CHAPTER FOUR
GETTING POLITICAL
With the end of her Tin Angel stint, Odetta sang again for the Turnabout Theatre, becoming a star of the adult version of the show, this time delivering her growing repertoire of folk songs instead of classical tunes to audiences in Los Angeles and then in San Francisco, after the troupe decided to cut stakes and move north. The Turnabout accounts for almost all of Odetta’s concert work in 1955 and the early part of 1956. But in September of that year, her talents, and the growing interest in folk music, brought her the break she’d been looking for in the person of Dean Gitter, who paid Odetta a visit one afternoon at the three-room railroad house in Berkeley where she was living. “She played, I talked, and before I got up to leave she had agreed that I would be her manager and I would produce her first three albums,” Gitter recalled.1
The somewhat convoluted story of Gitter’s role in Odetta’s career starts at Harvard University, where, at the age of twenty, he had just earned an English degree. A fellow graduate, Tom Wilson, had borrowed $900 to form a company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, called Transition Pre-Recorded Tapes. Wilson’s idea, ahead of its time, was to sell prerecorded tapes to the masses, but in the terribly inconvenient reel-to-reel format that existed then. A tall, elegant black Texan, Wilson had been president of the Young Republican Club at Harvard and had graduated with honors and an economics degree. Before his early death, Wilson would become a top rock and pop producer, recording Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, and the Mothers of Invention, but he started as a jazz buff who preferred Sun Ra and John Coltrane to Pete Seeger.
The way Gitter tells it, he’d offered to put together a folk music line for Wilson and, after hearing the Odetta & Larry LP, had set his sights on signing Odetta for Wilson’s new label. “I listened to that album and I fell out of my chair,” Gitter said. “I never heard a voice like that.”2
There are elements of Gitter’s recollection that don’t make sense. For example, a contract exists between Odetta and Wilson, signed back in March 1956, six months before Gitter met her. It calls for Odetta to record four LPs (with the material also to be issued on reel-to-reel) over three years. Gitter couldn’t explain how that contract came to be, and he downplayed Wilson’s role: “Tom did not negotiate that contract. I put it under his nose and he signed it. Tom never talked with Odetta, never met Odetta and didn’t know anything about it except what I told him.”3
Whatever the sequence of events, Gitter, who was newly married and looking, like Wilson, to make money in music, had driven cross-country to meet Odetta. That first day, Gitter said, “We sat together on her front porch for hours while she played through all of her repertoire.” Two days later, they tried to find a recording studio. The first one Gitter called in San Francisco informed him that union rules prohibited it from recording blacks. “We had to go to a Jim Crow studio,” Gitter said, one manned by black recording engineers. The session lasted more than eight hours, and Odetta, accompanied by Lou Gottlieb on bass, recorded sixteen songs.4
On September 22, Gitter left Berkeley and drove back to New York. He arrived about 7 p.m. on the twenty-fourth, and by 10 that night he had turned up at the Bronx apartment of his friend Kenny Goldstein, who was already becoming known as the nation’s top folk music producer. He played the Odetta tapes for Goldstein, who pronounced them “sensational.” At midnight, Gitter called Tom Wilson in Boston to deliver the news, and Wilson dropped a bombshell about his company. “We’re broke,” he said.5
By the first week in October, Wilson had transferred the contracts of all his artists, including Odetta, to Gitter, who assumed title to recordings of Odetta and a few other singers, as well as Transition’s debt. With Goldstein’s help, Gitter began shopping the tapes to all the folk-oriented record companies in New York, including Riverside (where Goldstein worked), Elektra, and Tradition, a label started by the acting-singing brothers Paddy, Tom, and Liam Clancy, later part of the seminal Irish folk revival group the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem. Everyone agreed that Odetta was destined to be a star.
On October 5, Gitter spent all night writing Odetta a four-page, single-spaced letter in longhand, explaining all he was doing on her behalf in trying to secure a new record deal for her. The letter was among several that Gitter would later provide to a court after things went south in their partnership. But at the beginning, Gitter was full of enthusiasm. “I believe that you in time are going to make Belafonte look like an amateur,” he wrote, “so believe me when I say that I am going to conduct the affairs between us in such a manner that when March 1, 1959 rolls around, you will be tickled pink to extend our agreement.”6
It appeared that Odetta and Gitter, who was also a folk singer and actor, had struck up a friendship during his brief stay in Berkeley. He ended the letter by saying: “Just to be consistent with my usual practice of putting most important things last: How are you, honey? Stay well and hungry and write soon. Love and stuff, Dean.” Six decades later, Gitter made a point of insisting there was nothing but a business relationship and a shared passion for the arts between them, though he acknowledged that Odetta thought there was more, which he chalked up to “strange fantasies about who she fell in love with.”7
Gitter had appeared in the play Finnegan’s Wake with Tom Clancy at the Poets’ Theatre in Cambridge, and he ended up selling the Odetta tapes to the Clancys, who began preparing them for release. Back in California, Odetta gave notice at the Turnabout Theatre. Then she boarded a train bound for Chicago to perform at a new club there called the Gate of Horn.
