ODETTA
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1954–2005 |
Folk |
Muleskinner Blues
(1956) |
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Album
released: Sept.? 1956 |
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Tracks: 1) Santy Anno; 2) If I Had A
Ribbon Bow; 3) Muleskinner Blues; 4) Another Man Done Gone; 5) Shame And
Scandal; 6) Jack O’ Diamonds; 7) Buked And Scorned; 8) Easy Rider; 9) Joshua;
10) Hound Dog; 11) Glory, Glory; 12) Alabama Bound; 13) Been In The Pen; 14)
Deep Blue Sea; 15) God’s Gonna Cut You Down; 16) Spiritual Trilogy. |
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Most people in the world — and I
do not exclude myself from that number — probably hear this record only after
learning that it was (possibly) that one LP which caused a young Bob Dylan to
(temporarily) abandon his infatuation with rock’n’roll and switch to acoustic
guitar and log cabins instead. This is quite ironic, given the huge
popularity of Odetta in the folk-loving circles of the late 1950s and early
1960s — but before you begin citing racism or sexism as a possible reason,
let us remember that the absolute majority of folkies from that era ended up
sinking without a trace, maybe with the possible exception of Joan Baez,
whose tenaciousness and willingness to evolve with the times earned her a
more stable place in popular memory than most of her illustrious peers from
the era when Greenwich Village ruled over the intellectual world. |
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That said, Odetta Sings Blues And Ballads is
both an important and a unique album, if not necessarily a great one. Prior
to Odetta, most black female vocalists were either jazz singers, like Ella or
Billie; or blues / vaudeville singers, gradually evolving towards R&B; or
mighty gospel ladies, like the great Mahalia Jackson. The idea of a black lady
playing acoustic guitar and encompassing all of the folk-Americana tradition,
both black and white, was, to say
the least, vastly underrepresented. Yet here was this imposing young woman
from Birmingham, Alabama, who’d actually spent a large part of her childhood
training to be an opera singer (in the footsteps of Marian Anderson) and
then, after switching to the popular circuit, still ended up choosing a more
«academic» than «commercial» singing career. Being this kind of outsider
inside the racially open, but still largely white community of
Greenwich-based folk singers must have been an odd experience, but also one
which gave Odetta a very special edge that set her completely apart from
everyone else. Indeed, the
material covered on Odetta’s solo debut album (her first LP, a collaborative
project with Larry Mohr released in 1954, went largely unnoticed) is quite
diverse — folk songs coming from various white sub-traditions are
interspersed with deep blues from the Delta, and gospel-influenced working
tunes sit next to covers of Jimmie Rodgers. As a guitar player, Odetta is
nothing special, besides knowing all the right chords and playing them
without any significant mistakes, mainly relying on the guitar as a steady
rhythmic support (I think Dylan was actually far more experimental in his
playing on the self-titled debut). But as a singer, of course, she is endowed
with a powerful and expertly trained voice in which an inborn blues feel is
combined with years of practice. She is not a thunderous screamer like
Mahalia and not an overwhelming soul siren like Aretha; hers is a more
restrained, more pensive approach to the material which puts her more in the
Nina Simone category — though, again, with very little, if any, of Simone’s
intentional provocativeness and theatricality. If there is a
single flaw to Odetta’s approach, it is the exact same one which also applies
to all the classic heroes of Greenwich Village, definitely including Joan
Baez: all of these old blues and folk tunes are delivered way too seriously,
way too «academically», in a manner which transforms them all into sacred
symbols and makes you want to stand up and remove your headgear while the
album is on. When Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman, sang ‘Mule Skinner
Blues’, he did it jokingly and nonchalantly, yodeling and grinning all the
way. When Odetta takes over, she sings it as if the future of the world
depended on each drawn-out note — without the lyrics, you’d think this was at least about Joshua fitting the
battle of Jericho and the walls comin’ tumblin’ on down rather than about how
"I like to work / Rolling all the time / I can carve my initials / On
any mule’s behind". Likewise, compare any of the Leadbelly originals
with their interpretations here and it’d be like... well, maybe just like what you’d expect an
opera-trained singer to do when taking over the legacy of poor old weathered
bluesmen from way down South. The bad news,
therefore, is that despite all the diversity of source material — ‘If I Had A
Ribbon Bow’, ‘Jack O’Diamonds’ and ‘Santy Anno’, to take a few examples,
represent at least three very distinct traditions — Odetta’s approach makes
them all into Odetta songs, essentially meaning one deep spiritual prayer
stretched over 45 minutes of varying keys and tempos, sometimes a cappella (‘Another
Man Done Gone’, ‘Glory Glory’), more often accompanied by guitar, but always
conveying one and the same emotion, that of we-shall-overcome. It is a noble
emotion and having it displayed before you over a period of, say, 20 minutes
would be very healthy, but at 45, it does feel like an overdose. The good news
is that, 20 or 45 minutes, at least in 1956 there was no other album that
sounded quite like Odetta Sings Blues
And Ballads. So it is a bit, or even more than a bit, «academicized», but
it is done by just the right person to do this: certainly I shall always take
‘Alabama Bound’ when it is delivered as a hymn by an actual native person
from Birmingham over an ‘Alabama Bound’ delivered by the likes of Pete Seeger
(or Lonnie Donegan from across the other side of the ocean, even if, God
bless his soul, the charming old guy did quite an impressive job on that
one). Not to mention an actual native person who has depth, volume, power,
and manages to stay just one inch away from ruining the material by
oversinging it — each single song is perfectly enjoyable and appealing in its
own way, it is simply that after a while they really begin to merge together.
