CHAPTER SIX

TV SENSATION

Dave Van Ronk once estimated that the Red Scare delayed the folk revival by a decade. If true, the postponement had one unintended but far-reaching consequence: it meant that folk music and the civil rights movement would peak at the same moment in time. Had folk taken off earlier, it might have run its course as a pop fad and not played such an indispensable role in the freedom struggle. Odetta would figure prominently in both.

In May of 1959, she teamed up with Count Basie for a benefit performance at Hunter College in New York, sponsored by a group called the Youth March for Integrated Schools. The concert raised money in support of a civil rights bill pending in Congress that Senator Paul Douglas of Illinois, a liberal Democrat, had introduced. Two years earlier, Douglas had spearheaded the Civil Rights Act of 1957, which had created a civil rights division in the Justice Department to prosecute voting rights violations in the South—the first significant federal legislative action on civil rights since Reconstruction. Now, Douglas’s new bill called for expanding the Justice Department’s civil rights enforcement powers to other areas, including school desegregation, which, despite the Brown v. Board of Education ruling, was “slowly grinding to a halt,” according to one recent report.¹ The bill, like all other civil rights legislation over the next several years, would face a stiff wall of opposition from the Southern wing in Congress, leaving activists to continue pressing their case in local disputes and in the court of public opinion.

The committee for the Hunter College show comprised a who’s who of civil rights leaders, from A. Philip Randolph of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters and Roy Wilkins of the NAACP to Martin Luther King Jr. and his chief confidante in the entertainment world, Harry Belafonte. For Odetta, it marked the first time that Belafonte enlisted her aid in the civil rights cause, something he would do repeatedly as both movements gathered force. “People had heard about this nappy headed little girl talking about the history,” Odetta recalled. “They would call upon me to do benefits. So it was like we were all developing at the same time.”²

In Odetta, Belafonte could hardly have found a better representative of the hopes and dreams of African Americans. Her queenly deportment, radiant smile, and Afro all exuded pride in race, while her mighty, impassioned singing evoked the soul-striving of her people and a clarion call for justice. If she was more likely to talk then about chain gang labor than to get on a box and demand rights for blacks, her very presence—and talent—made it harder to ignore the second-class status of America’s Negroes.

That spring it was becoming clear to everyone paying attention to folk music that Odetta had assumed the mantle as its most inspirational figure. Not long before the Hunter College benefit, Odetta had taken the stage for the first time at New York’s Town Hall on West Forty-Third Street, long one of the city’s most important concert venues. Founded by suffragists, the fifteen-hundred-seat theater was the place where Margaret Sanger had once been arrested on stage for daring to discuss birth control and where Marian Anderson had made her New York debut while still barred by the Metropolitan Opera. More recently, it had played host to Duke Ellington, Mahalia Jackson, and Thelonious Monk.

In the reviews for the Town Hall show, one sees the mainstream press, while fumbling to describe Odetta in a white-centric way, nevertheless beginning to come to terms with her power and artistry, conveyed with increasing confidence on stage, and what she might mean for the emerging civil rights movement. “Odetta is a Negress who seems six-foot tall and has a baritone voice,” wrote Jay S. Harrison, music editor for the New York Herald Tribune. “Her bearing is that of a princess, her manner that of an intensely devoted executant who has something to say and the wherewithal to say it.” He continued:

Bessie Smith and Lead Belly seem her closest models, and like them the sorrow of her race is in her voice; the protest too, at the misfortune of being ever in the minority, ever against the world. And the pride, also, that comes of physical strength and unashamed feeling. . . . Odetta . . . gave us the picture of a strong and indomitable people.³

Unfortunately, she had little time to bask in the attention just yet. The day of her Town Hall show, Riverside Records sued her in New York, in a companion action to Dean Gitter’s lawsuit, over her failure to fulfill her recording contract. In the months since Gitter had sued Odetta, folk music had clearly taken off, and Riverside sensed an opportunity to cash in on the deal that it had made in good faith with Gitter. Calling Odetta “a singer of great and unusual talent” whose recording would be lucrative, Riverside was seeking $25,800 ($212,000 today) in damages and restitution.⁴

On the cusp of stardom, with her shows nationwide selling out and her records selling briskly, Odetta now found herself caught up in a legal battle pitting her against a record company and her former manager. The suits were certainly proof that the stakes in folk music were growing bigger every day. They would drag on for several years.