Albert Grossman had opened one of the nation’s first folk music nightclubs in the basement of the run-down Rice Hotel on the corner of Dearborn Street and Chicago Avenue, where he would book established stars like Josh White and the bluesman Big Bill Broonzy and up-and-coming young folk singers like Bob Gibson.
Grossman, with sleepy owl eyes, chubby cheeks, and a crew cut (which would continue to lengthen throughout the next decade until his hair tickled his shoulders), had grown up in Chicago and earned a degree in economics. He was one of the first people to realize that a business could be built around folk music. Grossman had named his club, modeled on the basement jazz lounges of Paris, after a line in Homer’s Odyssey, which contrasts a gate of ivory from which deluded fantasies arise with one made of horn that allows only the truth to pass.
Whether Grossman, soon to become the most important music manager of the era, represented truth or a ruthless quest for money and power wound up being one of the more fascinating parlor debates about the 1960s music business. “It wasn’t the folk music, because Albert knew nothing about folk music and could have cared less when he opened the Gate of Horn,” said Gibson, who performed frequently at the club and later hired Grossman as his manager. “He knew that a listening room could work.” Frank Hamilton, who moved to Chicago from Los Angeles and became the house backup guitarist at the Gate, held a jaundiced view of Grossman. “Al could be charming,” he recalled. “But I don’t think he had really terrific values as a person. I think he liked the music enough. But it was more the glamour and the fact that he could see this was going someplace, this folk music revival, and he could make it happen.”8
Grossman had written to Odetta and told her about his new club. When her train pulled into Chicago on October 30, she went directly to the Gate of Horn for her sound check. Standing outside waiting for her were Josh White and Bill Broonzy. White had just finished a run there, and Big Bill lived in the Windy City. They’d gotten word that Odetta would be performing and felt protective of a fellow black musician. “They wanted to make sure their little sister was going to get on ok,” Odetta recalled.9
Odetta opened for Gibson her first night. By the following week, she was the headliner, with Gibson and Paul Clayton getting second and third billing. As usual, she made an immediate impression. “Odetta toplines with a set of pipes as direct and powerful as a blowtorch and as deep and resonant as an old master’s bass viol,” Variety said. “Accompanying herself on the guitar, this femme is superb with the blues and the spirituals, the powerful gutsy songs. . . . Odetta goes off to thunderous applause.”10
It had been a little more than a year since the lynching of the Chicago boy Emmett Till in Mississippi and the open-casket funeral his mother had insisted upon in his hometown, which drew the national press and brought the horrors of Southern Jim Crow home to Americans, awakening many to injustices that had been all too easy to ignore. Soon after, inspired in part by Till’s gruesome death and the easy acquittal of his murderers by an all-white jury, Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat to a white person on a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, sparking the bus boycott that brought Martin Luther King Jr. to prominence.
In her early Gate of Horn shows, Odetta began to sense the political moment and what she might do with it. Though she started out tentatively, she began speaking about the history behind the spirituals and slave and prison songs. Her secret fury still hid behind the guise of her singing, and her perfect diction and thoughtful manner commanded attention.
In Chicago, she appeared several times on Studs Terkel’s popular radio show on WFMT, which mixed folk music, blues, and jazz with topical conversation, lubricated by Terkel’s inquisitive mind and liberal politics. “She’s a powerful singer,” Terkel told his listeners, “but seems even more so because of the time in which we live.” He asked Odetta about “Another Man Done Gone,” the chain gang song she delivered nightly at the Gate in dramatic fashion by removing the guitar from her shoulder and laying it on the stage, before belting out the a cappella number, her hand claps echoing like nine-pound hammers or overseers’ bullwhips. “There was a time when the prison farms, or state farms, chained the men to the beds at night and to each other during the day, during work hours,” Odetta told Terkel. “When a man escaped . . . blood hounds were put on the trails and usually the prisoner who tried to escape was killed in some fashion or another.”11
Odetta changed a verse in the song, first collected by John Lomax from Alabamian Vera Hall in 1940. Instead of singing, He killed another man, He killed another man, an apparent reference to the convict’s crime, Odetta made it, They killed another man, They killed another man, keeping the focus on the barbarous system itself. For a woman endeavoring to break free from her own chains—“society’s foot on your throat,” as she’d put it—there was a metaphorical power in her renditions of chain gang songs, as if by her extraordinary telling, she was taking a sledgehammer to iron shackles.
