CHAPTER FIVE

THE FUSE IS LIT

America in the late Eisenhower years was a nation in transition, from what had been a rigid, top-down society to something more egalitarian but also more uncertain. Amid whirlwind economic prosperity, the family circle was beginning to weaken: more women started working outside the home, and men spent longer hours at the office, many commuting to work from newly manufactured suburbs, their unquestioned authority in the nuclear family diminishing. Young people had less structure in their lives—greater opportunities, to be sure, especially if they were white, but also more doubt, not only about their own futures but about a country riven by issues of class, race, and ideology and a world consumed with war, both hot and cold. They seemed to be soul-searching for meaning as never before.

Many parents had blamed rock ’n’ roll for what was deemed an epidemic of youth rebellion in the mid-1950s, with dozens of cities putting curfews in place to get kids off the streets. “Never before in our history have we Americans experienced such a wave of distrust of our teen-age youth,” read an article in the Los Angeles Times. But the rock fad merely tapped into an angst that was already there. Unlike swing, the youth obsession of a previous era, rock was do-it-yourself music, spurring teenagers to buy their first guitars and make some noise of their own. Now, in early 1957, with the first phase of the rock ’n’ roll revolution showing signs of waning—teen heartthrobs like Pat Boone and Tab Hunter were all over the radio, and by year’s end, Elvis would be drafted and Little Richard would retire to join the church—young people were looking for something new that spoke to their doubts and desires and finding it in another do-it-yourself genre: folk.

In New York City, the epicenter of the coming folk revival, the youth movement planted its first flags in the ground. At 110 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village, twenty-nine-year-old Izzy Young opened the Folklore Center, ostensibly a store selling sheet music, folk music books, and instruments but more importantly the place where musicians would gather to jam, share the latest gossip, or score a gig if they were lucky, perhaps even one sponsored by the gregarious Mr. Young himself at his shoebox establishment. Not far from the Folklore Center, in Washington Square Park, gaggles of devout “folkniks,” as Young called them, began congregating with their guitars, banjos, and mandolins on weekends to play blues, ballads, and old-time music.

Despite whatever misgivings these young people may have harbored, when they were playing music, the city was brimming with youthful energy and possibility, and that’s what Odetta found when she packed up her belongings in Berkeley and went to live with Dean Gitter and his wife, Margery, in a two-room basement apartment at 327 West Fourth Street in the West Village.

As in Los Angeles and San Francisco, she found plenty of comrades-in-arms eager to trade songs, political philosophies, and more. In coffeehouses, bars, and church basements, music, poetry, and literature cross-pollinated and roused one another. “We all had an audience for whatever we were doing, whether it was a jazz or classical musician performing, or an opening for an off-off-(way off) Broadway play, or a reading from a book or poetry recital, or folk musicians having a hootenanny,” the jazz musician David Amram, who later became a good friend of Odetta’s, recalled. “Pete Seeger, Odetta and I all played with musicians from every style because there were no cultural commissars telling us what was Correct and what was Verboten.”¹

Odetta wasted little time in establishing her reputation in New York, a city she would call home off and on for the rest of her life. Her first gig after arriving from Berkeley was a “Folk Song Fest and Calypso Carnival” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Also on the bill were the Kentucky balladeer Jean Ritchie and Oscar Brand, the Canadian-born folk singer who hosted a seminal radio show, Folksong Festival, on New York’s WNYC. Brand served as emcee for the concert, and he recalled going backstage before the show and hearing Odetta singing scales in grand fashion, which was hardly typical for the city’s young folk singers. “We talked for a while and I said, ‘Do you sing opera?’ And she said, ‘No, I sing . . . folk,” Brand remembered. “And she walked out on that stage and that audience had never known her or seen her or anything, including me. And she just blew them out of that place, with the voice and that personality. She was a person that was more of a spirit than any kind of human being.”²

In the audience were Selma Thaler and her husband, Ed. He was a newly minted doctor, and she was years shy of starting a therapy practice and pregnant with their first child. The Thalers, both from Brooklyn, had met Odetta a few times in Berkeley, and when Selma heard about the concert on Brand’s radio show, she decided to try to reconnect. She invited Odetta to dinner at their two-room apartment near Highland Park, and after some initial awkwardness, they were still listening to blues and folk records at 3 a.m., talking and telling funny stories, eliciting Odetta’s contagious childlike giggles. They became lifelong friends, which Thaler agreed was difficult for Odetta: “She was able to trust us. It was not easy for her to trust people and she could trust us. And she knew she was loved and not judged.”³