A week after getting served, Odetta returned to Chicago and tried to divert her attention by getting married. She’d only met Danny Gordon, a native of Queens, New York, seven months earlier while performing at Cosmo Alley, a new folk club in Los Angeles. Leo Vincent Daniel Gordon was a lithographer by trade, Odetta hazily recalled later, but his artwork doesn’t seem to have made any lasting impressions on anyone.

A tall, handsome African American who possessed a silver tongue, Gordon introduced himself by telling Odetta that he loved music and that his two favorites were Frank Sinatra and Odetta. Danny and Odetta appear to have become quickly inseparable, and in the months before the marriage, Gordon, who was in the midst of finalizing a divorce, moved into Odetta’s small apartment at 1252 North Wells Street on Chicago’s Near North Side and started working for Albert Grossman, a job Odetta surely arranged for him. When they took their vows before Judge Abraham Lincoln Marovitz in Cook County on May 1, Danny was thirty-one, and Odetta, twenty-eight.

Gordon got decidedly mixed reviews from Odetta’s friends, who knew she had a propensity to fall in love quickly. On the one hand, they found him quite charming. Selma Thaler described her initial impression of Danny as “very intelligent, very sensitive. He was bright . . . he was smart, he was with it.” “He was a lot of fun and everybody loved him,” Lesley Greening Taufer recalled. One can imagine Gordon saying all the right things to woo Odetta, who had been conditioned from the beginning to doubt her looks and self-worth.⁵

But Josh White Jr., who became a folk singer like his dad, immediately had doubts about Gordon’s sincerity. “I think we were all a bit surprised when she got married,” he said. “I don’t know for some reason, if it was just me or others, didn’t think it was going to last.” And Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul and Mary, who met Danny a bit later, smelled trouble. “I never had a good feeling about Danny Gordon,” he recalled. “I felt that he was using her, that he was playing her, so to speak.”⁶

Gordon often talked big, like the many times he showed up at the Greenings’ home with his latest get-rich-quick idea. “One time he came to our house with a thing called a zoomer-ing that he found in China that was going to take over the world like the hula-hoop,” Lesley Greening Taufer said. The fad never materialized. “He would come in with all sorts of schemes about how he was going to make a million,” she added, “and I think that kind of did ’Detta in eventually, the schemes and her money disappearing and her money supporting him.”⁷

The newlyweds decided they wouldn’t mix business with pleasure, although it didn’t quite work out that way. “If he managed me we’d have to break the contract or get a divorce,” Odetta told an interviewer, “and I’d much rather stay married.” A photo of the bride and bridegroom appearing in Jet magazine shows a beaming Odetta in a white dress and Danny in a dark suit and tie sharing a post-wedding toast with Al Grossman and Barbara Siegel, a publicist. Gordon has a cigarette in his left hand, which is around Siegel’s shoulder. There was a reception that night, but with Odetta’s increasingly loaded calendar, not a lot of time to enjoy their wedded bliss. “Congratulations and long life to Danny and Odetta on their marriage in Chicago,” Izzy Young noted in his “Frets and Frails” column in Sing Out! “Shortly afterwards Odetta flew to Boston for a return engagement at Storyville.”⁸