It would also be quite a chore to try to discuss them all separately (which
is why most reviews of this album tend to keep it short and sweet), because
any such discussion would immediately lead you into talking about the songs
rather than Odetta’s personal take on them — because, other than her skilled
use of her vocal cords, there is no
personal take: she simply prefers the material to speak for itself, and what
good would it do to talk about the quality of material known from the
recordings of Jimmie Rodgers, Leadbelly, and Blind Lemon Jefferson in a
review of Odetta’s performance of that material? No good at all. But even so,
the album is still a (minor) classic from the golden age of the folk movement
era, and there’s nothing you can do about that. |
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Album
released: Oct. 1957 |
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Tracks: 1) He’s Got The Whole World In His
Hands; 2) Sail Away Ladies, Sail Away; 3) The Gallows Pole; 4) Lowlands; 5)
The Fox; 6) Maybe She Go; 7) The Lass From The Low Countree; 8) Timber; 9)
Deep River; 10) Chilly Winds; 11) Greensleeves; 12) Devilish Mary; 13) All
The Pretty Little Horses; 14) The Midnight Special; 15) Take This Hammer. |
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REVIEW
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Sound-wise, the
only — though significant — difference between this record and its
predecessor is Odetta’s addition of Bill Lee on bass guitar: Bill (who is, by
the way, the father of Spike Lee and has composed quite a few soundtracks for
his son’s movies) was a prominent figure around the acoustic folk circuit at
the time, and he and Odetta would stick together for at least 5–6 years
before parting ways. This sudden appearance of an extra bass guitar was
probably intended to give Odetta’s performances that extra «bottom», a touch
of sonic heaviness, earthy grittiness, doom, gloom, and whatever else rhymes
with ‑oom. I am, however, not
entirely certain that this was a good choice, because the goddamn bass is so
loud sometimes that it totally muffles Odetta’s acoustic picking and even
upstages her vocals; the result is that there is some slight loss of that
precious intimacy which was so important about her first record. (It may not
be so coincidental that Dylan would be a bigger fan of the first album, and
that, with one or two exceptions, his early acoustic recordings would always
be just Bob and his guitar, with nothing else to take the attention away from
either). As for the
material, this is precisely the same mix of ye olde British folk,
ye-not-so-olde American folk, and occasional samples of blues and spirituals
as before. Arguably the only song that genuinely stands out is ‘The Fox’,
largely because it is an old comic
ballad and it gives Odetta a chance to engage in some lightweight vocal
clownery — she does an awesome quack-quack-quack, might I note — to dilute a
bit the overall solemn atmosphere. But nobody would probably want to select
it as an intentional highlight: instead, that honor must rather go to
something like John Jacob Niles’ ‘The Lass From The Low Countree’, if only
for the sheer length (four and a half minutes) and the tragic flow of
Odetta’s "oh sorrow, sing sorrow" vocals. (This is, by the way, one
of the few numbers here without the accompanying bass). In order to
write a more detailed review, you have to have a far more serious passion for
folk music than your humble servant’s, because I probably fail to notice the
many nuances that distinguish one of these ballads from any other. I do
admire the way she can transform everything, be it a medieval British
minstrel song or a modern-era Leadbelly work song, into the exact same
«Odetta aria», but, unfortunately, this kind of deprives the tunes from
individual personality: when your ‘Midnight Special’ becomes the same kind of
operatic prayer as your ‘Greensleeves’, you might gain a whole new level of
appreciation for the differences between Creedence Clearwater Revival and
Fairport Convention. This is by no means to discredit the power, the
subtlety, and the overall class of Odetta’s delivery — but once you have
expressed your admiration for her overall style (which was done in the
previous review), you are left with nothing to write about other than the
songs themselves, and just how fun is it to write about the lyrics of
medieval English ballads in the context of a performance by a mid-20th
century folk performer? Still, just so
we can end this on a special note, I must
state that Odetta’s ‘Take This Hammer’, closing the record, is one of the
most vocally powerful renditions of the song I have heard — and that Odetta’s
heavily snorted "haah"s are easily the most disturbing
"haah"s ever, as if she were conveying the idea that all the
prisoners working on the chain gang were slowly dying of TB or something.
Overall, it would have been nice to hear her do more of these rowdy work
songs, as well as gospel material — her voice is just so better suited to
anthemic, «burly» songs like these than to romantic or murder ballads. But
it’s not as if that would help to make the songs more distinctive, and it’s
not as if she cannot properly handle sentimental material, either, so this is
not so much a complaint as an unconstructive criticism for the sake of
criticizing. |
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Album
released: 1959 |
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Tracks: 1) Poor Little Jesus; 2) Bald
Headed Woman; 3) Motherless Children; 4) I Knew Where I’m Going; 5) The Foggy
Dew; 6) I’ve Been Driving On Bald Mountain / Water Boy; 7) Ox-Driver Song; 8)
Down On Me; 9) Saro Jane; 10) Three Pigs; 11) No More Cane On The Brazos; 12)
Jumpin’ Judy; 13) Battle Hymn Of The Republic. |
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REVIEW As hard as it is to even think
about introducing any kinds of change to an established musical formula,
particularly a «holy formula» where the slightest tweak may bring on
accusations of selling out, losing touch with The Spirit, betraying one’s own
authenticity, etc. — listening to Odetta’s third LP clearly shows signs of
such artistic uneasiness; at the very least, there is a desire to use the
recording studio as a workbench for doing the old schtick in different ways.