Odetta would spend a lot of time with the Thalers at their apartment whenever she was in town. “She would offer to wash the dishes after we would eat and she would sing German lieder,” Thaler said. “That’s what she was trained for—she could have been one of those.” Thaler’s daughter, Carrie, born the following year, remembered Odetta as a great hugger of children and an even better listener through the decades, someone who prized her special friendships, once she allowed someone to get close to her. “Odetta was someone that, and I don’t think I’m unique in this, I always felt really good to be around her,” she recalled. “And I think a lot of people may have felt that way.”⁴

In the Village, many of the new record companies that were starting to put out folk material were within walking distance, including Vanguard Records on East Eleventh Street, Elektra Records on Bleecker Street, and the Clancy Brothers’ Tradition Records, which had just released Odetta’s LP, on Christopher Street. Liam Clancy remembered what it was like in the cozy Village scene in 1957:

One evening the great Odetta phoned and invited me to a Bob Gibson concert at a church hall on Bleecker Street. . . . I was shy about it, but what a thrill it was. . . . After the concert she and I went down the street to Izzy Young’s Folklore Center, where the banjos and guitars were goin’ at it. Paul Clayton was there singing whaling songs with his friend Jo El. It turned into a party, as it always did at Izzy’s place. Odetta sang “The Lass from the Low Country,” and Paul and I did some sea shanties. I walked Odetta home and we had a long talk. She sang me some songs in that powerful voice of hers (even though she tried to sing sotto voce) that shook the walls . . . as if they were the walls of Jericho.⁵

Odetta found kinship in this early circle of folk music enthusiasts, which included the people who ran the record companies and genuinely loved the music—before big business got deeply involved. She was especially taken with the young and rakish Clancy Brothers, who sang about revolution in Ireland in ways that hit home for black Americans. As her friend Maya Angelou would note of one of the Clancys’ songs, “Wearing of the Green”: “If the words Negro and America were exchanged for shamrock and Irish, the song could be used to describe the situation in the United States.”⁶

The Clancys often hung out at the White Horse Tavern, a gritty Hudson Street bar that had attracted a literary crowd, including Dylan Thomas and Jack Kerouac, and where “people would sit around and sing all night,” Odetta recalled. “I’m glad it was through them [the Clancys] that I was baptized, rather than going into Warner Brothers or RCA, where there’s nothing but bean counters telling you to smile, even when you’re hurting.”⁷

By the spring, the Gitters, along with Odetta, had moved to a five-room apartment at 144 East Twenty-Second Street, where it turned out blacks were not entirely welcome, the kind of Northern racism often underplayed in histories. Dean Gitter had become friendly with Earl Jones, a six-foot-six black actor who moonlighted as a floor sander. Jones had done some work on the Gitters’ previous apartment (along with his son, a young thespian named James Earl), and he visited a few times at the Twenty-Second Street place. “One afternoon, I got a visit from a representative of the august realtor who managed the building,” Gitter recalled. “He told me that it was alright for the ‘nigger gal’ to stay in the apartment, but ‘the big shvartze’ [Yiddish slang for a black person] was frightening the old Jewish ladies who lived in the building and must not visit us again. I threw him out.”⁸

Albert Grossman, visiting from Chicago, stayed in the third bedroom that spring. One night, they had a dinner party, and Bob Gibson came with a friend who wanted to meet Grossman: a young singer named Mary Travers, whom Grossman would later tap for Peter, Paul and Mary.

New York had no club devoted to folk music in early 1957. The high-end cabarets mostly offered pop music and jazz. Aside from the Gate of Horn in Chicago, in fact, only a handful of clubs around the nation, including the Hungry i in San Francisco and Storyville in Boston, regularly featured folk musicians. That would very soon change.

In mid-August, one of the first of the new wave of folk clubs, the Café Bizarre, opened its doors at 106 West Third Street in what was said to have been a former stable once belonging to Aaron Burr. Odetta headlined on a bill that featured several others, including a young merchant seaman, Dave Van Ronk, who had never performed before on stage. Van Ronk recalled what Odetta did that night, which was certainly beyond the call of duty for the night’s main attraction.