Odetta’s music was beginning to exert a magnetic pull on those it touched. It had inspired Dave Van Ronk and Grace Slick, and brought Danny to her side, and it was Odetta’s gigs at Storyville that year that convinced the jazz club’s owner, George Wein, to create the Newport Folk Festival, the nation’s premier folk gathering, in Rhode Island. “If I had to pick one person responsible for the establishment of the Newport Folk Festival in 1959, it would be Odetta,” Wein recalled. “We had Sunday afternoon sets at Storyville in those days and I saw that hundreds of young people were filling the club, buying $1 ginger ales, just to hear this magnificent artist whose beauty and power of self-presentation reached deeply into their musical minds.”⁹

Wein, a jazz pianist who ran the popular Newport Jazz Festival, had been unaware of what was taking place on Boston’s college campuses, where excitement had been building over folk music. He had been planning to feature some folk artists at that year’s jazz festival, but he realized folk was becoming a big enough draw to warrant a separate festival of its own.

Grossman had accompanied Odetta to her Storyville gigs, and during her shows, he and Wein discussed the folk scene. These conversations led Wein to tap Grossman to coproduce the festival with him. While in Boston, Grossman had also gone to a new folk club in Cambridge called Club 47, where he saw an eighteen-year-old Staten Island–born beauty named Joan Baez, who had also been inspired by Odetta, perform some of her first shows. He invited Baez to come to Chicago and sing at the Gate of Horn.

In mid-June, Baez appeared at the Gate, her first gigs outside Boston, with the Chicago Tribune calling her “a Mexican songstress with sad eyes, long tresses, and a steady guitar.” At the club, Baez met Odetta for the first time, and her reaction says a lot about the almost spiritual force Odetta was beginning to exert on the younger generation of singers. “When I first met her, at the Gate of Horn in Chicago, my knees went to jelly, and that doesn’t happen to me very often,” Baez recalled.¹⁰

Baez, whose family moved around, depending on where her academic father was working, had discovered Odetta a few years earlier during high school in Palo Alto, California, shortly after hearing Belafonte and Pete Seeger. She’d grown up listening to the Negro spirituals her mother loved, particularly from Marian Anderson. But Odetta became her new “heroine,” and she cut her teeth on songs from Odetta’s two Tradition records, like “Oh, Freedom,” “Another Man Done Gone,” and “Lowlands.”¹¹ Baez described their first meeting at the Gate—in rather colorful language:

One night the Queen of Folk, Odetta, came to the club. I was a nervous wreck waiting to see her and was at the bar when I realized that she had arrived. . . . She was as big as a mountain and black as night. Her skin looked like velvet. She wore massive earrings that dangled and swung and flashed, and her dress looked like a flowing embroidered tent.¹²

Baez dealt with her nerves by bounding up to Odetta and singing a spot-on version of “Another Man Done Gone.” “She looked surprised and then pleased, and then she enveloped me in her great velvet arms. I felt about six years old, and my heart didn’t get back to normal for a week.”¹³

When the Newport Folk Festival got underway a few weeks later, Odetta picked up Baez at her parents’ house in Belmont, Massachusetts—Joan Senior had extracted a promise that Odetta would look after her little girl—and off they drove, with Danny behind the wheel and Bill Lee, Odetta’s new bass player, in the back seat. The festival took place over two days, July 11–12, in Freebody Park, and it featured a mix of young urban folk singers like Bob Gibson and the Kingston Trio and traditional artists, including the bluegrass Stanley Brothers from Virginia and the blind gospel guitar virtuoso Reverend Gary Davis of South Carolina. In addition to concerts, there was a workshop and a seminar, where musicians and folklorists discussed musical origins and demonstrated performance styles.