Particularly by 1959, when she’d worked her way up to a certain level of
recognition and acceptance — and when even the big music business began to
realize that there might actually be some future in the neo-folk revival and
in social protest (at least, as long as its terms were to be stated «politely»
and «accurately»). |
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Thus it was
that for her third album, Odetta had secured a contract with Vanguard
Records, one of the leading independent labels of the day — and got to be
promoted by none other than Harry Belafonte himself, who not only arranged
for her to appear on his TV show, but also supplied a detailed set of liner
notes for the LP. Although most of the recordings were still made by Odetta
in the sole company of Bill Lee on bass, a few of the tracks totally went out
of their way to add a choir, with choral arrangements by professional
conductor, arranger, and producer Milt Okun — who’d already worked with
Belafonte before, and would go on to be largely responsible for the sweet
sounds of folksies from Peter, Paul & Mary to John Denver... yes, not the
best possible reputation, I know, but any producer’s angle of corniness is
usually a derivative of the artist’s readiness to accept that corniness, and
on this particular occasion, Odetta was not going to accept any sentimental
flack from anybody, so Okun’s choral additions work in favor of the songs,
not against them. Actually, the
biggest difference of My Eyes Have
Seen from Odetta’s LPs on the Tradition label is not the addition of a
choir, but a drastic change in production style. On those earlier albums, the
music was always in your face: sit Odetta as close to the microphones as
possible and have that acoustic guitar and that powerful, dead-man-rousing
vocal boom right out into your living room. Here, the very second that ‘Poor
Little Jesus’ kicks things off, you get the impression that the lady is
singing from a cave — suddenly, there’s an echoey distance between her and
you, one that was not even vaguely hinted at by anything she’d previously
done. Some might see this as an unnecessary distraction (and rather route for
the kind of version that she performed, for instance, on the Ed Sullivan show), but
artistically, the decision is perfectly sensible — having Odetta adopt this
Moses-on-the-Mountain approach to her delivery subtly emphasizes her
accumulated status of a «prophet» of the folk movement, and she handles the
responsibility well enough. I do not know
of too many renditions of the ‘Poor Little Jesus’ spiritual prior to Odetta,
but I do know that her
version is easily my favorite of everything I did hear; compare it, for
instance, with the Weavers’
version from 1951, just to see how Odetta, with her fast tempo, booming
voice, and heavy emphasis on the word "shame" throughout, turns the song from a «watch our sorrow
turn to joy» rumination into a diatribe on the world’s senseless cruelty and
stupidity. She even dispenses with the last joyful verse altogether; for
Odetta’s own poor little Jesus, there is no escape from the ‘pity and the shame’, not ever — the
song’s two minutes cut in and cut off as abruptly as possible, as if it were
just two minutes of radio interference from a dimension of eternal pain into
our own, casually untroubled, universe. It’s a masterful gesture which, in
such a short while, manages to bring up a state of poignant gospel ecstasy
that not even Mahalia Jackson herself could always be capable of, at least
not on such short notice. And it sets an excellent tone for the album — which
rarely rises to the exact same heights as the opener, but still remains
permeated by the same intense Biblical flavor until the very end. In addition to
myself, I know for definite sure of at least one other person who remained
impressed with it — not Joan Baez or Bob Dylan or John Denver or even your grandmother,
but, believe it or not, the famous record producer Shel Talmy, he of the ‘You
Really Got Me’ and ‘My Generation’ fame. And you don’t even need him to go on
record saying it (although he did): all you have to do is compare the fact
that My Eyes Have Seen You
includes two titles with the word "bald"
in them (‘Bald Headed Woman’ and ‘I’ve Been Driving On Bald Mountain’) with
the fact that those exact two songs with the exact same titles — but credited
to Shel Talmy himself!! — would five years later be included on the
self-titled debut album by the Kinks. (The Who would also record ‘Bald Headed
Woman’, but not ‘Bald Mountain’). Talmy (who, these days, runs an extremely
interesting and useful set of mini-memoirs about rock music’s golden days on
his FB page) uses
the meek apology nowadays that everybody was assuming songwriting credit for
traditional material in those days, but I remember quite vividly how, in my
own young and innocent days, when «Odetta» was at best a name I came across
in a pulpy Bob Dylan biography, I used to form this mental image of Shel
Talmy as a pervy little guy with a bald fetish, writing all that stupid
material for his artists to make them spread his "Shel ‘Bald Is Good’
Talmy" religion all over the world... yes, children, misattribution
corrupts the correctness of the world’s image in your heads, and that’s way
worse than Shel Talmy buying himself a new jet plane from the royalties off
an old folk tune he claimed for his own one day. Anyway, the
connection between Odetta and Shel Talmy is rather accidental — as is her
unexpected «influence» on the early Kinks and Who — but it is a little sad
that, for instance, as of today, the Wikipedia page for ‘Bald Headed Woman’
does not even mention the Odetta version, which is arguably the finest of all
the ones I have heard. For starters, it is delivered strictly a cappella,
with just the same cavernous sound of handclaps setting off the beat for
Odetta to follow, reminding us that the tune is essentially a work song,
partly nonsensical and partly poignant ("I don’t want no cold iron shackles / ’Round my legs, lord, well
a-round my legs"). Just about every subsequent rendition, with the
possible exception of Harry Belafonte’s, loses that poignancy by turning the
work song into a generic pop-rock tune — neither the Kinks nor the Who, I
believe, were truly understanding what they were singing about here; Odetta
most certainly does understand. She then does