I still do not know what I sang or said, but I remember very well what happened immediately afterward. I was shaking like someone who has narrowly missed a fatal car crash, and just as happy, when up came Odetta herself with a great big smile on her face—and she has a smile that could melt diamonds. “That was wonderful,” she said. “Do you do this for a living?” I told her, no, I was a merchant seaman on the beach and I meant to ship out again as soon as my money ran low. Well, she said, if I was interested, she could take a tape of mine out to Chicago to Albert Grossman, owner of the Gate of Horn.⁹

In what became a legendary episode, Van Ronk’s tape never quite made it to Odetta or to Chicago, but Van Ronk thought it had, and after hitchhiking to the Gate of Horn, he endured a failed, soul-decapitating audition for Grossman. With Odetta’s encouragement, however, Van Ronk soon took up folk singing full-time, becoming one of the more influential performers in Greenwich Village, even if he never quite became a star.

Van Ronk said Odetta’s music “had made an incredible impression on us,” and his wife, Terri Thal, recalled Odetta’s gesture to a then-unknown singer as “a generous, wonderful thing to do.” Odetta made a similar impression on a young Grace Slick, who, while still in college, snuck into her dressing room at a Village club around this time and played and sang for her. “She encouraged my moderate ability and gently warned me that being a musician was a sort of hit-and-miss occupation,” recalled Slick, the future Jefferson Airplane singer.¹⁰

By the end of August, Gitter had booked Odetta on a fall tour of colleges. And he got her her first national TV spot, on NBC’s Today Show. It would have seemed a perfect showcase for Odetta’s powerful work songs or spirituals, yet even though McCarthyism was ebbing—a disgraced Joseph McCarthy himself had died at age forty-eight a few months earlier—television in the summer of 1957 wasn’t quite ready to embrace folk songs with a message. A limousine picked up Odetta and Gitter at his apartment at 6 a.m. and took them to NBC’s studio on Forty-Ninth Street. But the cohost of the show, Jack Lescoulie, “didn’t know what to make of Odetta, didn’t know what to make of folk music,” Gitter said. “And she sang, ‘The Fox,’ [a cute English folk song] which was all the Today Show could stand.”¹¹

A short time later, Gitter abruptly parted ways with Odetta and left for England, nine months after becoming her manager and outlining an ambitious plan to make her a star. Gitter offered various reasons for the decision. He said that he’d already been accepted a year earlier to the prestigious London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts to study Shakespearean acting and had delayed his admission for a year just as the opportunity with Odetta had arisen. “But as the end of the year began to approach . . . I realized that I really didn’t want to be a manager,” Gitter said. “To me it smacked of flesh-peddling.”¹² On another occasion, he said that as much as he admired Odetta’s talent, he concluded that he couldn’t make a living at folk music, which was true of most people in the business then. Margery had just given birth to their first son, Jonathan, and Gitter, about to turn twenty-two, felt he had to provide for his family, although going to acting school hardly guaranteed him a future income.

As for who would manage Odetta then, Gitter said he quickly settled on Al Grossman. “And I arranged to give—GIVE!—the contract to Albert Grossman, who had never managed anybody, but he did have the Gate of Horn, so he was becoming one of the most important figures in folk music, even then.”¹³

According to their official agreement, signed September 20, 1957, Gitter transferred all his managerial rights to Grossman. As compensation, he asked for a 20 percent cut of the fall concert tour he’d booked for Odetta through the end of November. Odetta, Gitter said, felt betrayed by his decision to leave. “Albert related how really personally pissed Odetta was with me,” Gitter said, with Grossman telling him the end of their partnership “sounds more like a love affair with you screwing her.”¹⁴

If Odetta was blindsided by Gitter’s exit, she did already seem taken by Grossman’s can-do attitude and forceful personality. “One sensed that Albert was brilliant, a man of impeccable artistic taste,” she recalled.¹⁵ For Grossman, it meant that he now had the top new folk singer as a client. He immediately booked Odetta at the Gate of Horn, this time for a five-week run starting in early September. Her shows there at the beginning of the year had generated buzz, but now she’d begun attracting a serious fan base.

With Odetta’s first Tradition record selling briskly, Grossman rushed her into the studio to record her second solo LP, released by Tradition in late October of 1957. In an early example of Grossman’s marketing genius, it was entitled Odetta at the Gate of Horn, even though the entire recording was made in a New York studio. As Odetta began to gain fame, Grossman would enjoy a growing reputation as folk music’s éminence grise. While it’s certainly true that serious folk fans would have heard of the club, there’s no doubt that the record helped put it on the map. It would often be said later that Grossman had “discovered” Odetta at the Gate of Horn, but as to who helped the other more, a good argument can be made that Grossman benefited from the relationship far more than she did, as she helped spearhead the ascendance of folk music around the country.