Despite rain and fog, the turnout exceeded expectations. “Devotees of folk music are flying here from Florida, Tennessee and even as far as the West Coast,” the Newport Daily News reported. “Odetta, the renowned California vocalist, is at the Hotel Viking,” the newspaper noted. In the festival program, Seeger and Odetta got top billing, their two blurbs appearing together on the first page of artist bios. They also closed the Saturday night concert, with Odetta taking the stage right before Seeger and giving what Robert Shelton of the New York Times called “the crowning performance of the week-end.”¹⁴

Odetta—or at least her music—became entangled in one of the event’s minor contretemps, a debate about whether traditional artists were getting short shrift in favor of more popular urban folk song interpreters. At her concert, Odetta gave what Shelton called “a commanding performance” of “Another Man Done Gone,” her a cappella showstopper. On Sunday morning, the folklorist and song collector Alan Lomax told the audience assembled for the seminar entitled “What Is Folk Music?”: “Last night we heard Odetta sing ‘Another Man Done Gone.’ The woman from whom the song was collected lives in Alabama, her name is Vera Hall, and she’s a dishwasher. She’s the one we should be hearing.” But others countered that not every traditional artist was necessarily ready to perform in a festival setting. “How do we know that Vera Hall could do as well here as she has recording in her own home?” the poet Langston Hughes, a member of the festival board, told a reporter.¹⁵

While it’s probably true that Hall learned a good deal of her repertoire in her rural community and not from records and books, the line of demarcation between traditional musicians and folk song interpreters was fuzzy at best. Many of the celebrated prewar bluesmen, for instance, were well known in their communities for performing songs they’d heard on records or from other musicians who’d heard the records. Lomax himself had had to teach Lead Belly some of the songs for which he became famous, including “Take This Hammer.” And Woody Guthrie’s background had been a lot more middle class than many people assumed.

Debates about the relative authenticity of various folk singers would become an ongoing sideshow to the folk revival, and Odetta would remain a frequent target. The definitions of authenticity were always muddy, but often boiled down to geography and a kind of unspoken misery index. Odetta’s operatic training and perfect diction certainly created the illusion of a middle-class childhood, far from the struggling communities that bred traditional artists, and her press materials, which tended toward the pretentious, didn’t help. “A true artist, Odetta is a perfectionist and her own severist [sic] critic,” read a typical early press release from Grossman’s management firm.¹⁶

Her detractors, including the young Minnesotans who started the influential Little Sandy Review to critique the latest folk records, would seize on her presumed background and her seriousness as signs of inauthenticity. “One gets the feeling of an enormous dishonesty in all that this woman sings,” it complained. “She doesn’t really sing a song; she beats it to death with a club.”¹⁷

But to her growing multitude of fans—and that would include most of the young folk singers who became stars during the next few years—Odetta practically walked on water. It began with Baez, who made her Newport debut that year singing duets with Bob Gibson. Odetta introduced Baez to other musicians and “was really my black angel,” Baez recalled. She hoped some of Odetta’s majesty would rub off on her. She copied Odetta’s dangling earrings, and back at the Viking Hotel, she even tried to steal Odetta’s leftover roast beef sandwich, which she spied on a tray outside her room. “I tried to eat her sandwich and the meat had gone bad. I guess I thought, Ooohhh, Odetta’s roast beef sandwich!” Baez said.¹⁸

With Gibson at the festival’s Sunday night concert, a barefoot and muddy Baez sang “Virgin Mary Had One Son” and “Jordan River” and launched her career. In addition to her precocious talent, Baez would offer the coming legions of young white folk fans a sex appeal that Odetta couldn’t. George Wein noted Baez’s “modest but alluring stage presence,” and the press would brand her the “Barefoot Madonna.” If Odetta was the reigning Queen of Folk, then Baez was now the Virgin Queen in waiting.¹⁹

In addition to Odetta and Baez, another big winner at the festival, which had attracted upward of fourteen thousand people—or, as one critic noted, “the impressive equivalent of between four and five sell-out concerts at Carnegie Hall”²⁰—was Al Grossman, who had programmed the event and returned to Chicago with even more clout. With Odetta’s star rising, he would soon try to broaden his client roster beyond her and Bob Gibson.

