CHAPTER EIGHT

ENTER BOB DYLAN

In January of 1961, nineteen-year-old Bob Dylan arrived in New York City from Minnesota in the back seat of a Chevy Impala to fulfill his destiny as the greatest musical poet of his generation. He went to meet his idol, Woody Guthrie, by then suffering mightily from Huntington’s disease and languishing at Greystone Hospital in New Jersey. If Guthrie was Dylan’s present obsession, though, it was Odetta who had set him on his path.

Shortly before matriculating at the University of Minnesota, Dylan had unslicked his pompadour and traded in his rock ’n’ roll electric guitar for an acoustic after hearing Odetta’s Ballads and Blues album in a record store in Hibbing. “The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta,” he recalled. “I heard a record of hers in a record store, back when you could listen to records right there in the store. . . . Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson.”¹ Dylan expanded on that first encounter in another interview:

What I was looking for were folk music records and the first one I saw was Odetta on the Tradition label. I went into the listening booth to hear it. Odetta was great. I had never heard of her until then. She was a deep singer, powerful strumming and a hammering-on style of playing. I learned almost every song off the record, right then and there, even borrowing the hammering-on style.²

As one of his biographers told it, he appeared completely changed by the experience, according to one of his old friends, John Bucklen: “Bob had become an apostle of a woman named Odetta. . . . For hours on end he rhapsodized about her earthy style, dropping her mysterious name as if she were an intimate acquaintance. Bucklen listened to Bobby strum through tunes like ‘Mule Skinner,’ ‘Jack O’ Diamonds,’ ‘Water Boy,’ and ‘’Buked and Scorned,’ equally fascinated by their beautiful melodies and ‘the intellect of the songs.’”³

After building up a repertoire by listening to Odetta, Harry Belafonte, and Guthrie, Dylan sought Odetta’s approval for his stillripening artistry, by now a rite of passage for young folk singers. At some point, Dylan, before leaving Minnesota, had given a tape to his friend the blues singer John Koerner to pass on to Odetta at the Gate of Horn. Then, when Odetta was in Minneapolis, friends brought Dylan to sing for Odetta, either at a local café called the 10 O’Clock Scholar or at an after-concert get-together at a Minneapolis apartment, depending on who is telling the story. Most of Dylan’s biographers put this meeting sometime in 1960, but it probably happened in May of 1961 when Odetta gave a concert at St. Paul Auditorium, her first appearance in the Twin Cities, at the same time Dylan was back home from New York visiting friends. He performed for Odetta, and she told him he had a chance to make it in folk music. “It was a big deal at the time,” recalled Jahanara Romney, Dylan’s then-girlfriend, whose given name was Bonnie Jean Boettcher (aka the actress Bonnie Beecher). “He was our friend, and Odetta was somebody we worshipped and adored from afar.”⁴

Dylan would waste little time in 1961 making a name for himself in New York, and by the end of the year, he had a Columbia record deal and the attentions of the man who would soon become his manager: Albert Grossman. Dylan’s fame outside Greenwich Village built slowly. In the meantime, Odetta remained folk music’s queen, and with the release of Sanctuary in February 1961, her star continued to rise.

Her concerts became events. When she appeared again at Town Hall in New York in March, to provide what Times critic Robert Shelton called “the intense and heroic music-making that listeners have come to expect from Odetta,” the program noted that her movie and TV work “have brought her to the largest audiences she has enjoyed. She has become one of the major concert attractions in the country, appearing in colleges, concert halls and summer music festivals throughout the United States and Canada.”⁵

If the hype almost seemed hard to believe sometimes, those who attended some of her big concert hall shows in New York around then recall an almost rapturous embrace by Odetta’s largely white audiences, put under a spell by her ability to embrace the characters she was singing about—and by the civil rights undercurrent to her act. Selma Thaler’s daughter, Carrie Thaler, who was just a young child then, remained in disbelief when recalling what she had seen more than forty years ago. It wasn’t just Odetta’s artistic brilliance, but the metamorphosis she underwent to become the magnetic Odetta on stage that was hard to grasp:

You know, the folk song would be about a broken-hearted lover and you could just see the people, whether they’d be Irish or from the islands or whatever, she just became that person, with dialect, body language and just something spiritual that happened. And there was an amazing transformation that would happen over the course of an Odetta concert and the audience just became transfixed and in love. . . . And then we’d go backstage and there would be ’Detta and I thought, How could this be the same person? I never could figure it out.⁶

The bluesman Guy Davis, son of Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, also retained vivid memories of the spectacle at Odetta’s big shows. “I remember her short Afro, I remember her pounding on the side of the guitar,” Davis said. “I mostly remember after the event, when there were a lot of lights. We were in a really open area and a lot of people were around Odetta, and trying to be next to her, be near her and talk to her. . . . I just remember the crush of people trying to see her.”⁷

Having grown up feeling marginalized, Odetta could perhaps be forgiven if she started putting on a few airs to befit “the great folk singer” and costar of Sanctuary. Some of Odetta’s friends noticed the change. “As she grew more famous,” Jo Mapes recalled, “she would become very noble and very serious and sometimes she would walk in or meet some new people I’d introduce her to, who would be awed by her, so she would be as awesome as possible.”⁸ Mapes, who by then had become a folk singer with a soprano that some compared with Joan Baez’s, decided to use humor to try to bring Odetta back down to earth. “I used to call her Ophelia, which irked her at times. . . . I started teasing her once when she began to believe the grandness that was being spoken about her.” Other times Mapes would change the words to one of Odetta’s most solemn tunes, the traditional lullaby “Hush Little Baby”:

Hush little baby don’t say a word,

Papa’s gonna buy you a mockingbird

And if that mockingbird don’t sing,

Papa’s gonna buy you a diamond ring

The third stanza went: “And if that diamond ring turns brass, Papa’s gonna buy you a looking glass,” but Mapes would jump in and ruin it. “I would zap her. . . . She would stop and sort of tense herself for what she was afraid was coming and that was the line I was gonna sing: ‘Mama’s gonna shove it up the jeweler’s ass.’”

As much as a part of her wanted fame, Odetta struggled with the demands and media glare that came with it. Vivienne Muhling, then a concert promoter in Canada, had twice booked Odetta to sing at Eaton Auditorium in Toronto, and the two had been friendly. But things changed when Odetta arrived for a third concert at Eaton in the spring of 1961. “It was just after she made a film, which got her feeling that she was on the way to international [acclaim],” Muhling said. “And she came with an assistant, a maid or something the third time. And she really had lost her way as a human being.” 20th Century Fox had arranged with Muhling to host a party to call attention to both the film and concert, and Odetta flat out wouldn’t cooperate. “She got on her high horse and refused to go. She said no she was just going to do her concert, forgetting that she normally did publicity and media and all that, you know. . . . And it was quite unpleasant.” Odetta may have bristled at the idea of promoting a film she secretly loathed. A year later, she apologized to Muhling, and they resumed their friendship.⁹

In May, on their second anniversary, Odetta and Danny finally took a proper honeymoon, in Mexico, where, to Odetta’s displeasure, he put bullfights on their itinerary.

When Odetta landed back in Chicago, a script was waiting for her in the mail for the popular TV western Have Gun—Will Travel. As America moved further from its rural roots and embraced an urban and suburban lifestyle in the 1950s and early 1960s, westerns dominated the TV dial. It might seem like a contradiction, but it made perfect sense. The rough-hewn pioneer spirit of the younger nation had given way to a dreary conformity, with Madison Avenue holding sway over how people dressed, the cars they coveted, and the cigarette brands they craved. The family and company man, like the besuited Jim Anderson on Father Knows Best, became the model of 1950s manhood, and westerns, in addition to being very entertaining, offered a counterweight. Men needed an escape valve and an outlet for their repressed machismo, and brave, individualistic heroes like The Rifleman’s Lucas McCain and Gunsmoke’s Matt Dillon (one of the supposed inspirations for Bobby Zimmerman’s nom de guerre, Bob Dillon, which he later tweaked to Dylan) drew legions of fans.¹⁰

It didn’t hurt the genre that the US was locked in a bitter Cold War against the Soviets. Westerns presented an idealistic vision of America as a land where hard work, individualism, and integrity won the day and where good prevailed over evil because of the courage, strength, and unbending morality of rugged American men. Since westerns were set in a mythical nineteenth-century past, even a bit of racial tolerance or empathy was thrown in—occasionally. There were plenty of screaming, whooping, more or less cardboard Indian savages, but also a few Indian characters who elicited genuine sympathy because of ill treatment at the hands of white settlers. The same was true for Mexicans and Chinese, two other minorities who had significant roles in the real American West. Focusing on these ethnic groups in the setting of America’s frontier history allowed shows to tackle the issue of racial intolerance without offending Southern stations, which would often refuse to run shows that broached the topic more directly.