Charlie Rothschild, who would start working for Grossman’s managerial firm a few years later, maintained that Grossman helped guide her early career in important ways. “He was a very good businessman and he did wonders for his acts, including Odetta,” Rothschild said. “When he met Odetta she was probably making peanuts and he generated a good income for her and got her exposure.” Yet it’s arguable how much of that exposure would be due to Grossman and how much would come from word of mouth and the unusual power of her music. Rothschild agreed that Grossman wound up reaping big benefits from the client Gitter had handed him. “I would assume,” Rothschild said, “Odetta attracted a lot of people to Albert.” As Odetta herself would note in looking back at this period much later, “Albert started his business on my back.”¹⁶

In terms of content, Odetta at the Gate of Horn picked up right where Ballads and Blues had left off, with another selection of the ballads, convict songs, slave songs, and spirituals she was singing in her live shows. They included the old Negro spiritual “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” which would forever be associated with her, and “Take This Hammer.” Odetta used the liner notes of the album to assert that her music had a clear political message if her listeners would pay close attention to the words. Of the lyric “I don’t want your cold iron shackles” in “Take This Hammer,” she wrote that it represented “what man has done to man”; and of the line “hurts my pride—hurts my pride,” she commented that it “continues to do in one form or another.”¹⁷ Instilling black pride would be a constant theme of her work, whether by showing off the inherent beauty and power of black music born of slavery and Jim Crow or by using the history of folk songs to show that her people had a real past worth remembering.

Critics were quick to heap praise on the record. “When Odetta lets out all the stops of her strength and feeling on the work songs ‘Timber’ and ‘Take This Hammer,’ one is aware of listening to an extraordinarily gifted singer,” Robert Shelton wrote in the New York Times, the first of his many plaudits over the years.¹⁸ Odetta’s two records on Tradition would more or less carry the small label for a time. Still, although her popularity was building in folk circles, Odetta’s sales were modest when compared with Harry Belafonte’s record-breaking LPs on RCA. While RCA had a huge marketing department and connections with radio deejays to boost airplay, Tradition relied mostly on word of mouth to generate sales—not a recipe for hit songs or albums.

In November, Odetta embarked on the college tour Dean Gitter had booked for her. It included stops at Yale, Princeton, Oberlin, and other schools, with a total gross of a little more than two thousand dollars. The college folk circuit was then in its infancy, but Josh White and Pete Seeger had both had successful college shows—and interest among students was swelling. It was on these campuses that the fuse was really lit for the folk revival. “In going to different university and college campuses, to see the kids who are playing banjos, recorders, guitars, 12-string guitars, who are sitting and entertaining themselves, it’s quite a lovely thing to see,” Odetta told an interviewer a short time later. “And it’s growing and growing.”¹⁹

As Odetta saw on her campus tours, young people were ready to ditch “Heartbreak Hotel” and “Tutti Frutti” for more thought-provoking fare. “Her voice is thoroughly disciplined and the vocal pyrotechnics that she displayed would put Little Richard to shame,” wrote June Starr, Oberlin class of 1958, in her review of Odetta’s concert on November 16. She reported that “a wildly enthusiastic audience greeted the first appearance of Odetta at Oberlin. From the opening choruses of ‘Santy Anno’ to the final encores we were unquestionably hers.”²⁰

By Christmas Eve, Odetta was back for yet another run at the Gate, with Chicago quickly becoming, for a time, her new home base. It made sense now that her new manager and one of the top folk clubs in the nation were both there. It was also a good midway point for shuttling between gigs on both coasts.

Early on, she usually stayed at the home of Dawn and Nate Greening, folk music enthusiasts who lived in nearby Oak Park. Dawn was a founder of the Old Town School of Folk Music, which had started informally in the Greenings’ living room and had just opened for business on North Avenue, amid increasing demand for teachers of folk music. Aside from offering classes on guitar, banjo, and folk dancing, the school would become an informal gathering place for visiting musicians such as Josh White, Pete Seeger, and Big Joe Williams, and it would help cement Chicago’s folk scene the way Izzy Young’s Folklore Center did in New York.