Americans of an earlier generation had briefly been made aware of the reputation of Southern chain gangs for brutality. The 1932 movie I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, based on the memoir of a Georgia chain gang escapee named Robert Edward Burns, had caused an uproar over the inhuman treatment of Southern convicts, many of them black, who were worked as legally sanctioned slaves under threat of death for the slightest misstep. The outcry had supposedly led to reforms, but Northern newspapers in the 1950s occasionally followed the stories of escapees who fled to cities like New York and Chicago, echoing fugitive slaves from a century earlier, with tales of unspeakable horrors perpetrated by sadistic guards.
While Odetta didn’t go so far as to tell her audiences that the justice system in the South that had put so many black men behind bars was a sham, she was nevertheless cluing them in to the fact that there was more to be learned than they’d gotten in history class. When she became the prisoner, or the railroad worker in “John Henry,” or any of the other desperate characters she inhabited, she allowed her audiences to empathize, however briefly, with their plight, making it more likely that the history might genuinely sink in. “There was a period in my early career when I needed to learn what to say and what to leave out,” Odetta remembered, “but I felt I had to say a lot because our schools certainly weren’t teaching us anything about ourselves.”12
Dean Gitter had been in Chicago for Odetta’s opening. And in early November, after her two-week run ended, he headed back to New York and Odetta back to Berkeley, where she received a letter from Gitter written on November 13 that began: “Hello Baby: Forgive the long delay in writing, but my affairs—long neglected while I was in Chicago—closed in on me last week and I’ve been up to my ears in work.” He told her that he was embarking on a plan for her called “Operation Stardom,” which would begin, he said, with “a concerted assault, no holds barred, teeth bared, on the entertainment hub of America—New York City.” He was talking to concert promoters such as Max Gordon of the Village Vanguard and Blue Angel and Art D’Lugoff of the Village Gate, had spoken to Finian’s Rainbow lyricist Yip Harburg about possible opportunities on Broadway, and was trying to get her a national TV appearance. He signed it “XXXOOOXXXOOOXXX, Dean.”13
The next day, Tradition Records released Odetta’s first solo LP, Ballads and Blues. The striking red-and-white album cover featured a closeup of Odetta’s face deep in the throes of singing. As with all her early records, the producers avoided showing her very far below the shoulders, an apparent effort to deemphasize her large body. Purposefully or not, these portraits only accentuated Odetta’s natural hair, as it framed her quite striking features, providing an indelible image of black beauty that didn’t try to cater to white tastes.
The LP, with Gitter as producer, included all sixteen tracks she’d recorded for him in San Francisco. The record reflected Odetta’s wide tastes in folk music, from “Santy Anno,” the sea shanty she’d sung in Cinerama Holiday, to the calypso tune “Shame and a Scandal,” to Lead Belly’s “Alabama Bound.”
Aside from her astounding voice, it was her ability to build tension in a song—the result of her operatic training and the tutelage of Rolf Cahn—that immediately set her apart from just about anyone else then singing folk music. Her “Joshua Fit De Battle of Jericho” was so powerful that when she sang “well them walls come tumbling down,” it seemed as if she could have done the deed herself with her voice alone. Josh White had introduced the song to the folk world, but his rendering had been far more polite.
The centerpiece of Ballads and Blues was Odetta’s crowning masterpiece, the spiritual “Freedom Trilogy” she’d learned as individual songs from Cahn. Once again, she ratcheted up the tension masterfully from a dirge on the slave lament “Oh Freedom” through the hopeful awakening of “Come and Go with Me” and on to the stirring promise of “I’m on My Way.” While the component spirituals had already begun to appear on the front lines of civil rights protests in places like Montgomery, Odetta’s inspired coupling brought to bear the whole history of the black struggle to make a profound statement about the crescendo of change just beginning to swell across America.
