CHAPTER SEVEN

THAT LOVELY ODETTA . . . PLAYING A MURDERESS

A few days after her TV triumph, Odetta returned to Chicago, where Al Grossman had booked her again into his Gate of Horn for three weeks. Reservations poured in. Her record sales shot up. And Langston Hughes soon offered her a role in his new play, Tambourines to Glory, but she would ultimately have to decline. That’s because a call came from Hollywood. Film producer Richard Zanuck had seen the Belafonte show, and from his office at 20th Century Fox had sent for a kinescope of the program. He would soon summon Odetta for a screen test for a new film called Sanctuary, based on the writing of William Faulkner.

While all this was going on, Odetta suddenly had a falling out with her biggest benefactor—Belafonte himself. “Something has just come to my attention which is hard for me to conceive,” he began an angry letter to Odetta on December 16, 1959. It involved Miriam Makeba.¹

Makeba, the young South African singer, had recently fled to the US after making an appearance in Lionel Rogosin’s apartheid documentary Come Back Africa. Since then, Belafonte had helped Makeba escape a usurious contract she’d inked with her South African record company, giving it 65 percent of her earnings. And he’d also shamed Rogosin and Village Vanguard owner Max Gordon into ripping up a managerial contract they’d gotten her to sign only weeks earlier when she was appearing at the club. Belafonte had taken Makeba under his wing professionally, given her money and advice, and promised to help promote her.

Before Odetta had left New York and headed back to Chicago, she had invited Makeba to dinner and, without telling her, had brought along Al Grossman, who had made his own pitch to become her manager. Belafonte was furious. “I am left with no recourse but to let you know how terribly disappointed I was to know that you, too, were capable of precipitating the same kind of conduct of which I am sure, for many years, you have been the victim.”²

It’s not known to what extent Odetta knew of Grossman’s intentions, but it’s quite possible her involvement was innocent enough. Belafonte’s protectiveness regarding Makeba, who would owe him a big debt for igniting her American career, is understandable given the racism and inequity he’d encountered in his own life. In hindsight, his indignation comes across as a bit idealistic, but honorable.

Yet an interesting side note comes from Makeba’s own recollection of her arrival in the US and Belafonte’s efforts to shape her for American audiences. Belafonte wanted her to get her hair straightened so he could present her as a pop chanteuse, she recalled in her autobiography. He arranged an appointment at a Harlem salon, but Makeba rejected her new hairdo and kept it short and kinky the way she’d always worn it back in Soweto. “This is not me. . . . I’m not a glamour girl,” she said.³ As Makeba’s star rose, there were two prominent black female entertainers—one American, the other African—wearing natural hair, and others would soon follow.

The rift between Odetta and Belafonte didn’t last long. Belafonte, in fact, had contracted for four more specials on CBS, and he wanted Odetta to appear with him again. But the two sides couldn’t agree on terms, and the plan was scrapped. (So were all but one of the specials, after Revlon, bowing to complaints from Southern TV affiliates, asked Belafonte to do away with the interracial cast; he refused.)

Belafonte went on to win an Emmy for his performance in Tonight with Belafonte, the first black actor to take home the award. He and Odetta both received a Sylvania Award for the show. Given by Sylvania Electronics, then one of the top TV manufacturers, the award rivaled the prestige of the Emmys in the early days of television. However, when Odetta got word of her prize by mail during the third week of January 1960, a plain envelope arriving at her Near North Side apartment, she was affronted. “I was disappointed in the casual way I received the accolade,” she told a reporter. “I had always dreamed of myself clad in a flowing gown, with a large orchestra playing suitable music as I walked down a long aisle for the presentation.”⁴

As the new decade began, a slew of articles in newspapers and magazines touted the arrival of folk music as a genuine phenomenon. “Folk music is replacing rock and roll as the teenager’s way of ‘expressing himself,’” the New York Herald Tribune said. Newsweek noted that “it is not unusual to see artists like the Weavers, Theo Bikel, Pete Seeger, and Odetta fill halls with capacities of from 1,000 to 4,000.”⁵

