FEATURE ARTICLE
A role for Odetta
by Seth Rogovoy(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., March 28, 1997) -- Odetta's nearly 40-year career as a performer has spanned folk and blues music, TV, film, opera and musical theater. What ties it all together for her, she says, is playing a character in empathy with some aspect of the contemporary human condition.
After studying to be an opera singer as a teen-ager, said Odetta in a recent phone interview from her New York apartment, "I went into folk music because it addressed more areas that we humans address than classical music does. I still love classical music. It's just that it does not cover as many areas as our living mode."
Odetta will undoubtedly address some of these areas with the "living mode" of folk music when she performs at the Clark Art Institute tonight at 8. Delta bluesman David "Honeyboy" Edwards will warm up the crowd for Odetta in the last of the museum's "Four Fridays of Folk" series. For more information call 458-2303 x. 505.
Odetta's first significant stage experience came as a member of the chorus in a road company version of "Finian's Rainbow." While performing the show in San Francisco in 1949, she soaked in the folk music she heard in clubs and coffeehouses, and within a few years turned pro as a folkie in that city.
By 1953 she was playing at the Blue Angel in New York, and garnering the attention of such folk heavyweights as Harry Belafonte and Pete Seeger. The Birmingham, Ala., native who grew up in Los Angeles appeared with Belafonte on his TV special in 1959, and on one of his best-selling albums a year later. Her own albums, including "Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues," "Odetta at the Gate of Horn" and "Odetta Sings Folk Songs," were a major component of the folk revival of the late-'50s and early-'60s, and the next generation of folk and blues singers, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Janis Joplin, frequently paid tribute to Odetta as a key influence.
In addition to frequent recording sessions and concerts, Odetta also made numerous TV appearances. She performed in feature films including "The Last Time I Saw Paris," "Cinerama Holiday," "Sanctuary" and "The Effect of Gamma Rays on Man-In-The-Moon Marigolds," and in the TV movie "The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman. She acted in Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" in Stratford, Ontario, and sang in the Gian Carlo Menotti opera "The Medium."
For Odetta, these experiences were all of a piece. "I've always acted," she said. "I'm not a prisoner singing a prison song. I'm not a child singing a children's song. I'm not a lost love singing a lost love song. I've gone into what would be, or I've acted out the song. So when I'm in a stage play or a movie or an opera, it's more of a focus on a character. Within my concerts, there are many characters that go across the stage.
"All those other things are not stretches of the imagination. The technique is there, the voice is there, the interest in acting and the ability and willingness to learn. That's not a stretch at all."
Odetta brings the same level of empathy and emotional commitment to individual songs that she brings to her acting roles. In order for a song to make it into her repertoire, "it has to be graceful, or it has to have an emotional level that addresses" contemporary concerns, she said.
"We're not agrarian, we're city folks, but from the folk music area they have addressed all of our emotional levels, and we as an audience can transpose," said Odetta, describing her method, which could also be a description of the folk process. "If I'm singing `John Henry,' everybody knows that they haven't built a tunnel competing with a steam drill. But the feeling of frustration, especially as machines are taking over our work, and especially since there's this cutback stuff and downsizing stuff, the frustration is coming out of stuff, but `John Henry' represents the frustration. You put your name to it, or what you do. You make it so that it fits you. But what has happened is we're dealing with the same emotions."
Certain songs, however, exert a personal hold on the singer beyond rational explanation. "In any concert I need to start with `Kumbaya,'^" she said. "It helps me and the audience focus into the space that we are now going to ride on.
"Another one that is a lot in my head is a cowboy song called `I'm a Rambler and a Gambler.' There's something about this cowboy's attitude I like very much. I always used to wonder, why cowboys? Then I heard recently that during slavery the black men -- the slaves -- took care of the cattle. And they called them `cowboys.' If there was a white man, he was a `drover' or a `ranger' or whatever else. If you called him a `cowboy' them was fightin' words. So then Hollywood comes along and I guess `cowboy' really fits the tongue and the imagination, and that is how `cowboy' has come to cover rangers, drovers, everybody who worked with cattle."
[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on March 28, 1997. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1997. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
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