that’s the cart before the horse. You see, we as an audience can only sit back and look at what somebody has done and then react to it. We have heard for many years, “I’m gonna leave you. I’m gonna shoot you.” So that’s what we’ve come to expect.
…
Despair in Modern Music
Is there something uniquely universal about American folk music?
Well, you come to my house and I offer you a cup. And in that cup is some hot water. I give you the cup of hot water and I say, “Here, have this soup.” You drink it and you don’t say anything, but you know for sure it’s just a cup of hot water. Okay, that’s homogeneous. Then you come to my house and I offer you a cup of hot water, and in this hot water are herbs and spices and vegetables and whatever. You say, “Mmm, that’s a good cup of soup.” That is how I would describe why American music, in whatever genre, has affected the rest of the world.
We did not invite each other to our churches, our mosques or our synagogues, to our palaces and our hovels. But somehow or other, the music crept out between the cracks. I’m in Neighborhood A, you’re in Neighborhood C and I heard you doing something that I liked. I took a little part of that, without even knowing that I did it, and put it in what my music was. I there was ever a melting pot in this country, it’s been in the music
Folk music has a history of bringing people together and seeking common understandings. What role can it play in these times, when certain types of music are said to project a more destructive and separatist energy, even to the point of encouraging suicide?
It can only be as it is. … Music, to me, is healing, you see, and so when we’re talking about all that hate and stuff … The prison work song is about hating the situation. But if that song came out of a prisoner, that was the insistence upon living. They were not just going to lie down.
But if there are in fact destructive repercussions to a negative song, that does at least confirm the power of music to affect people profoundly.
Well, I’ll tell you, it’s quite a bit different from when we were growing up. These kids today have some images that are frightening. Television is saying that they’re not educating people, that you can’t blame it on them. But you get educated via examples, and that’s what they’re shooting out there. These kids, so many of them, feel that they have no option. They get to the point of “is that all there is?” much earlier than us older folks did or would.
In the stereotypical folk concert, listeners have linked arms and sung some inspirational anthem together. That image doesn’t apply so easily to a lot of modern music.
But music is not sitting out there all by itself. Music is reflecting something. Look at that slam-dancing they used to do. Frightening stuff. Yet have you ever heard of a riot, or somebody being beat up or killed, at a folk music festival?
No, not even at a right-wing folk music festival.
[Laughs.] As long as they do it together!
###
Great interview. Somehow I had never heard of her. I will be checking out her records.
One of your best! Odetta really shines through here.