But Odetta’s music wasn’t getting played on the radio, something that would continue to plague her career. In March, Robert Shelton of the New York Times bemoaned the fact that while Belafonte and the Kingston Trio were getting plenty of the heavy rotation airplay that leads to hit records, Odetta was not. “Why is it that the most glorious new voice in American folk music is heard so rarely on the air? Odetta Felious Gordon, who calls herself Odetta, has a voice so large and a physical presence so commanding that recordings have yet to do her complete justice.” One wonders why Grossman wasn’t doing a better job promoting her to radio stations, though to be fair, the radio business at the time was highly corrupt and many well-deserving artists didn’t get an honest shake. A House subcommittee at that very moment was conducting hearings on the under-the-table bribery of disc jockeys by big record companies in exchange for airplay, a practice known as payola. Shelton, meanwhile, observed that Odetta was “moving toward the heights of Negro song that have been scaled by Bessie Smith, Marian Anderson and Mahalia Jackson. Shouldn’t the disc jockeys make a little time for her on their programs?”⁶

She fared better on television that year. On March 10, she appeared on NBC’s The Ford Show starring Tennessee Ernie Ford. The title of the popular Thursday night variety program was a cute play on words since Ford Motor Company was the sponsor. (On Sunday nights, Chevrolet had to settle for The Dinah Shore Chevy Show.) Odetta’s appearance on The Ford Show was remarkable, though it’s been overlooked in the annals of television. Just five weeks earlier, four students at North Carolina A&T, an all-black college, had staged a sit-in at a segregated lunch counter near the Greensboro campus, and their brave act of passive resistance not only had generated newspaper headlines and stories on the evening news but had also inspired sit-ins across the South in places like Nashville, Richmond, Atlanta, and Tallahassee. “It’s important to remember that on February 1st of 1960, for all intents and purposes the civil rights movement began in Greensboro, North Carolina, when four men walked into the Woolworth’s lunch counter and sat down,” recalled Ernie Ford’s son, Jeffrey Buckner “Buck” Ford. “And the next week there were more and the next week there were more and the next week there were more. This was a little more than one month away from Odetta guesting on The Ford Show.”⁷

Ernie Ford and his wife, Betty, were big fans of Odetta’s, having seen her perform in California shortly after the sit-ins began; Betty, more politically aware than her husband, had helped him understand the importance of having Odetta on his show at that singular moment. But when the show’s producer, Cliffie Stone, and director, Bud Yorkin, presented the idea with the sit-ins gathering steam, it didn’t sit well with the sponsor. Ernie Ford had shot to stardom when his cover of Merle Travis’s “Sixteen Tons” topped the Billboard charts, but as a folksy Southerner who spoke in a countrified twang, Ford had crossover appeal. His show was as popular in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and Lake Charles, Louisiana—the same kinds of markets that had complained about the racial content on Harry Belafonte’s show—as it was in New York and Chicago.

“There was major objection, major resistance,” Buck Ford said. “Ford Motor Company was at first unsure. It didn’t take long, though, for somebody to convince them and to realize that this individual man is selling more freaking cars per week than your sales people that are working on the floor. And this [appearance] is happening, and this is a beautiful singer with a gorgeous voice.”⁸

Ford didn’t simply have Odetta on his show. As a white Southerner, he used her appearance to make an unambiguous statement to the nation about the civil rights struggle. He introduced her by telling his audience in his usual aww-shucks manner that her music was a welcome respite from the other sounds he’d been hearing on records (presumably rock ’n’ roll), the “squealin’ and skwawkin’ and gruntin’ and jumpin’ up and down—it sounds like a lovesick hog in an empty pen.”⁹

Odetta came on and sang with her eyes closed, as usual, beginning with the chain gang song “Another Man Done Gone,” which must have reverberated quite differently for Mississippi viewers than for those in New York. Then, grabbing her guitar, she sang “Mule Skinner Blues,” a tune well known to Southern audiences in versions by Jimmie Rodgers and Bill Monroe. When she finished, Ford joined her center stage, and that’s when he took a stand. He grabbed Odetta by the hand, led her forward, held their clenched fingers aloft, and shook them in a display of solidarity as Odetta beamed, eyes twinkling. Then they sang two duets, on a medley of Woody Guthrie’s “Pastures of Plenty” and Merle Travis’s “Nine Pound Hammer” and on “I Was Born About 10,000 Years Ago,” a bragging song Odetta and Larry Mohr had performed together back in her Tin Angel days. The interracial interplay was seen by millions.