an even more interesting thing with the next number, ‘Motherless Children’,
which begins lyrically like a cover of Blind Willie Johnson’s ‘Mother’s
Children Have A Hard Time’, then starts sucking in words from all over the
place, including ‘This Train Is Bound For Glory’ and ‘Dig My Grave With A
Silver Spade’, gradually gaining in gospel intensity as the choir solidifies
around Odetta and she starts dropping casual hallelujah bombs to the left and
right. It’s captivating, moving, and at the same time oddly and fiercely
post-modernist, a meat grinder of a tune showing that the student is no
longer afraid to fiddle around with the classics and is, in fact, trying to
find a new angle of perception, for instance, one under which the emotion of
despair and the emotion of joy seem to flash with one and the same color —
the color of spiritual ecstasy. This is a short performance, just barely over
two minutes, which lends itself to any interpretation: it may be about
celebrating the coming of the Lord, or it might be about the ground
swallowing us all in the Apocalypse. You just have to tilt your head a little
to one side — or another. This train don’t carry no literalists, hallelujah. And this is just the first three songs, though it’s not getting much
better than the opening. The Irish portion of the record comes next; as the
tempo slows down to make way for the romance of ‘I Know Where I’m Going’,
Odetta gets a little too lyrical for me (Judy Collins probably works better
for this kind of material), but ‘The Foggy Dew’ is quite masterful at least
in terms of how it starts out — Odetta and Bill Lee really work as a team
here, she supplying the fast rhythm trills, rolling over one another like
ocean waves or gusts of wind, he providing an overtone-rich earthy foundation
which colors your entire living space with black smoke. That the subject of
struggle for Irish independence would find its natural place along the
subject of struggle for African-American emancipation should hardly be of any
wonder; what is really
unpredictable is the ghostly, ominous beauty of that arrangement, most of
which hangs on Bill Lee’s shoulders. Remember that, aspiring
singer-songwriters: do not underestimate the value of a professional bass
player on the team. On the second side of the LP, highlights include the fast-paced
‘Ox-Driver Song’, where Odetta’s choir does its best to impersonate the
ox-drivers (and sometimes the oxen, I guess); the great old pessimist anthem
‘Down On Me’ (I think that this is probably the version that must have
impressed itself on the memory of a young Janis Joplin); and a really groovy,
relaxed, chill-out rendition of ‘Ain’t No More Cane On The Brazos’ which must
have struck a note with Bob Dylan and through that would later be passed on
to The Band. Odetta’s rather straight-faced sense of humor shows up on the
moralistic tale of ‘Three Pigs’ (not
a highlight, but works as a lightweight interlude); and her
fight-for-the-right colors are hoisted high up on the closing ‘Battle Hymn Of
The Republic’, which is a bit too much for me to take (I have a real hard
time with any tune to which you are
supposed to stand up and salute) but at least when it is Odetta who sings
"mine eyes have seen the glory of
the coming of the Lord" it’s much preferable to, you know... Whitney
Houston? The bottomline is that My Eyes Have Seen was as solid a claim
for Odetta in 1959 as could be imagined from a folk artist still unwilling to
cross that major line separating the interpreter from the creator — but
perfectly willing to be as creative with her interpretations as physically
possible. The powerhouse vocals; the diversity of the material and the
lyrical and melodic liberties taken with it; the subtle atmospheric touches
introduced by the production and the addition of vocal choirs — Odetta here
was becoming just a wee bit too imposing for the narrow confines of Greenwich
Village, entering what was perhaps her most ambitious, if also very brief,
period in the music business. This
was, perhaps, the perfect time for her to try and start writing her own
songs, but somehow that particular impulse never came, or perhaps she was
suppressing it herself out of fear of taking on way too much responsibility. The first Bob Dylan she would never
be... Ironically, even though all these little touches, in my opinion, easily
make this not simply the best Odetta album from the 1950s, but also the most accessible one — much easier to sit
through for a non-committed hardcore folkie — this is usually the point at
which even the professional nostalgic music lover’s patience for Odetta ends;
spurred on by praise from Dylan or from the likes of Joan Baez, people go and
try out Sings Ballads And Blues, put the «Mission Accomplished» check
mark in the box and never return — this is why, for instance, on RateYourMusic this LP has something
like ten times less ratings than Odetta’s debut. This is, in my opinion, a
serious misunderstanding for which the critical press should be blamed. While
it is true that much, if not most,
of the Greenwich Village scene pre-Dylan today constitutes only historical
interest, its best representatives were not necessarily just clueless mofos
whose inadequate love for American soil had made them deaf and blind to
whatever was going on in the world around them — some of them at least had their own intuitions and world views
and musical sensitivities, and there were curious stories of artistic growth
and unpredictable surprises and... whatever, just listen
to the album and hopefully you’ll see what I mean. |
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Album
released: July 1960 |
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Tracks: 1) Ballad For Americans; 2) This
Land; 3) Old Smoky; 4) Hush Little Baby; 5) Dark As A Dungeon; 6) Great
Historical Bum; 7) Payday At Coal Creek; 8) Going Home; 9) Pastures Of Plenty. |
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For some reason, this album has
forever remained out of print since its original release on the Vanguard
label; while all of Odetta’s classic-years catalog got the CD treatment
sooner or later, Ballad For Americans
has for a long, long time only been available as a piece of used vinyl, or,
in more recent years, as a crudely ripped digital copy of said vinyl.