A few weeks after Newport, Odetta released My Eyes Have Seen, her first LP for her new label, Vanguard Records. Founded by two brothers in New York City, Seymour and Maynard Solomon, Vanguard had specialized in jazz and classical music early on but was increasingly making inroads into folk. The Solomons, reliable left-wingers, had recorded both Paul Robeson and the Weavers, even as the artists had continued to suffer the effects of the blacklist.

My Eyes was Odetta’s first record with Bill Lee, a young jazz veteran from Georgia who would be her traveling companion for the next several years. The album also included the backing of a chorus on a few songs conducted by Milt Okun, who had already arranged music for Belafonte and would later create Peter, Paul and Mary’s sound. While Vanguard was no Columbia or RCA in terms of its power in the industry, it was a definite step up from Tradition. Belafonte seemed determined to help Odetta achieve the stardom he thought she deserved. He wrote the liner notes and, in a signed introduction, paid tribute to his own musical debt to her: “Odetta is a vast influence on our cultural life. We are fortunate indeed in having such a woman in our musical world. Those of us who call ourselves artists can learn much from her strength, simplicity, warmth, humor and complete humanity.”²¹

Like her Tradition records, My Eyes was a mix of spirituals, work and prison songs, ballads, and a children’s song. It opened with “Poor Little Jesus,” a traditional black spiritual, but one that Odetta slyly adapted to modern times. With the civil rights struggle in mind, she added a line that she knew would resonate with anyone sympathetic to the cause.

Poor little Jesus, mmmm-mmmm,

Laid him in a manger, yes, my lord.

Well, they couldn’t find no hotel room . . .

In Jesus’s case, of course, the inn in Bethlehem was booked, not segregated, but the line was lost on no one. While it wasn’t Odetta’s style in those days to sing more overtly political material in the vein of “Strange Fruit”—and the blacklist remained, even without McCarthy—she found other ways to raise consciousness about the black struggle, particularly in her song choices. Of the thirteen tracks on the record, four were convict songs, including two Alan Lomax had collected from prisoners at the Mississippi State Penitentiary: “Jumpin’ Judy” and “Bald Headed Woman,” which Odetta sang a cappella, with just her hand claps, as she’d done on “Another Man Done Gone.”

Her recording of “Water Boy” (paired with “I’ve Been Driving on Bald Mountain”) became an instant classic of the folk era and was almost unrivaled in its power. She learned “Water Boy” from the singing of Robeson, who in the 1930s had gorgeously rendered the traditional work song in typical art song fashion to delicate piano accompaniment. In Odetta’s hands, it reclaimed its dusty Southern roots, the staccato strums of her guitar mimicking a chopping pickaxe, her throaty growls evoking the raw desperation of a chain gang convict sweating up a thirst in the hot sun.

The record ended with Odetta’s moving rendition of “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” a song written to inspire Union troops during the Civil War. Once again, the subtext would be obvious, having a young black folk singer singing a patriotic (and apocalyptic) song evoking the battle to end slavery—and a none too subtle statement that the work of Lincoln remained unfinished.

The LP garnered stellar reviews, though one critic noted that Odetta’s fame was still limited to the folk faithful, and “this exciting performer . . . certainly deserves a wider audience.”²² That was about to happen.

In late September and early October, Odetta sold out the Ash Grove, a new folk club in Los Angeles, night after night. Ed Pearl, who opened the club in an old furniture factory on Melrose Avenue the previous year, just as the Kingston Trio was hitting it big, had to expand from four to six nights to accommodate the huge crowds for her, which included, according to Sing Out!, “mink coats and high school kids alike, working folks and the white-collar crowd, with a heavy sprinkling of liberals and the intelligentsia.”²³