Odetta returned later for the program’s final segment, duetting with Ford on the hymn “What a Friend We Have in Jesus,” backed by Ford’s all-white choir. By the time the show ended and Ford gave his usual sendoff—“Good night and bless your little pea-pickin’ hearts”—the pair had struck another blow on television for racial harmony.

Ford’s stance was courageous, given that physical contact between blacks and whites on TV was just about as taboo as it had been a decade earlier when Sammy Davis Jr. had appeared on Eddie Cantor’s Colgate Comedy Hour, and Cantor had wiped his guest’s perspiring face with a handkerchief, which had led them both to receive a torrent of threatening hate mail. (And it would remain taboo eight years later when Petula Clark touched Harry Belafonte’s arm on a prime-time special and caused a ruckus.)

Ford had featured the black singer and actress Ethel Waters on his show twice, when he’d also sung duets with her and grabbed her hand, but it had a much different feel. The gray-haired Waters had starred in a TV show portraying a mammy character named Beulah, so viewers would have associated her with the safety of the old social order, and her appearances had come before the civil rights movement had taken center stage. Odetta, on the other hand, was a young black woman with an Afro who sang about prisoners and chain gangs, as African Americans squared off with racist sheriff’s departments over segregation.

As expected, Odetta’s guest spot generated hate mail, but it died down pretty quickly, and, Buck Ford said, it made little difference to his father. He loved Odetta’s music. “It was water off his back that somebody would tell him, ‘You can’t do this cuz, my God, Ford, she’s a nigger!’ It was about the music for him and he simply had never heard anything like her.”¹⁰

The on-air chemistry between Ford and Odetta was genuine. After the live taping, Ernie and Betty Ford and Odetta retreated to the Fords’ Hollywood home to watch the West Coast feed of the program. Once again, critics were quick to praise her performance. One noted that she “seems to have all the woes of all the downtrodden synthesized in her remarkable voice.”¹¹

Later that month, Vanguard released what would be the most overtly political album of Odetta’s career, Ballad for Americans. The title number, which occupied all of side one, was a cantata composed by John La Touche and Earl Robinson and first made famous by Paul Robeson. It told the story of the nation from the Revolution through the Civil War, focusing on the ideals of freedom and liberty and what they meant for ordinary Americans—especially immigrants, women, and minorities. Robeson, taking the role of the singing narrator, first performed it on a CBS radio show in the fall of 1939 to huge acclaim, then recorded it for Victor Records and sang it in concerts around the US.

Debuting during the Great Depression and World War II, the piece melded the Popular Front emphasis on “the folk,” with the patriotic fervor of a nation that would soon be at war against fascism. It was an unabashed celebration of the American experiment, but depending on one’s political bent, it was also a none too subtle criticism that the United States hadn’t lived up to the ideals laid out by the Founding Fathers. It was so popular that during the 1940 presidential election, it was sung at both the Republican Party’s and Communist Party’s national conventions.

The idea of reprising Robeson’s role must have enticed Odetta, who took it on at the suggestion of the Solomon brothers at Vanguard, according to Robert De Cormier, the musical director on the album. De Cormier directed the huge Symphony of the Air and an accompanying chorus, but Odetta was so nervous that she nearly scuttled the project. “I was frightened,” she later recalled. “I’d sung with, at most, a string ensemble, but as those symphony men, about 100 of them, came into the studio with their instrument cases and took their places so solemnly and seriously, I thought I could never get up in front of them and sing. And as a matter of fact, I didn’t.”¹² When De Cormier saw Odetta shaking, he put a screen between her and the musicians so she couldn’t see the orchestra, and she was able to continue.

The episode perfectly captured one of the chief contradictions in Odetta’s story. Her self-doubt could be debilitating, but once she set her mind on performing, she projected incredible power and toughness. When she sang in the Ballad’s closing stanzas, “Our country’s strong, our country’s young and our bravest songs are still unsung, from her plains and mountains we have sprung to keep our faith with those who went before,” no one listening could fail to hear this proud young black woman calling on Americans to uphold the promise of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.”