Apparently, in 2017 somebody finally took proper care of the catalog and
remastered the album, so now you can find it on most streaming services in
better sound quality — but still not in physical form. Something, I guess,
has rubbed somebody in the wrong way about Odetta expanding her horizons and
covering the musical legacy of Paul Robeson. |
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Admittedly, it
could be argued that, for all the audacity and desire to move on beyond the
acoustic folk formula, Odetta’s attempt to put a slightly more modern spin on
a pompous musical piece firmly rooted in 1939 does feel a bit... cheesy. The original piece, composed by Earl Robinson with a libretto by John
Latouche, was basically a «lightweight classical» cantata, combining elements
of operetta, spirituals, and showtunes and designed to be sung with typically
pre-war dashing pathos, whether by the ground-rattling bass-baritone of Paul
Robeson or, one year later, with the seductive croon of Bing Crosby
(who adds so much top hat flavor to the composition, I must say, that its
very purpose gets lost in the Purr-Pose). But would that same kind of
grandstanding patriotic aura really hold up in 1960? Certainly somebody like Odetta, who had received some training in
classical singing (her mother, at one time, really hoped for her to become
the next Marian Anderson), would be the perfect candidate to try and answer
that question. For this particular recording, she is accompanied by the
Symphony Of The Air Orchestra (comprised of musicians from the famous NBC
Symphony Orchestra, after it was disbanded in 1954 following Toscanini’s
retirement), conducted by Robert DeCormier, a good friend of Pete Seeger and
one of America’s leading experts in combining classical music values with the
art of folk singing (and just a little pinch of communism). Predictably, the
recording sounds grand — almost as
grand as the original Paul Robeson version, and definitely more imposing than
the Bing Crosby one — and on the whole, Odetta in the role of the
"Nobody Who Is Anybody, Anybody Who Is Everybody" is totally
convincing, possessing both the gravity and the occasional lightweightness
required to properly convey the many shades of the cantata. The problem is that with this particular arrangement, the 12-minute
composition kind of sounds like a medley from West Side Story, only with extra pathos on the side. In 1939, if
you wanted to make a big statement on the issues of liberty, human rights,
equality, and the evolution of the American Dream, there was hardly any
alternative to doing it the Paul Robeson way. But by the late 1950s, fashions
had changed, and it is probably fair to say that most people did not exactly
expect their enlightenment to come from grandstanding, classically-enhanced
mega-showtunes; they were much more likely to expect it from in-yer-face folk
singers, be it the older school of Woody Guthrie or the slightly younger
school of Pete Seeger and his friends at Greenwich Village. Thus, hearing
this «mini-musical» wedged right in the middle of Odetta’s impressive run of
acoustic classics takes some getting used to — at best — or feels like a
corny, over-acted, uninspiring melodrama — at worst. In any case, I wouldn’t
call it a truly «successful modernization». The bottomline here is that if you are in the mood to hear Paul Robeson
at the height of his powers and learn what the fuss was all about, ‘Ballad
For Americans’ is as good a choice as anything. If you want to hear Odetta at the height of her powers,
though, I would rather recommend the B-side of this LP over the A-side. It’s
just that some things designed in 1939 are best left in 1939, and continued
to be enjoyed in a 1939 frame of mind if you can concoct one for yourself
(not that I haven’t been in a
rather 1939 frame of mind ever since February 2022, but that’s a slightly
different angle of 1939, and not even Paul Robeson can be of much help here).
Meanwhile, the old folk ballads and their neo-folk imitations that fill up
the LP’s second side continued to be all the rage in 1960, and Odetta could
still interpret them in her own ways without being held down by, let’s say,
certain «gentile conventions» of pre-war musical styles, which, in this
particular case, DeCormier’s orchestral and choral arrangement has not much
helped her to overcome. She does aim for a little consistency: to keep up with the subject of
‘Ballad For Americans’, most of the second side also deals with issues of
social justice, workers’ rights and so on. Interestingly, up to that point
Odetta had not yet officially covered even a single Woody Guthrie song; this
album includes a whoppin’ three of
them, and while I generally don’t think I need yet another cover of ‘This
Land Is My Land’ in my collection, I can’t help but feel a little admiration
in Odetta’s regal delivery — she makes "this land is my land" sound as if she were indeed the royal
owner of this land through God-given right, and "this land is your land" sound as if you were right there,
standing on one knee and receiving your personal fiefdom from the monarch.
Uh, well, perhaps this is not quite
the actual meaning of the song, but that’s precisely what makes it more
interesting, and maybe even a little more unintentionally ironic, than most. The true highlight of these three Guthrie covers, though, is ‘Pastures
Of Plenty’. Guthrie usually sang his own song at a
fast, rollickin’ tempo, with cheerful harmonica accompaniment and in an
uplifting mood — the idea being that, through all the struggle and toil,
paradise on Earth shall still be attained, sooner or later, by the oppressed
characters of The Grapes Of Wrath.
"We’ll work in this fight and
we’ll fight till we win", that sort of thing. Odetta turns the song
180 degrees — hers is a dark, bleak delivery, with the same ominous
guitar-and-deep-bass sound mix she and Bill Lee had going so well on ‘Foggy
Dew’ from the previous album. Most notably, she changes the lyrics: that line
about "fighting till we win"
disappears from her delivery and is replaced by a reprise of "we come with the dust and we go with the
wind" from the second verse. And then, in the last verse, the line
"My land I’ll defend with my life
if it be" is replaced with "Travel
this road until death sets me free" — feel the difference?