I’m on my way and I won’t turn back
I’m on my way and I won’t turn back
I’m on my way and I won’t turn back
I’m on my way, great God I’m on my way
The meaning of the song in the context of the quest for civil rights was crystal clear. As Chestyn Everett, a columnist for the Los Angeles Tribune, a black paper, would put it: “‘I’m On My Way,’ as Odetta sings it, is our serious nomination as a replacement for the socalled [sic] Negro anthem. The prophetic fervor, the indestructible faith and determination of a people is mirrored in Odetta’s rendition of this song—a true revelation!”14
The LP hit critics like a thunderbolt. Robert Bagar’s review in the New York Journal-American was fairly typical.
With undisguised excitement the people at Tradition records are touting this lady as the coming “Queen of American song.” Also they name her a direct descendant of the fabulous folkists Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. Want to know my opinion? I think they’re right. It is out of the kind of singing and the kind of songs sung by such artists as Odetta that a rich lore is created, and from that a country’s musical personality.15
The record immediately changed the game for folk musicians coming of age then. Many of the folk artists—most of them men—already well known by the mid-1950s were earnest performers in the vein of Burl Ives, who expertly resurrected old songs in a pleasant manner that didn’t have a particular edge to it or tell you anything about the inner life of the songwriter. Pennsylvanian Ed McCurdy was a former vaudeville performer who had success singing folk songs in New York nightclubs and would later become a minor TV star, and Paul Clayton from Massachusetts was a folklorist and singer who specialized in sea shanties and ballads. (Bob Dylan would base “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” on Clayton’s “Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons When I’m Gone?”) Englishman Richard Dyer-Bennet gently fingerpicked a guitar and sang songs like “John Henry” but with a pretty voice that sounds (to modern ears) more suited to sentimental love songs.
Kentuckian John Jacob Niles, one of the most audacious of the early folk revival minstrels, played a lute and sang in an eyebrow-raising falsetto. He gathered material on song trips through the Southern mountains, where he’d visit county judges, school superintendents, jailers, and truant officers, who often knew the best local singers from whom he could “collect” songs. He also wrote songs such as “Black Is the Color of My True Love’s Hair.”
Belafonte, a genuine star and sex symbol, remained the pacesetter in sales, and Seeger, though still hounded by the blacklist, was a huge influence on the younger generation of folk fans, though, again, not the kind of singer who could inspire, especially on vinyl.
When it came to folk material that, either explicitly or not, addressed the civil rights struggle, Josh White had long led the way, bravely singing about Jim Crow, often at great personal risk. During his prime, in the mid-1940s, when he’d held court at Café Society in Greenwich Village, he’d sometimes had to beat back attacks from racist whites angry at his renditions of tunes such as the antilynching song “Strange Fruit.” But while hard-core lefties sympathized with his cause, the nation at large wasn’t much interested then in doing anything about the nation’s festering racial inequality.
By the mid-1950s, White had come to be seen as something of a relic. His voluntary testimony in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee had torpedoed his reputation on the left, even though he hadn’t named names, while it didn’t completely remove the taint from his appearance in the anti-Communist pamphlet Red Channels. And while White had come up from the South and learned firsthand from a number of traditional bluesmen, including Blind Lemon Jefferson, his act had become very polished from his many years in the nightclubs, and that didn’t resonate with younger folk music fans. White would enjoy some success during the coming folk revival, but he wasn’t the tastemaker that he’d once been. “The perception was that Josh had adapted too completely to nightclub work,” the folk singer Dave Van Ronk recalled. “Josh had smoothed all the rough edges from his act, and he was essentially a cabaret singer. And we were not interested in that at all.”16
The dimming of White’s star left the door open for other black folk singers to push the national consciousness toward acceptance of blacks as full citizens, and Belafonte and Odetta, along with black artists in a variety of fields, would do much to help make that happen.
In early December, with her album generating considerable buzz, Odetta arrived in New York. On the tenth, she signed a contract making Gitter her personal manager. It was an ambitious deal, covering five years with two options for five-year renewals, his management fee expected to rise as her bank account fattened.17
There was reason once again to believe that folk music was on the rise, half a decade after the Weavers’ successes. The previous year, Bill Hayes had scored a number-one hit with “The Ballad of Davy Crockett,” and Tennessee Ernie Ford had done the same with the Merle Travis song “Sixteen Tons” (and Ford and the actor Fess Parker also had hits with their own versions of “The Ballad of Davy Crockett”). Then, in 1956, Belafonte notched his first number-one album with Belafonte, which led off with Odetta’s arrangement of “Water Boy.” Belafonte followed that months later with Calypso, history’s first million-selling LP. Despite Gitter’s optimism about Odetta’s future, however, he wouldn’t stick around long enough to find out whether she too could become a star.