On side two, she offered eight folk songs mostly in keeping with the same theme, including Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land,” a tune she would often tell concert audiences should be America’s national anthem. However, she altered Guthrie’s most famous line, singing “this land belongs to you and me” instead of “this land was made for you and me.” It was a subtle change, but one she insisted on. “She thought it was arrogant to say this land was made for you and me,” Selma Thaler recalled.¹³

The album was generally very well received, but the Washington Post’s jazz critic derided the record for its “liberal” message. The Ballad, however, did register with young idealistic folk fans. “During the early days of the civil rights movement, my friends and I used to sing it out loud on buses traveling to demonstrations,” recalled Leda Schubert, who was a fifteen-year-old living in Bethesda, Maryland, when she bought the record, shortly after it came out. She learned every word, she said, but didn’t tell her parents, who’d owned the Robeson version, but had gotten rid of it during the witch hunts.¹⁴

On May 2, their rift behind them, Odetta, Harry Belafonte, and Miriam Makeba, who had declined to sign with Albert Grossman, teamed up for a benefit concert at Carnegie Hall. The show, which also included the Chad Mitchell Trio, raised money for the Wiltwyck School for Boys in Esopus, New York, a residential school for children with emotional and behavioral problems—“juvenile delinquents,” in the dismissive parlance of the day—most of them from black and Hispanic families. It was a favorite charity of Eleanor Roosevelt, and she probably enlisted Belafonte’s aid for the school.

RCA recorded the concert and released it as Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall. Odetta and Belafonte’s performance of “Hole in the Bucket” was released as a single abroad and provided Odetta with a great deal of exposure around the world. It wasn’t released in the US, probably because Odetta remained under contract to Vanguard—a shame since it wound up the most popular single of her career. RCA producer Bob Bollard, who worked closely with Belafonte, soon began trying to woo Odetta away from Vanguard.

The Carnegie Hall concert served as a dress rehearsal for Odetta’s solo debut at Carnegie Hall just six days later. That performance benefited the Church of the Master in Harlem at 122nd Street, an integrated Presbyterian congregation that ran a community center, mental health clinic, and two children’s camps. Odetta would perform hundreds of benefits over the years for causes that she believed in. Like her Town Hall show, this one proved, as if any more proof were needed, that she had ascended to the heights of folk music.

The civil rights movement, which had struggled since the Montgomery bus boycott almost five years earlier to gain traction in the American psyche, had by then taken a dramatic turn. With the sit-ins continuing, Martin Luther King Jr. had met with students to strategize, leading to the creation of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which would add youthful energy and daring to the movement and play a major role in the segregation and voting rights battles to come. King had resigned his pastorship at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, to focus his energies full-time on the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the fight for civil rights.

But Southern leaders weren’t about to give up Jim Crow without a fight. In Alabama, King had been indicted on what his supporters viewed as a trumped-up charge of perjuring himself on his state income tax, and a group calling itself the Committee to Defend Martin Luther King and the Struggle for Freedom in the South, chaired by A. Philip Randolph, had met at Belafonte’s apartment to come up with a plan to raise money and awareness.

The group took out a full-page ad in the New York Times entitled “Heed Their Rising Voices”—also the headline of a recent Times editorial—denouncing violence and intimidation against civil rights leaders and students engaged in sit-ins and asking for donations to the cause and to King’s defense. Noting that students had faced tear gas and fire hoses in Orangeburg, South Carolina; school expulsion in Montgomery, Alabama; and other abuses in a host of other Southern cities, the ad called on the nation to get off the sidelines and act. “Decent-minded Americans cannot help but applaud the creative daring of the students and the quiet heroism of Dr. King,” the ad said. “But this is one of those moments in the stormy history of Freedom when men and women of good will must do more than applaud the rising-to-glory of others.”¹⁵

On May 17, the sixth anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the committee organized two rallies and a fund-raising concert in New York with a number of stars on hand, including Odetta, Maya Angelou, Ossie Davis, Ruby Dee, and Sidney Poitier. The day began with about 400 people, including 150 students, taking a Circle Line boat from South Ferry to Liberty Island and the base of the Statue of Liberty. “This ceremony paying tribute to the Statue of Liberty is our way of re-affirming our faith in our country,” Belafonte told the throng.¹⁶

After Belafonte sang “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a Catholic priest, a protestant minister, and a rabbi all offered prayers. A student in a neat brown suit named Bernard Lee, who had been expelled from Alabama State College for leading a sit-in at a snack bar in the Montgomery courthouse, read a proclamation as others laid bouquets and wreaths before Lady Liberty, a message of both hope and mourning for freedoms unrealized. “The colored people are neither bitter nor discouraged,” Lee said. “We have faith in ourselves and a positive estimate for achieving our full status as American citizens under the republic.”¹⁷ A reporter for the New Yorker described what came next:

Then the students filed up the steps to the ramp of the Statue of Liberty while Odetta—a large, solid black woman with close-cropped hair, as imposing and monumental herself as a statue—sang, “Oh, Freedom,” a folk song that the Negro students from the South have been singing during their demonstrations. She stood with her eyes closed, singing very softly.¹⁸

On the boat back to Manhattan, the magazine noted, “the students—white and colored, from North and South—gathered in a group and sang the same song: ‘I’m on my way/And I won’t turn back.’”¹⁹ Actually, what they were singing was the third portion of Odetta’s “Freedom Trilogy,” the rousing finale which served notice that a people still in fetters wouldn’t stop until they were free.

A freedom rally sponsored by several labor groups, including the AFL-CIO, followed at noon and attracted thousands in the city’s Garment District. Then a three-hour benefit performance was held that night by a mix of Hollywood and music stars, including Dorothy Dandridge, Alan King, Abbey Lincoln, Sidney Poitier, Sarah Vaughan, and Odetta at the Harlem 369th Regiment Armory, home of the segregated Harlem Hellfighters during World War I. Dandridge, one the show’s emcees, introduced Odetta to the more than fifteen thousand in the crowd “as the number one female folk singer in the U.S.,” one of the city’s black papers, the New Amsterdam News, reported. “She proved it with selections that had the audience alternately in rapt silence and at other times clapping in spontaneous rhythm.”²⁰

The show raised ten thousand dollars for the defense of King, who had been scheduled to attend but instead had to appear in court in Montgomery. (In one of the few hopeful signs out of the South, an all-white jury would shockingly acquit him of his perjury charge later that month.) Just as importantly, the day’s events had shown civil rights leaders the power of celebrity in bringing attention to their cause. Both the New York Times and Hearst newsreels had covered some of the events, and King and Belafonte absorbed the lesson.

Around the same time, with songs of freedom and the stirring of the civil rights movement ringing in her ears, Odetta flew to Los Angeles to audition for Sanctuary. A costume designer met her plane at LAX and took her directly to Western Costume on Melrose Avenue for a fitting. It was a taste of things to come. If Odetta wanted a movie career, she would have to conform to Hollywood’s vision of the black experience, something she’d decried as a child and, she would find out, hadn’t changed much in two decades. “When I got there,” she recalled, “we went into this room . . . and this man started putting all these dumpy clothes on me. Then I thought ’Detta it’s just a part. Then one time, he put a sweater on me and he reached up and tore the sleeve down. I said, ‘Now, you may make me raggedy, but you’re not going to make me dirty.’”²¹

Thusly adorned, she did her screen test for the film’s coproducers, Richard Zanuck and his movie mogul father, Darryl. It didn’t go well, she recalled. Perhaps nerves or shyness played a role or those old feelings of humiliation had resurfaced. But it didn’t matter. She got the part anyway. “You had this quality of transmitting the compassion you feel to the listener,” Darryl Zanuck told her, perhaps chomping on one of his ubiquitous cigars. She would be portraying Nancy Mannigoe, a black, drug-addicted servant convicted of killing the child of her white employer, Temple Drake, in a screen adaptation of a couple of Faulkner tales—Sanctuary and Requiem for a Nun—set in the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. The gossip columnist Hedda Hopper summed up the irony of it all: “Richard Zanuck has that lovely Odetta, Negro folk singer, playing a murderess in ‘Sanctuary.’”²²

In late July, Odetta moved into the Chateau Marmont, the gothic fortress of a hotel on Los Angeles’s Sunset Strip, to begin filming. From the start, the production was beset by tensions. Part of the behind-the-scenes drama arose from trying to satisfy studio censors with Faulkner’s pulp fiction tale of a Mississippi debutante’s kidnapping, descent into debauchery, and struggle to return to a more conventional life. Faulkner had written the novel Sanctuary for a quick paycheck during the Depression, and he produced, he said, “the most horrific tale” he could imagine, one involving rape, murder, prostitution, bootlegging, and voyeurism. A screen adaptation in the 1930s had been a catalyst for the infamous Motion Picture Production Code, and while the code by 1960 was seen to be on the wane, censors still held enormous sway over scripts and storyboards. “The simple truth was that under the then conditions . . . it was idiotic to have even considered making Sanctuary,” the film’s British director, Terry Richardson, recalled three decades later. “Now it might make a great movie, but at that time all that was vital had to be removed from the story.”²³