(Admittedly, it is a rather poor combination with the final intact line,
"cause pastures of plenty must
always be free": first of all, it’s bad form to rhyme the same word
with each other, and second, Odetta’s reinterpretation is that the song’s
heroes are not in possession of
their pastures-of-plenty, and shall hardly ever be — so in this new context
the final line makes much less sense than in Woody’s original). Throw in a really impressive guitar-and-bass arrangement of Merle
Travis’ coal miner anthem ‘Dark As A Dungeon’, perhaps the most complex and
moody take on this chestnut in the entire history of neo-folk; some very
stylish picking on ‘Payday At Coal Creek’, a song that most people would only
usually listen to for the lyrics; and a rather haunting version of the old
spiritual ‘Goin’ Home’ (which William Arms Fisher had originally adapted from
Dvořák’s 9th symphony, though not much of Dvořák’s
original theme remains in this arrangement) — and you really have a very strong side of material, a
combination of bleakness, power, and instrumental professionalism unmatched
by any other competitor at the Village at the time. Most importantly, the
Odetta / Bill Lee combination of instrumental skill and inspiration is just
as important here as the vocals are — while it would be a downright lie to
say that the Greenwich folkies generally cared little about their playing
skills (some did and some did not, as it always happens), Odetta at her best
had a real knack for setting the proper mood with her technical proficiency.
Just listen to those first fifteen seconds of ‘Pastures Of Plenty’ — there’s
just two guitars in there, and the effect is already that of a symphonic sea
of sound, penetrating much deeper than the loud and swirling orchestral arrangements
on ‘Ballad For Americans’. Perhaps what I’m really trying to say is that, deep at heart, Odetta is
a natural-born tragic artist, and
both her playing and singing work so much better when conveying bitterness
and melancholy than optimism and cheerfulness (cue "my kind of woman!" in the voice of the Muppets’ Animal).
Even on ‘Ballad’, she’s at her most convincing when singing lines like "nobody who was anybody believed it,
everybody who was somebody doubted it". This, rather than skin color
or anything else, is her biggest difference from, say, Joan Baez — they could
sing exactly the same songs, but Joan has a natural gift for «Apollonic
beauty» rather than tragedy, while Odetta has this natural gift for carrying
the cross to Golgotha. And the contrast between the first and second sides of
this record, I think, vindicates this statement better than anything else. |
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Tracks: 1) If I Had A Hammer; 2) I’m Going
Back To The Red Clay Country; 3) When I Was A Young Girl; 4) Gallows Pole; 5)
God’s A-Gonna Cut You Down; 6) John Riley; 7) John Henry; 8) Joshua Fought
The Battle Of Jericho; 9) All The Pretty Little Horses; 10) Prettiest Train;
11) Meeting At The Building; 12) No More Auction Block For Me; 13) Hold On;
14) Sometimes I Feel Like A Motherless Child; 15) Ain’t No Grave Can Hold My
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REVIEW The value of this album is first
and foremost symbolic: to have an album recorded At Carnegie Hall means an honorable place in the spotlight, in
this case signifying progression from the small cafes of Greenwich Village,
limited to bohemians and intellectuals, onto a national level of recognition.
Although Odetta was far from the first neo-folk artist to have performed and
be recorded at the venue (The Weavers had their first live album recorded
there as early as 1957), it was still an important achievement both for
herself and the entire movement — seriously increasing the role of the folk
singer (if not quite yet the «singer-songwriter») in contemporary music
culture and all that. How do you get to Carnegie Hall, anyway? Buy yourself a
guitar and rent a room in Chelsea around 1960... |
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Impressively,
for this performance, recorded on April 8, 1960, Odetta comes up with an
almost completely new setlist; only two of the songs (‘Gallows Pole’ and ‘All
The Pretty Little Horses’) are reprised from the Gates Of Horn LP, and one more (‘God’s A-Gonna Cut You Down’) from
her debut album — the rest of the selections had not yet been tried out in
the studio. This is a good thing, because
even if comparison of the live and studio versions shows that the live
playing and singing are more intense (particularly on ‘Gallows Pole’), it
feels as if the intensity is largely due to technical reasons — the venue’s
monumental environment has Odetta trying harder than usual so as to properly
reach the audience, rather than «let her hair down» like a rock’n’roll
performer would typically behave. On the whole, though, Odetta live is
(unsurprisingly) not too different from Odetta in the studio. There is no
stage banter, there is virtually no improvisation, and there seem to be no
spontaneous or spurious changes to the songs — which is perfectly
understandable, since at this point in time all of those «oldies» must have
sounded quite fresh and new to the ears of most of the people in the concert
hall, and Odetta’s point was to get their message across, not to mess around
with them. Joining her for most of the concert is the ever-loyal Bill Lee on bass,
and for the last four numbers, a gospel choir from the local Church of the
Master. As usual, the songs are a mix of three categories — straightforward
gospel numbers; African-American work songs and slave ballads; and a bunch of
old English folk ballads carried over from the other side of the Atlantic. As
usual, I remain a bit torn about the last category: for all the joys of
genre-mixing and a «color-independent» approach to performing, Odetta sounds
more at ease singing ‘Motherless Child’ and ‘No More Auction Block’ than
narrating the woes and troubles of pre-industrial era British fair maidens —
the same way Joan Baez sounds significantly more at ease narrating the woes
and troubles of pre-industrial era British fair maidens than trying to sound
like a cotton field worker. This is not to imply that Odetta’s performance of
‘John Riley’ is worthless, but her big, bulky voice is not a natural choice
for this kind of material, which requires more finesse and fragility. Then again, this is precisely why LPs are more than just collections of
individual songs: extracting ‘John
Riley’ or ‘When I Was A Young Girl’ from this record, to treat them as
autonomous nuggets within some randomized playlist, is destructive. The album
works best as an album, whose
symbolic significance is in the unity of the folk tradition — showing that
British folk, white American folk, and black American folk ultimately share
the same roots (well, at least some
of the same roots), and that folk music need not be perceived as boring or
monotonous if you do not painstakingly sub-divide it into a whole lot of
separate traditions and styles. Thus, the record kicks off with a powerful one-two punch as Odetta
jackhammers her way through the ubiquitous ‘If I Had A Hammer’ (at least hers feels like it’s made out of solid
metal, rather than the quaint rose-glass tool of Peter, Paul & Mary) and
the non-stop vocal-slaughter of ‘I’m Going Back To The Red Clay Country’,
where the main trick is to stretch out every single vowel until the whole
song turns into a barely decipherable, but awesomely irresistible, «mooing and
bellowing» vocalize. Then, whoops, the singer is suddenly all gentrified and
her voice takes the elevator to higher ranges on ‘When I Was A Young Girl’,
warning Carnegie Hall concert goers about the dangers of excessive ale
consumption — don’t do it, kids, or you’ll ruin your falsetto range forever.