Blacks, of course, played a prominent part in the saga of the West, but on TV they appeared only now and then in the saloons, corrals, trading posts, and one-horse towns where the stories were set. Black roles on prime-time television dramas overall were still very limited, a fact that black actors and the black press often bemoaned. The dismal reality in Hollywood had the comedian-activist Dick Gregory quipping before a congressional committee the following year that “the only show that hires Negroes regularly is Saturday night boxing.”¹¹

Of all the westerns, CBS’s Have Gun—Will Travel took the most activist approach when it came to the treatment of minorities, a fact owing in large part to its star and guiding light, Richard Boone. The Los Angeles–born Boone, a seventh-generation nephew of Daniel Boone, had been a boxing champion at Stanford University and studied the Method at the Actor’s Studio. Not handsome in the Hollywood sense, Boone made sure his character Paladin—named for the legendary chivalrous knights of Charlemagne, the Holy Roman emperor—was no typical western hero but a chess-playing, Shakespeare-spouting philosopher-gunslinger-for-hire with a soft spot for people battling powers larger than themselves. The laconic Paladin would rather be reading The Brothers Karamazov or brushing up on his Heraclitus than quick-drawing his Colt revolver but did so when a matter of honor or moral rectitude was at stake.

Boone favored New York stage actors with Method training, so he was going out of his comfort zone to cast Odetta, who had never taken acting lessons but had a way of inhabiting her characters in the same way that she did when singing about a convict or slave. Boone saw Odetta’s guest spot—and television in general—as a means of advancing a civil rights agenda, his son Peter Boone recalled. His father had taken the family to see Odetta perform at the Ash Grove and was a “huge” fan, Boone said. “It was not an accident that she was on the show, I can assure you.”¹²

Odetta flew to Bend, Oregon, in late July to film on location for an episode entitled “The Hanging of Aaron Gibbs,” with Richard Boone directing. In the episode, Odetta portrays Sarah Gibbs, a woman whose husband is hanged at a mining settlement along with two other men after they try to steal the miners’ payroll. As part of their getaway plan, the men had dynamited a mineshaft, which unintendedly had caused the mine to cave in, trapping and killing the miners inside. Sarah’s attempts to bid farewell to her doomed husband and to recover his body after he’s put to death are blocked by some relatives of the victims who are out for vengeance.

The filming took place in the midst of the Freedom Rides that spring and summer, when black and white activists rode interstate buses down South to challenge local segregation laws—and were met with mob violence and bombings—and there are more than subtle reminders of the civil rights struggle in the script. Sarah, an uneducated, dignified woman, tries to explain her husband’s actions to Paladin as a by-product of their lack of economic opportunity and mourning for their young son, who had recently taken sick and died: “A man runs from trouble and finds trouble waitin’ around the corner for him. It’s hard for a man to go to field workin’ after he’s known better. He used to drag home at nights with his hands cracked open with blood.”¹³ At the mining camp, Paladin lays his hand on Sarah’s shoulder, where it lingers just long enough to show genuine empathy and concern—an act he repeats once more later in the episode.

Viewers find out that Aaron and his accomplices did indeed blow up the shaft, though he maintains it was a terrible accident. After Paladin’s prodding, the grizzled marshal of the settlement allows Sarah and Aaron to share a moment and a surprisingly tender kiss.

When Sarah asks to give her husband a Christian burial, one of the victims’ relatives stands angrily in her path, saying, “Maybe you can find some way to get my brother out of that pit and bury him Christian.” But Paladin sternly confronts him with a line that would have raised an eyebrow for viewers paying attention to the nightly news: “Are you the only human being in this world who ever had to fight hardship?” Paladin’s defense of Aaron’s right to die with dignity and religion seems to convince some of the family members. A woman gives Sarah a black shroud for Aaron’s coffin, and some of the men help load it onto Sarah’s wagon before she and Paladin depart, Odetta singing softly as they ride off into the sunset.