There was also reported turmoil involving the stars—the lusty Frenchman Yves Montand, Lee Remick, and Odetta—the kind that Hollywood gossip columnists loved to fuel. “They slammed the ‘Sanctuary’ set shut,” the Hollywood Reporter dished later in the summer. “Yves Montand discovered he’s playing third fiddle to Lee Remick & Odetta. Despite Montand’s demands, script stays.” Other reports said Odetta “spiraled from featured to fourth-star billing” and got an air-conditioned trailer like Remick’s.²⁴

The convoluted plot, involving composite characters, flashbacks, and other contrivances, is too complicated to summarize here, but Odetta’s Nancy wasn’t exactly the kind of role for which black actors and civil rights groups had long been campaigning. Blacks in Hollywood had been trying for decades to move beyond stereotypical roles as maids, butlers, and Stepin Fetchit–style dimwits. Sidney Poitier had probably managed this better than anyone, portraying a doctor, priest, and student in his 1950s films, although not without criticism that he was just the kind of conservative, self-contained black man that America could cotton to. The 1959 film Porgy and Bess had given blacks hope that a new era had begun in Hollywood. The black cast, led by Poitier, Sammy Davis Jr., and Pearl Bailey, had worked diligently behind the scenes to expunge racist dialogue, costuming, and characters. After its release, the Chicago Defender had pronounced the film “the Emancipation Proclamation of the Negro artist in quest of equality in Hollywood.”²⁵

But despite that hopeful assessment, good roles for African Americans remained the exception and not the rule in 1960. So if she wanted to break into film acting, Odetta had little choice but to work within the confines of the script. Her Nancy, a servant who had once been a drug addict, is condemned to die for murdering the baby son of Remick’s Temple Drake to save the young married woman—and the baby—from returning to a morally bankrupt life with a French Creole bootlegger named Candy Man, played by Montand. That Nancy considers the death of an innocent baby a necessary evil to help Temple is hard to swallow—although it’s straight out of Faulkner—but Odetta made the most of it. She managed to imbue Nancy with a quiet strength and nobility, and she winds up as the film’s moral center.

When the film debuted early the following year, there were signs even then that Odetta, who had devoted her career to educating audiences about the real lives of African Americans, wasn’t thrilled with the finished product. She asked 20th Century Fox to “tone down” the publicity about her, according to one report in the black press, saying, “For my first picture, I’d like my acting to speak for itself.” Movie stills issued by the studio showed her attired in various maid and servant costumes, and one can almost sense her discomfort with the whole premise; in one particular shot, however, in which she waits on guests at one of Candy Man’s swanky affairs, she manages an ironic half-smile. Many years later, she was more explicit in her criticism. “I would not do that film today,” she said. “In this film, this black woman kills a child and gives up her life in order to save somebody’s marriage. I could never do that again, never. My servant, she would die for me. Uh-huh.”²⁶

The critics mostly savaged Sanctuary. “The film dissolved into just another jugful of Hollywood’s standard Southern Discomfort,” Time said. “Zanuck’s attempt to clean up Faulkner for the family seems a bit like trying to smear the whole of Yoknapatawpha County with underarm deodorant.” But many singled out Odetta’s acting, some even predicting an Oscar nomination. “The only admirable performance is given, with mahogany strength and beauty, by a Negro actress and singer named Odetta,” the New Republic said. “Because of her impressive performance in the movie Sanctuary, folk singer Odetta is slated for more movie roles that will be exceedingly larger in scope,” the Chicago Defender reported, although it offered no evidence to back up the claim.²⁷

When she wasn’t filming, Odetta had seemed to enjoy being back in Los Angeles, this time living like a Hollywood celebrity. The Chateau Marmont was always a scene, and she’d also spent time at Johnson’s Bath House on Western Avenue, a spa that pampered black A-listers like Ray Charles, Dorothy Dandridge, and Willie Mays. She didn’t completely neglect her singing career, though. In early October, she did a week at the Ash Grove, supported by a little-known folk singer named Peter Yarrow, doing his first club date outside of Greenwich Village. Yarrow, who’d been an art student at the High School of Music and Art in New York, had fallen under Odetta’s spell and aimed to show her how smitten he was. “I made her a pair of earrings. I was in love with her heart, her soul. And they were big silver . . . and they looked so beautiful on her. And she tried them on and it started a friendship.”²⁸