On the day of her first show, after Pearl welcomed Odetta, her mother, Flora, and an assistant to the club, he went home to be with his family. He returned about 6 p.m. and checked on Odetta in the dressing room. “The room was beautiful,” he recalled with a laugh. “They put pictures up, they had mirrors up. All the dust had gotten probably [vacuumed up]. She put a really nice cover over the regular couch covers so it wouldn’t have dust on it.” It was just Odetta being Odetta. “I mean she was a diva,” Pearl said. “She was not one of the gang folk singers. . . . She practiced to sing absolutely perfectly, you know just exactly the right thing.”²⁴

Whatever Odetta was doing, scales and all, was working, and excitement was mounting. She may have been secretly fighting off nerves and getting her hate out, but on stage she commanded her audiences, who found themselves swept away by her charm and the visceral power of her voice. “She had a way, after a song or set, of just lowering her head and looking up with the most extraordinarily beautiful smile, her eyes a melt of love as she looked out at the audience,” Lynn Gold Chaiken recalled.

The reviews from the period—and indeed throughout her early career—were so positively over the top that they almost defy belief. “Odetta has such charm, such ease, such artistry and understanding,” one reviewer wrote, “that you’re held quite spellbound while she is performing, with no sense of lapse of time—just a mild sense of loss when she finally exits.” When she took a side trip during her Ash Grove run to perform at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, a review in the local paper carried the headline: “Odetta Captivates Audience, Makes You Glad to Be Alive.”²⁵

It was only a matter of time before prime-time television came calling. By November, Odetta had signed a contract with Harry Belafonte’s production company to costar on a prime-time TV special called Tonight with Belafonte. Odetta was excited but unnerved by the invitation. “Suddenly there was a television offer and the frightening thought that millions would hear me,” she said.²⁶

When CBS and Revlon had approached Belafonte about hosting a variety show, they were in dire need of some good publicity. As the network and sponsor of The $64,000 Question and The $64,000 Challenge, both had been tarnished by the TV quiz show scandals, when it was revealed that contestants on some shows were fed answers or received easier questions in an effort to boost ratings. Television executives and sponsors, including Revlon founder Charles Revson, had been defending themselves in congressional hearings in October and November, and it was in that atmosphere that Revlon agreed to give Belafonte $200,000 ($1.7 million today) and complete creative control to produce what was reportedly the first prime-time TV special by a black production company. Spend what you want, Belafonte was told, and keep the rest.

“I started envisioning a portrait of Negro life in America told through music,” Belafonte recalled. “What better way to promote understanding than with music that reached millions of Americans in sixty minutes?”²⁷ Belafonte, in addition to his hit albums, had become a Hollywood star, and he said it was assumed he would tap a black starlet like Lena Horne or Dorothy Dandridge, with whom he’d made three films, as his costar. He recalled what happened when he met with Revlon and CBS executives to tell them his plan for the show.

When I put it together and sat before the supreme forces on Madison Avenue and they said, “Well, tell us, what will we see. Who will be with you?” and I said, “Well, first and foremost will be Odetta.” And there was this moment of silence. And one of the principal forces said, “Excuse me, Harry, but what is an Odetta?” I said, “It is not a what. It is a human being. It’s a she, it’s a who.” “And what does she sound like?” “Paul Robeson. Her voice is enormous. And the depth and range of it is never-ending.” “Uh, huh,” they said. “And what does she look like?” I said, “She’s a Nubian Queen. She is the mother of history, of all of Africa. Her beauty reigns as supreme.”²⁸

And, as a final dagger to the cosmetics company, Belafonte said he added: “And there will be no need to make her up.” It’s a great line, and while the story was probably polished over time, the larger point is that Belafonte was set on making a statement to the nation about the black experience that was far removed from Hollywood, and Revlon and CBS had no veto over his choices.

Dandridge would certainly have been the safer pick. She was the nation’s first black female movie star and sex symbol. Earlier in the year, Hollywood mogul Samuel Goldwyn’s wife, Frances, had praised Dandridge’s popularity with the white public as “very healthy. It makes our concept of beauty more interesting.”²⁹ It was about to get even more so.