There’s no doubt that the script, with its clear endorsement of black rights, caused some of the usual backstage turmoil, probably from the network, the sponsors, or both. “I remember there was some sort of controversy about that one, a certain amount of nervousness about it,” the show’s producer, Frank Pierson, recalled. “But when they heard that we were going with Odetta, it all quieted down.”¹⁴ The show would air that fall, and although Have Gun—Will Travel had fallen from third place in the Nielsen ratings to twenty-ninth, it attracted about 11 million viewers per week as the lead-in to CBS’s most popular show, Gunsmoke.

Richard Boone was said to have been so impressed with Odetta’s acting that he insisted she be included in another script to be filmed that fall, but for some reason, it didn’t happen. Still, he recalled her appearance fondly: “I’ll never forget Odetta’s powerful voice, low and soft, singing in the gathering twilight of the Deschutes river country in Oregon.”¹⁵

Despite the groundbreaking nature of much of the episode, one aspect conformed with Hollywood’s vision of black Americans: Odetta had to cover her natural hair with a straight-haired wig. Although many freed blacks in the Northern cities were, by the 1870s, straightening their hair, many rural blacks who worked as sharecroppers and the like had little time for such fussing and kept their kinky locks covered in head rags. Nevertheless, the irony of Odetta donning a wig was considered so unremarkable in 1960s America that it got no notice even in the black press, which trumpeted her starring role, as it did whenever black actors managed to land parts other than the usual stock characters as maids and butlers.

Black newspapers, however, became endlessly fascinated with Odetta’s hair. One article that year noted that Odetta, Miriam Makeba, and the jazz singer Abbey Lincoln “have cut their hair and leave it completely au naturel. Many fervent nationalists—bitter about racial assimilation—also leave their hair in a natural state. This growing group obviously does not need the services of professional hair straighteners.” One far-fetched early 1960s rumor had it that Odetta turned down “a lot of money” to endorse a hair straightener because she refused to pose for photos with pressed hair. “I wonder how she would look with pressed hair,” wondered a writer for the Afro-American in Baltimore, who apparently hadn’t seen her on Have Gun—Will Travel. “But with her talent, who needs hair straightener?”¹⁶

Black identity was shifting in America by 1961, in no small part because of the exploding African independence movement, which had seen seventeen nations gain freedom from their colonial rulers the previous year alone. In an influential 1961 essay in the New York Times Magazine, James Baldwin wrote that the freedom for millions of black Africans meant that American Negroes were no longer willing to wait for their own liberation. With the sit-in movement in mind, Baldwin summed up black disaffection with a simple equation: “At the rate things are going here, all of Africa will be free before we can get a lousy cup of coffee.” But a political awakening was only part of what was going on, he insisted. The rest was social. “The American Negro can no longer, nor will he ever again, be controlled by white America’s image of him. This has everything to do with the rise of Africa in world affairs.”¹⁷

Odetta was at the forefront of this movement. In addition to wearing her hair naturally—what some blacks began calling “an Odetta”—she had also taken to donning colorful African kaftans on stage. The kaftans partly reflected her wish to cover her large body, but they also signaled a telltale pride in her heritage and, together with her hair, gave her the look of an African princess. Andrea Benton Rushing, a black studies professor at Amherst College, recalled her shock at seeing Odetta for the first time in a New York concert in the early 1960s. “Helmeted in my chemically straightened hair because hot comb pressing was out of style, I saw Odetta at the Village Gate. . . . I was mesmerized by her stunning face framed in its short kinky halo. She had a regal poise and power that I had never seen in a ‘Negro’ . . . woman before.”¹⁸

The hair revolution, in particular, was destined to proceed slowly and not without some pushback, however. An article in the New Pittsburgh Courier in the fall of 1961 captured the commotion that ensued when a well-to-do black woman walked into a social function in Camden, New Jersey, sporting kinky hair. “One of South Jersey’s most dazzling personalities slipped through the entrance . . . in an exclusive gown creation, from one of Philly’s super exclusive gown shops, [but] the mass shock wave came when they took one look at her coiffure, which wasn’t a coiffure at all, but was in the first stage generally associated with drying out after a wash.” Of this “back to Africa” hairdo, as the Philadelphia beauticians began calling it, the paper said that Odetta “may have slightly set off an idea.”¹⁹