By the time they met, they already shared a manager. Al Grossman had seen Yarrow perform that summer on a CBS television show called Folk Sound U.S.A., the first TV folk spectacular if you didn’t count Harry Belafonte’s show, and offered to take on Yarrow, who didn’t think he could do much better than having Odetta’s manager on his team. “He was managing her at the time that he asked me if I would like to have him manage me,” Yarrow said. “She was the queen. And we always called her the Queen of Folk Music.”²⁹ Grossman would soon hatch the idea to build a hip trio around Yarrow, one that could capture the nation’s attention—and rack up sales—like the Kingston Trio and the Weavers.

While Odetta and Yarrow were sharing a bill at the Ash Grove, Joan Baez’s first album debuted on Vanguard—the label of Odetta and the Weavers—though Baez could have gone with a more commercial outfit like Columbia. Joan Baez would rise to number twenty on the Billboard charts, the first of her many hit records. “Manny and his brother were on the ball, but the shipping department wasn’t quite together,” Odetta recalled of the Solomon brothers who ran Vanguard, comparing her own records to Baez’s. “Once she recorded for Vanguard, there was a backlog already before the record was out. They had to get off their duffs and get them out. The thing was that along with the gorgeous voice, that she has that young pure looking white girl look, so of course, the whole industry and the rest of the country would go along with that. But it’s not like they put their [praise] into something mediocre, she was splendid.”³⁰

Grossman had already made an aggressively seductive pitch to manage Baez—famously telling her “you can have anything you want, you can have anybody you want”³¹—but he lost that particular sweepstakes to the low-key but earnest Boston concert promoter Manny Greenhill, who fitted better with Baez’s pacifist-humanist political agenda and aversion to big business.

Seeing his future in the nexus of coffeehouses and record companies in New York, Grossman had sold his stake in the Gate of Horn and decamped there, setting up an office at George Wein’s Central Park West apartment while Odetta was busy in Los Angeles for several months. It’s hard not to see the significance in the move, given that Odetta had chosen Chicago as her base after Grossman had become her manager.

But Danny Gordon and Odetta had plans of their own. In October, they announced they’d formed Dandetta Productions with the goal of making movies and managing singers. According to a letter from her attorney, they were dividing stock in the company equally between them, although Odetta surely put up most of the money. Danny was president, and a report in Variety named Grossman as a vice president, but it’s not clear whether he really had a formal position in the company.

Although some of the details remain opaque, what’s certain is that despite vowing not to mix business with pleasure, Odetta and Danny had decided to do just that. While Grossman nominally remained Odetta’s manager, Danny, who had little experience in the business, took on a greater role in guiding her career.

He was probably responsible for floating items with gossip columnists that Dandetta would soon film The Bessie Smith Story, with Odetta playing the lead. It makes sense that, having soured on her first Hollywood experience, Odetta would want to assume creative control over her future films. Disgusted with his own film choices, Harry Belafonte had recently formed Harbel Productions for the same reason. “I was tired of fighting Hollywood,” he said.³² But Belafonte, who had more clout in the industry than Odetta, found that going it alone was far from easy, and his film career would soon stall.

Portraying Bessie Smith, who’s generally considered the greatest blues singer of all time, would certainly give Odetta a meatier role than she was likely to get then from a Hollywood producer. There’s no evidence, however, that Danny did much more than float the idea of a Bessie Smith film and announce that a script was in the works, as if that would bring, out of the woodwork, financial backers and a studio green light. Ash Grove owner Ed Pearl met Danny during this time and, like many of Odetta’s friends, came away uneasy. “I did have a suspicion that he was taking her for money, that he was exploiting her for money . . . because he kind of talked like a city slicker,” Pearl said.³³

But the movie proposal marked a career-long fascination—obsession may be a better word—for Odetta with Bessie Smith. Reviewers had been comparing her to the prewar blues queen since she first walked on stage at the Tin Angel. But, more than that, there was something about Smith and other classic blues singers like Ma Rainey, their unrestrained sexuality and gutbucket lifestyles, that seemed to represent some kind of wish fulfillment on the part of the refined and proper Odetta. “I want to learn the freedom that Ma Rainey had in singing the blues,” she told a reporter some years later, but she could just as easily have been talking about Bessie.³⁴

While she waited in vain for the Bessie Smith movie to get made, her singing career continued to prosper—and intersect with the unfolding civil rights crusade. In November, when Ruby Bridges and three other little black girls in New Orleans attempted to integrate whites-only elementary schools six years after Brown v. Board of Education, they were met with hostile crowds that taunted and threatened them. US marshals were called in to escort the girls inside. As the events played out in front of the nation’s eyes, Odetta appeared on Jazz with Father O’Connor, a TV show on WGBH in Boston hosted by Father Norman O’Connor, a Catholic chaplain at Boston University nicknamed “the jazz priest.”