A warm, friendly woman whom students at the school would affectionately call “Momma Dawn,” Dawn Greening had met Odetta during her first Gate of Horn show and they grew close after some typical hesitation on Odetta’s part. “She didn’t believe that my mother was as nice as she seemed,” recalled Dawn and Nate’s daughter Lesley Greening Taufer. “She said, ‘I never ever believed that your mother was real.’ And then of course she did.”²¹

The Greenings were avowed “anti-segregationists,” their son, Lance, recalled. But it seemed that wherever Odetta went, she had to deal with racial hostility. Some of the Greenings’ neighbors didn’t take kindly to having a black woman in their midst. Oak Park had already made a name for itself as a racially unfriendly enclave. When Percy Julian, a black research chemist who had helped pioneer the synthesis of testosterone and other hormones, had moved his family to Oak Park in 1950, several attempts were made to burn down the home, including an attack with dynamite hurled from a passing automobile. “Every time [Odetta] came to town she stayed with us,” Lesley Greening Taufer said. “And our neighbors would peek through the curtains at us, and my mother would take Odetta’s album cover and stick it in the window.”²²

The TV networks would play a critical role in raising the consciousness of the nation about the black struggle, and in April of 1958, they featured Odetta for the first time in a civil rights context. She appeared on CBS for a Saturday morning program entitled Odetta Sings. Produced by the network’s public affairs department, the program, according to one black newspaper, was intended to stress “the lasting contribution of the colored race to America’s civilization.”²³ It was just the kind of opportunity that would have appealed to Odetta, one in which she could sing songs that spoke of the black experience. While the appearance was briefly noted in the black press, however, it was hardly a prime-time slot. Those would come soon enough.

She claimed by then to have a repertoire of 150 songs, according to a short profile in DownBeat that May. Her concert work was increasing, and she was mostly doing stage shows at places such as the Berkeley Little Theater, Jordan Hall in Boston, Orchestra Hall in Chicago, Reed College in Oregon, and the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

As the summer approached, though, any thoughts of a clean break from Dean Gitter evaporated. He filed suit against Odetta in Massachusetts, claiming that Grossman had never paid him the commission he was owed for the fall 1957 college concert tour. The suit also claimed that Odetta had reneged on a record deal Gitter had made on her behalf the previous June with Riverside Records. He was seeking 20 percent of the concert gross and fulfillment of the record deal, which could mean far more for him since it gave him a share of the royalty. As court papers later revealed, Odetta had cashed nine checks totaling eight hundred dollars as an advance against royalties of the Riverside record, but Grossman had balked at the contract Gitter had signed.

In August 1958, Odetta wrote her lawyer Samuel Freifeld in Chicago, dismayed at the legal imbroglio with her former manager and friend. “With the possibility of ending the recording contract with Dean, my mind goes back to the hope and enthusiasms of two young people with faith and respect for one and the other just about two years ago. I am saddened by the failure of our friend and business relationship.”²⁴

It wouldn’t be the first time Odetta would feel let down by what she felt were the cold calculations of people in the music business at the expense of the caring human relationships she so desperately longed for. “There have been some few difficulties concerning records in my life and it looks from here as if it will never be straightened out, but I’m sure it will,” she told an interviewer in September, without giving any details. “And I really don’t know right now where anybody stands.”²⁵

In November, the Kingston Trio’s version of the old murder ballad “Tom Dooley” skyrocketed to number one on the Billboard charts—the event considered the Big Bang of the folk revival. Young, clean-cut, and hip, the Trio became the first teen idols in the brief era when folk music reigned in American popular culture. The number of folk clubs soon exploded, as did the number of amateur guitarists and banjoists performing at local hootenannies with dreams of making it to the top. The record companies, too, already witnessing the success of Belafonte and other purveyors of folk, realized that the music was fast becoming mainstream and that meant a new search for talent with hit potential.

Odetta told an interviewer that she wasn’t interested in the great fame that now appeared possible for folk singers, though subsequent events make it seem as though her avowals were a bit defensive, as if she were subconsciously bracing for rejection. “I don’t want stardom. I don’t want stardom,” she said. “There’s too much for one to do and to experience for say a stardom like Mr. Belafonte, who has a great responsibility. If he comes up with a hit, somebody in some office is saying, ‘Ok, where is the other one?’ These are no conditions to work under.” She added that starting a family was too important to her to sacrifice on the altar of fame. “Because a career minded person, I’m not,” she said. “I couldn’t get along with just a career.”²⁶