Given the societal shift going on and her bad experience in Hollywood, it’s easy to see why, at the height of her fame, Odetta, along with Danny, continued to pursue her career in the movies on her own terms. “Acting is her second love but she has strong feelings about the kinds of roles she wants to do and will play no stereotyped ‘Aunt Jemima’ parts,” one reporter wrote after interviewing her that year. Yet another item appeared in the gossip columns, this time from Dorothy Kilgallen, that “Odetta . . . will play the lead in The Bessie Smith Story, to be filmed in New York.” However, it seemed the movie was no closer to being a reality than it had been the previous year.²⁰

Odetta had begun to incorporate more straight blues into her concert act, in part to prepare for a Bessie Smith role but also to add variety to her repertoire. The first song she included was Smith’s “Special Delivery Blues,” which she’d set to a folk rhythm on her guitar. She also began singing “Weeping Willow Blues,” another of Smith’s classic blues shouts. And she began performing with a jazz outfit, the Fred Kaz Trio, to try to capture more of the original sound of Smith, who usually had piano and horn accompaniment. When Odetta debuted the new act as the second half of her show in late May and early June at One Sheridan Square in Greenwich Village—the club that had replaced Café Society—she earned a blistering review in the Village Voice. “With the addition of the Fred Kaz trio . . . the show fell apart. Odetta attempted old Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey blues numbers adapted to a modern style. Either she had not come to terms with this stylistic marriage, or the songs were beyond her present powers.”²¹

She fared better in July, returning to the Gate of Horn, and backed again by the Kaz trio for a segment of her shows. But at the Gate, she was among friends, even if the club was in a new location on North State Street and no longer owned by Al Grossman. When she presented the blues program, billed as “The Bessie Smith Story,” at the Monterey Jazz Festival in September, she again failed to hit her mark with her six-song set. Ralph Gleason of the San Francisco Chronicle, usually one of her biggest fans, noted that the very proper Odetta had a difficult time setting the mood for back-alley blues for the crowds that packed the Monterey County Fairgrounds to hear her. “Perhaps the formality of announcing her intention of singing songs from the repertoire of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey set the stage awkwardly,” Gleason observed. “Whatever the cause, her performance of this material did not come across as successfully” as he’d expected.²²

By November, Odetta and Danny prepared to move to Los Angeles. His aversion to the cold weather and their movie aspirations probably precipitated their departure to the West Coast. They rented a home in the Hollywood Hills, at 1339 Miller Drive. Lesley Greening Taufer visited Odetta there after running away from home in Chicago as an eighteen-year-old and hitchhiking to California a couple of years later. “She lived in the Hills in a wonderful place,” Taufer recalled. “It was the California Spanish style with a beautiful patio overlooking Hollywood and LA, and it was up high and it was really pretty.”²³

During her two-week visit, Danny wasn’t around. He might have been traveling as he tried to build an artist management business of his own. As for Odetta, she would soon spend more of her time in a rented sixth-floor apartment on New York’s Upper West Side, meaning she and Danny were rarely together. The address was 392 Central Park West, but the large red-brick high-rise building was on West 100th Street, almost at Columbus Avenue. She furnished it for $200 at an auction house, with the kind of decor one would expect for someone who was on the road a lot. “We had an apartment in New York because of [the] proximity of getting to [the] Northeast to beat the hotel racket and also when going in to New York to record,” Odetta explained. “We rented a house in Los Angeles. Danny moved to and stayed in Los Angeles, and I would stay in the apartment in New York and get to Los Angeles every once in a while.”²⁴

She described herself in one interview around that time as “a rambler, really.” As for a home life, “there’s so little time now that I have for it,” she told another reporter that year. “Dan and I have such a little time together.” Asked about children, she no longer sounded like she was prioritizing starting a family over advancing her career. “It wouldn’t be fair to them. They could not have a normal family life. Later on, perhaps we’ll adopt children.”²⁵

In December, a few weeks after the Los Angeles move, Odetta flew to Europe for her first performances outside North America. In Manchester, England, she filmed a segment on a show called Personal Appearance for Granada TV. In London, she stayed at the Waldorf Hotel and hung out with British jazz journalist Max Jones, who interviewed her for Melody Maker, Britain’s top music magazine, and took her for a visit to the city’s famed Troubadour nightclub. At the club, Scottish folk singer Rory McEwen, a devotee of Lead Belly and one of the prime movers of the British folk revival, convinced her to borrow a guitar and sing “Gallows Pole” and a couple of other tunes.