O’Connor asked Odetta to sing a song that could be dedicated to the girls riding in US marshals’ cars to school. “The song was ‘He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,’” O’Connor recalled. “Midway, tears started to fall down the brown face of Odetta, and for a minute I thought the program, which had 10 minutes to go, was quickly coming to an end.” Odetta continued, he said, “but the tears kept falling.” And when it was over, viewers phoned the station to find out what was going on. “Nothing more than a warm, intense woman,” O’Connor told them, “feeling strongly about some children on their way to school.”³⁵

By Christmas, Vanguard released Odetta Sings Christmas Spirituals, which she’d recorded in New York in July before heading to the West Coast. Once again, she used her musical platform to promote black self-respect. It started with the cover, which Odetta insisted depict an image of a black Madonna and child. The idea of blacks reinterpreting the Bible to lift racial pride had gained currency in the black American Methodist Episcopal church before the turn of the twentieth century, when Bishop Henry McNeal Turner had declared, “We have as much right biblically and otherwise to believe that God is a Negro, as you . . . white people have to believe that god is a fine looking, symmetrical and ornamented white man.”³⁶ By the 1920s, Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association were leading a charge to convince blacks to tear pictures of white Madonnas and white Jesuses off the walls of their homes and replace them with Negro versions, and many blacks did.

For Odetta, who’d made racial pride of appearance so important to her image, the idea was perfectly in keeping with her goals. Recalling her mind-set in general for the LP, she said: “When we did the Christmas Spirituals record, it was time to make the point that there are things outside of what we’ve been told and taught.”³⁷ Finding a black Madonna proved difficult however. Maynard Solomon spent four hours at the New York Public Library looking for options to no avail. After considering and rejecting several Madonnas, they appear to have decided to create their own. Using a photo of the gothic sculpture Nostre Damme de Grasse from a French art museum, they reproduced the image with a bronze tint in black and white, obscuring the baby Jesus’s ruddy cheeks and giving him a decidedly African cast.

Odetta carefully chose thirteen Negro spirituals, once again with an eye toward messages that would resonate amid the conflict unfolding in the South. The song “Rise Up Shepherd and Follow” was originally a plantation song sung by slaves, who well knew, even if their masters didn’t, the meaning of “there’s a star in the East on Christmas morn; rise up shepherd and follow.” When Odetta sang “If Anybody Asks You,” the meaning was clear: “If anybody asks you who you are, you tell them you’re the child of God.” She also re-recorded “Poor Little Jesus,” once again inserting the line about segregated hotel rooms.

Odetta concluded a whirlwind year by appearing Christmas night on the Ed Sullivan Show. Sullivan was known in the industry for supporting black acts, and he made no exception for Odetta. Joining her on stage to introduce her, he grasped her hands in his and held them tightly, saying, “You know her from her albums. This is Odetta and she’s going to sing two reverent Christmas songs.” She performed “Shout for Joy” with only her hand clap, and Bill Lee’s bass from offstage, as accompaniment. Then she grabbed “Baby,” her acoustic guitar, pulled the strap over her head, and sang “Poor Little Jesus,” including her lamentation that Jesus’s family “couldn’t find no hotel room,” as the camera zoomed in on her face deep in concentration. That subtle but unmistakable comment about black civil rights was heard in prime time, in homes all over America.

It’s not known whether her appearance led to any repercussions from Southern affiliates. In any event, as the civil rights movement gained momentum, images on television continued to be crucial in raising the consciousness of a nation contemplating the role of African Americans in society. Documenting segregation and the fight to end it was of course one vital thread in advancing the cause of civil rights, and the other was the mainstreaming of white acceptance of black culture and identity. In that role, Odetta continued to be a pioneer.