Odetta flew in from Chicago, and Belafonte put her up at the Beekman Tower Hotel at Forty-Ninth Street and First Avenue. During rehearsals at CBS, he told a TV critic for the Daily News, “It isn’t enough just to parade a host of big names in front of a TV camera, all dressed up and set in a resplendent scene. It isn’t enough if they don’t have something worthwhile to say and entertaining to do.”³⁰

The one-hour show aired live at 8:30 p.m. on December 10, 1959, commercial-free other than two Revlon ads that bookended the production, and it was seen in living rooms that Thursday night from Boston to Biloxi, from San Francisco to Selma. The civil rights undercurrent was apparent from the start. It began with Belafonte, lithe and handsome in an open-collared shirt, singing “Bald Headed Woman,” which he’d heard on Odetta’s new record. Behind him in the shadows, muscled members of a chain gang moved in unison swinging imaginary hammers to the beat of what sounded like the cracking of a bullwhip. He then sang “Sylvie,” a Lead Belly song he’d recorded about a man working in the field and asking his wife for water.

Next a lone spotlight shone on Odetta wearing a dark loose-fitting dress, and she began singing “Water Boy,” or, rather, she unleashed it. Accompanying herself with her large National acoustic guitar, eyes closed, brows knitted in concentration, she brought the full tragedy and anger of chain gang life to bear.

There ain’t no hammer

On this mountain

That ring like mine, boy

That ring like mine

I’m gonna whoop this rock, boy

From here to the Macon

All the way to the jail, boy

All the way to the jail

But there was something else. Near the end of the song, when she shouted “Water Boy!” in her huge, full contralto, in between whacks on her guitar, the camera pulled back, seeming to recoil from her strength. It was a mesmerizing performance, and one of the most memorable moments from the show. “Her presence was very strong and very charismatic,” recalled Robert De Cormier, the show’s musical director and Belafonte’s longtime arranger.³¹

Other surprises awaited Americans who tuned in that night. An interracial group of children heard Belafonte sing one of Lead Belly’s children’s songs, “More Yet,” and Odetta sing “Three Pigs.” When Belafonte began “Pick a Bale of Cotton,” another song associated with Lead Belly, he was surrounded by an interracial troupe of twenty-five dancers. One of TV’s unwritten but widely accepted rules then forbade blacks and whites from performing together. Having black acts and white acts on a variety show was fine, but they had to be kept separate to appease stations in the South. “Revlon could not stand that, and I don’t think CBS could either really,” De Cormier said. “They tried to get Harry to make it all black, which they would have accepted. But they were really concerned about having blacks and whites together. But Harry absolutely refused to give in on it.”³²

There were other scenes of black life: Belafonte putting music to the Langston Hughes poem “I Wish the Rent Was Heaven Sent,” the blues duo Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry performing an instrumental dance tune; and Odetta singing the Negro spirituals “Joshua Fit De Battle of Jericho” and “Glory, Glory,” the former backed by an interracial chorus. The show’s unlikely hit, however, came from a nonsense song that was almost a throwaway: “Hole in the Bucket,” about a man trying to get out of doing the chores. “It was just a simple kind of a riddle song that didn’t have any power of melody and storytelling,” Belafonte recalled. “It was so simple and so childlike in its content, yet when she and I did it—we did it on stage as well as in the show itself—audiences loved it. And I think it was what we brought to it that captured the audience’s fancy.”³³

Reviewers loved the show, and most singled out Odetta. “Belafonte . . . introduced to network TV audiences the little-known folk singer Odetta,” wrote Fred Danzig, the television reporter for United Press International. “Today, this woman must be regarded as a star.”³⁴