And soon afterwards, the troubled young maiden reverts to Biblical matron,
blasting out a powerful a cappella sermon with ‘God’s A-Gonna Cut You Down’, a
great showcase for Odetta’s sense of phrasing, breath control, and loudness
dynamics (again, higher, louder, and much more intense than the studio
version: you can even hear the audience spontaneously explode in a brief
ovation when Odetta jumps out of her «quiet mumble mode» on the last verse to
go all ballistic on the final chorus). This sequencing, even if some of the performances individually work
much better than others, ensures that the program never gets bogged down in
too much «sameyness» — the worst and
most common thing that can happen to a guy or a gal with just their acoustic
guitar out there — and this good level of variation and excitement is
retained through most of the album’s running time. It may look a little
amusing to see two songs named ‘John Riley’ and ‘John Henry’ sitting right
next to each other on the setlist, but they are naturally two very different
Johns — one imported over from Elizabethan England, the other left over from
19th century America — and they naturally get completely different
treatments. Like I already said, I’m not overtly pleased with the former, but
‘John Henry’ gets a more monumental vocal tribute from Odetta than any
previous recording known to man. She really
drops the hammer on this one, just the way, one might think, it should have
been dropped in the first place: an anthem to a legendary American SuperMan™,
adequately vocalized by the contemporary American SuperWoman™. The last four numbers, for which Odetta engages the assistance of the
choir, aim at adding a bit of a mystical vibe to the proceedings. The choir
never explodes into jubilation; for most of the time, it stays in the
low-key, «mumbling» range, as if weaving a dark, ominous cloud, lapping at
the heels of the singer — or perhaps, more accurately, having the singer run
right into it, groping her way through the spiritual fog with determination.
It’s a very tasteful and genuinely moving use of the choir’s power,
simultaneously recreating a really «ol’ time», pre-Emancipation Proclamation
feeling, and aimed at letting the audience leave with a clear understanding
that the fight is not over yet. If you can stand the slightly antiquated
pathos of it all — her ‘Motherless Child’ feels as if it is channelling the
attitude of Marian Anderson’s and Paul Robeson’s recordings from the 1930s —
you might even experience a little catharsis on the way. Fortunately for the listeners, Odetta does not end the show with the
utmost bleakness of ‘Motherless Child’, but rather on a more uplifting note
with ‘Ain’t No Grave Can Hold My Body Down’ — the closest the record does
come to a note of gospel jubilation. Ironically, it also feels like her
weakest performance here to me, because it shows the limitations of her upper
register — the song absolutely does not require the singer to slip into
falsetto unless of her own extra volition, but for some reason, she decides
that a contrast between high and low might do good to the overall emotional
effect, and, instead of ending the song with power, puts it on its back with
a breaking cat-in-heat meaow, like a gymnastics champion messing up the final
landing after an immaculately performed series of jumps. Oops! Minor quibbles like this aside, At Carnegie Hall is ample proof
that Odetta had both the brawn and
the brain to win over the audience. No video footage exists of the event, of
course, and it would be futile to expect an Odetta show to be captured on
American camera in the late 1950s or early 1960s; the closest thing to seeing
the lady in her prime is a half-hour recording made for Belgian
TV in 1964, with a completely different setlist from Carnegie Hall
but a similar approach to setlist construction — and a good opportunity to
put a face to the music (almost literally so, since the cameraman focuses
almost entirely on Odetta’s face throughout the show; and a beautifully
emotional face it is, although I sure wish she would open her eyes more than
once or twice... still not figuring out if it’s all a matter of being
«carried away» to the world of cotton fields and sweet potatoes, or just a
consequence of natural shyness; quite possibly the latter, since Odetta was
often reported as being prone to extreme fits of stage fright). Of course, you don’t necessarily have
to put a face to the music in order to understand that she was the real deal;
the voice pretty much speaks for itself, and it’s a voice that imbues a
liberation song like ‘No More Auction Block For Me’ with much more sense and
«naturalness» (if not necessarily more depth) than, say, Bob Dylan covering it
in his early folk days. If only the power, conviction, variety, and
professionalism of this approach could be complemented with a proper sense of
humor and a faint hint at original songwriting, indicating progression from
traditionalism into the future... well, yes, then we’d have Bob Dylan. But
there is no way that the existence of Bob Dylan in this world could
completely cancel out the roles of the Odettas and the Joan Baezes, either. |
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Tracks: 1) Virgin Mary Had One Son; 2)
Somebody’s Talking About Jesus; 3) Ain’t That A-Rocking; 4) Mary Had A Baby;
5) Go Tell It On The Mountain; 6) Beautiful Star; 7) Poor Little Jesus; 8)
Shout For Joy; 9) Oh, Jerusalem; 10) Rise Up Shepherd And Follow; 11) If Anybody
Asks You; 12) What Month Was Jesus Born In?; 13) Children, Go Where I Send
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While the cheesy tradition of the Christmas
album is at least as old as Bing Crosby’s Merry Christmas from 1942, that of the «alternative Christmas
album» is much more difficult to pinpoint. Yet in a way, the roots of the
distinction between the likes of ABBA’s ‘Happy New Year’ or Shane MacGowan’s ‘Christmas