Although only a few of her records had been released in England, the BBC had shown Tonight with Belafonte and her performance had made a big impression, as had the single “Hole in the Bucket” with Belafonte, which had spent four weeks in the UK Top 40. Whereas back home, many reviewers felt obliged to comment on her weight, Jones began his Melody Maker piece: “It is not every day that such a beautiful folk singer as Odetta Felious Gordon comes to town.” Odetta would experience many of her overseas tours as soul-rejuvenating escapes from questions of race and the Hollywood ideals of beauty that followed her everywhere in the United States. To the people she would meet abroad, she recalled a few years later, “all of a sudden I was a beautiful woman, the feeling I hadn’t had here [at home]. Over there you don’t have to be a Lena Horne or a Marilyn Monroe. Here [in the States] that was a prerequisite and there was nothing else.”²⁶

From London, she flew to Rome and on to Africa to perform on the first night of a two-day arts festival in Lagos, Nigeria. The festival marked the opening of a new culture center in Lagos by the American Society of African Culture, which had been created by six black American writers and artists, including the novelist Richard Wright, as a cultural exchange between a decolonized Africa and the black diaspora in America. With Martin Luther King Jr. and other activists expressly linking African independence and American civil rights, black artists were eager to establish a connection and express solidarity with their ancestral homeland.

In addition to Odetta, the bill for the festival included jazz and blues heavyweights such as Lionel Hampton, Nina Simone, Randy Weston, and Brother John Sellers, as well as dancer and actor Geoffrey Holder. Before leaving on the trip, Holder had told the New York Times that he had “an extreme curiosity” about how Africans would view the black American arts.²⁷

The overall answer, on this first offering in newly independent Nigeria, was not favorably. “We put on a poor show and they didn’t let us get away with it,” Holder recalled. The failure was epitomized by a “long, ambitious, solemn Uhuru Suite (by Randy Weston) calling on Mother Africa to shake off her shackles and rise,” which played to “yawns, fish-eyes, and emptying bleachers.” “Uhuru and ‘Let My People Go’ may be strong stuff at Washington Square folk song uprisings,” Holder said, “but in Nigeria, 1962, freedom is something they have. Cheerleaders from Carnegie Hall they don’t need.” The Daily Times in Lagos reported that “appearances were too brief. The visitors showed little enthusiasm and were even sometimes quite stiff, at other times the painful conclusion was that they were condescending.”²⁸

Odetta was singled out as a big exception. Performing on the first night before five thousand people at King George V Stadium, she sang the “Freedom Trilogy” and “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” “Odetta had me in tears,” the Nigerian writer Peter Enahoro recalled. “When she sang ‘Oh, Freedom,’ I felt like a slave. She didn’t just sing, she was the part and you could feel her straining, crying to the heavens above, tearing and wrenching her heart out. The 3,000 audience [sic] roared for more.”²⁹

However, the crowd didn’t have much of a chance to enjoy her. Odetta sang only three songs “and walked briskly away” because she had to catch a flight back to Europe. A quick tour of Scandinavia followed, with shows in Denmark, Holland, and Sweden. At the Stockholm Concert House on December 19, she easily won over her audience despite the fact her records weren’t much available there. Still, she recalled the trip as bittersweet, especially her brief Africa sojourn. Her future visits to Africa would go much better, but this one was tinged with disappointment, undone, it seemed, by unfair expectations and an intense longing to connect with the motherland. “I was all excited about going to Africa,” she recalled. “My forefathers came from Africa; I was going to see what home was like.” But, she said, when she got to Africa, “it wasn’t home. It was a strange country, like any other strange country. I found myself thinking of an African, ‘I wonder if your forefathers put my forefathers into that slavery bag.’ That’s when I stopped looking for it to be home.”³⁰