The black press could scarcely believe what Belafonte had pulled off on network television, a show in which whites and blacks stood side by side celebrating black America. Unsurprisingly, they too singled out Odetta’s performance and what it meant for their race. “I hope you caught the hour-long spectacular on television last Thursday night when Harry Belafonte displayed his great showmanship . . . and introduced Odetta, who makes the Mahalias and the Rosettas get back,” wrote L. I. Brockenbury in the Los Angeles Sentinel, referring to the gospel stars Mahalia Jackson and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. “Some people may not like her looks—her hair has never seen a hot comb, she has strictly African features,” Brockenbury added. “But when she opens that mouth to sing, she is beautiful to these eyes. She should serve as an inspiration to all who would feel they can’t get ahead because of their looks, the texture of their hair, or the color of their skin.”³⁵

It’s hard to overemphasize how radical it was seeing a black woman with kinky hair on American television. It just didn’t happen. Even the half dozen black women in the interracial troupe of dancers on the show all had straightened hair. “She was making a political social statement about black people,” Belafonte recalled, looking back on the show at age ninety. Odetta “wasn’t trying to compete with the culture of the day. She was saying something else altogether: ‘My blackness unadorned is in itself its own adorning.’”

The black folk singer Jack Landrón, who began performing in the late 1950s as Jackie Washington, explained that in Odetta, blacks found someone who was not only supremely gifted but unafraid of her heritage. “You have to understand, there was never any particularly prideful thing about being black in America,” he recalled. “You were a second-class citizen. You never opened up magazines or went to movies and saw yourself reflected in a positive way. The whole thing of straightening one’s hair and wearing it in styles that was more like the women in the dominant culture or [the] men. Odetta was new.”³⁶

Odetta’s appearance on the national scene would prompt soul-searching kitchen-table debates in black homes around the country, like those of Carlie Collins Tartakov, an education professor, remembered a pair of aunts having about Odetta’s hair. One agreed with the long-accepted notion that it was “an embarrassment for us to let other people see us without some disguise on our hair.” The other argued: “Wouldn’t it be nice if we hadn’t ‘bought into’ the Europeans [sic] conception of what is beautiful? If we could just wear our hair any way we wanted?”³⁷

It wasn’t only blacks, of course, who were thrown for a loop by Odetta’s first star turn. Janis Fink, then nine years old and a few years away from becoming the precocious teenaged folk singer named Janis Ian, discovered Odetta that night in East Orange, New Jersey, and was forever changed. “I was taking a shower when I heard the most incredible voice coming from the living room,” she recalled. “Throwing a towel around me, I raced out of the bathroom, yelling, ‘Who is that? Who is that?’ That’s Odetta, my mom replied. I stared at the television screen. Even in black and white, she was absolutely beautiful. Dressed simply, with large hoop earrings framing her face, her hair in the first Afro I’d seen.”³⁸

After the show wrapped, Selma Thaler, along with her husband, Ed, who’d come to the studio for the taping, went with Odetta to the cast party at Belafonte’s gorgeous apartment on Seventy-Fourth Street and West End Avenue, the same residence Belafonte and Martin Luther King Jr. would use as an unofficial New York headquarters for King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the coming civil rights fight. For most of the party, Thaler was blind as a bat, because her hard contact lenses had disappeared up under her eyelids, but she remembered the celebration as “thrilling” and said Odetta was very happy with her performance. The show had been a game changer, not only for American culture but for Odetta personally. As Charlie Rothschild recalled, “It catapulted her into another arena.”³⁹

The next morning, Odetta was getting into a taxi in Midtown Manhattan when she was intercepted by some fans who congratulated her on her performance and began peppering her with questions about her professional and private life. “I was in the spotlight and suddenly all I could think about was fleeing for privacy,” she told a reporter soon after.⁴⁰ For Odetta, the push and pull of fame would be a constant struggle. Although she continued to claim fame didn’t interest her, she still saved every news clipping about her that she could find and she would clearly enjoy the perquisites of celebrity: the limousines, the first-class hotels, the special treatment accorded to the famous. At the same time, she could feel overwhelmed by the attention, and her hermit side would force her to run for cover.