Lullaby’ could probably be traced, with a little metaphorical skewing, all
the way back to the distinction between Christmas carols — recordings of
which are already piled up to the sky even before the arrival of LPs — and Christmas
spirituals, which feature in far fewer numbers. Odetta’s own collection,
brought out to the world during the Christmas season of 1960, was definitely
not the first one — at the very least, there is Mahalia Jackson’s Sweet Little Jesus Boy from as early
as 1955. But I have a serious hunch that it may have been the first one to be
recorded this way — in the «alternative
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Because even Mahalia
Jackson’s collection of
Christmas spirituals is a record that can be easily and carelessly
enjoyed over a nice family dinner — as warm, friendly, celebratory background
music. Odetta’s approach was
completely different: not deviating even one bit from her usual standards,
she gives you Christmas not as an occasion to have fun and stuff your face,
but as an excuse to sit and contemplate on the nature of Christmas as the starting
point of liberation from pain, suffering, and sin — deep-felt jubilation
steeped in the sorrows of slavery and oppression. This is quite explicitly
stated already in the liner notes, and is made obvious in pretty much every
single song on here, one of which (‘Poor Little Jesus’) is re-recorded in a
new version, having already been previously cut for My Eyes Have Seen,
but carries the exact same sentiment — empathy toward the destitute little
boy, "poor little Jesus, born in a
manger, ain’t that a pity and a shame?", something that the 19th
century slave in his shack must have felt far more acutely than his owner over
at the big plantation house. Of course, as usual, this is not so much an «authentic recreation» of
tradition as its re-imagining in the context of 1960 and its ongoing
struggles. For what it’s worth, Christmas has traditionally been a time for
joy and merriment both for the slave and the slaver, and from that point of
view, Mahalia Jackson’s jubilation spirit of 1955 might be closer to the
truth than Odetta’s spirit of deep darkness and bleakness of 1960. This is
precisely why «alternative» Christmas albums shall always command only the
tiniest proportion of listeners — even those of us who try to keep their eyes
open to the world’s hurts and issues, let alone our own ones, will be
naturally prone to trying to forget
about them for the holiday season, rather than take the opportunity to wallow
in our sorrow even deeper than usual. From the starting notes of ‘Virgin Mary Had One Son’, which Odetta and Bill
all but turn into a stern chamber sonata for guitar and double bass, song
after song gives you a very, very black Christmas. Thus, on the opening
number, Odetta plunges into her lowest range for the chorus hookline — "glory
be to the newborn king" is delivered in an almost Disney-Evil-Queen vocal
tone, spooking away all the kids before they even get a chance to assemble
around the fireplace. Minutes later, ‘Somebody’s Talking About Jesus’ is a
dialog between Odetta and Lee’s highly jazzy bass line that might easily fit
on one of the contemporary Charlie Mingus albums, and there’s a strong note
of terror rather than wonder in Odetta’s voice — the
appearance of Jesus is clearly announced as an ominous mystery, the
consequences of which are completely unpredictable, particularly to the
conscience of a person whose life has been nothing but disappointments,
disillusionments, and hopelessness so far. Later on, starting with the gentle acoustic folk picking of ‘Ain’t That
A-Rockin’, Odetta starts weaving in notes of gentle tenderness, which are
still typically interwoven with sorrow, and the album settles into a
relatively quiet, contemplative mood; it would make little sense to comment
individually on the songs, as it would inevitably lead to discussion on the
history and nature of specific spirituals rather than on Odetta’s actual
contributions — which are, emotion-wise, more or less exhausted by the time
of the third or fourth song, and begin to loop in a repetitive, but never
less-than-pleasant circle. The only thing that does stand out is the final
number, a cover of the traditional cumulative ditty ‘Children Go Where I Send
Thee’ which Odetta approaches far more «seriously» than Nina Simone in her
studio cover from the previous year — not only does she whip herself up into
furious strumming mode, but she lets the song gallop on for seven exhausting
minutes, as if truly possessed by the Holy Ghost, until the endless stream of
"one for the little bitty baby... four
for the four that stood at the door..." turns into a completely
mechanical, auto-pilot, trance-like delivery. Probably the closest thing to «having
a little bit of Christmas fun» on the entire record. (Also, bang, a sudden realization that Bob Dylan’s
‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ is quite naturally based on this tune, both melodically
and by way of phrasing). Apart from the predictable issue of emotional monotonousness (which is
not entirely true — in terms of
melodies, tempos, and moods the songs are sufficiently different to not merge
into one another), Christmas Spirituals still represents the Odetta / Lee
duo at their collaborative peak — and an extremely fresh and innovative
perspective on the musical embodiment of the Christmas season. Do beware,
though, that the album comes in two different versions: much later on, in
1987, Odetta would re-record most of the songs and re-release them under the
exact same title. The new album, distinguished by a Black Jesus on the cover,
would feature some extra percussion and be sung in a slightly gentler tone,
meaning that it is still perfectly listenable but does not quite have the
same combination of power and minimalism as featured in the original, so if
you are at all interested, be sure to seek out the 1960 version first. |
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