Odetta
What a beautiful name. Why aren't there many girls named "Odetta"?
Beautiful woman who kept her beauty and her voice well into old age.
According to NPR, she started singing a few years before I was born, 1950. I do remember her as a presence. More, some of the spirituals my mother sang me were Odetta standards. I guess she was a few years younger than my mom, she was 77, my mother would be 80 this year.
"If I had a Hammer", "Careless Love", if I sing these songs I have tics and turns that my mother passed on to me from Odetta. I believe we had an old album of 78's of her music, the kind where each record slips into a brown paper sleeve. I know that I owned an Odetta LP as an early teen, I just looked for it in my collection but it's been missing for years.
Odetta's voice and her opinions were consistent throughout her life. Reading the LA Times today, I see that she grew up in LA, walking distance to Marshall High, a great school (my old neighborhood, too). Because she was black she had to take the bus to Belmont, quite a hike and more of a central city zoo.
Music works for me that same way she explains in these quotes from the Times obit:
The traditional prison songs that she learned in her early days hit home the hardest and helped her come to terms with what she called the deep-seated hate and fury in her.
"As I did those songs, I could work on my hate and fury without being antisocial," she recalled. "Through those songs, I learned things about the history of black people in this country that the historians in school had not been willing to tell us about or had lied about."
" .... but traditional folk music remained her forte.
"The folk repertoire is our inheritance. Don't have to like it, but we need to hear it," she said. "I love getting to schools and telling kids there's something else out there. It's from their forebears, and its an alternative to what they hear on the radio. As long as I am performing, I will be pointing out that heritage that is ours."
Her voice carries so much history. Sixty years of singing that reaches back 400 years.
Beautiful woman who kept her beauty and her voice well into old age.
According to NPR, she started singing a few years before I was born, 1950. I do remember her as a presence. More, some of the spirituals my mother sang me were Odetta standards. I guess she was a few years younger than my mom, she was 77, my mother would be 80 this year.
Click to view"If I had a Hammer", "Careless Love", if I sing these songs I have tics and turns that my mother passed on to me from Odetta. I believe we had an old album of 78's of her music, the kind where each record slips into a brown paper sleeve. I know that I owned an Odetta LP as an early teen, I just looked for it in my collection but it's been missing for years.
Odetta's voice and her opinions were consistent throughout her life. Reading the LA Times today, I see that she grew up in LA, walking distance to Marshall High, a great school (my old neighborhood, too). Because she was black she had to take the bus to Belmont, quite a hike and more of a central city zoo.
Music works for me that same way she explains in these quotes from the Times obit:
The traditional prison songs that she learned in her early days hit home the hardest and helped her come to terms with what she called the deep-seated hate and fury in her.
"As I did those songs, I could work on my hate and fury without being antisocial," she recalled. "Through those songs, I learned things about the history of black people in this country that the historians in school had not been willing to tell us about or had lied about."
" .... but traditional folk music remained her forte.
"The folk repertoire is our inheritance. Don't have to like it, but we need to hear it," she said. "I love getting to schools and telling kids there's something else out there. It's from their forebears, and its an alternative to what they hear on the radio. As long as I am performing, I will be pointing out that heritage that is ours."
Her voice carries so much history. Sixty years of singing that reaches back 400 years.