CHAPTER NINE

IN THE HEART OF JIM CROW

Sbattling the lawsuit from Dean Gitter in early 1962, Odetta asked her record company, Vanguard, for an advance on future royalties to continue paying her Chicago attorney, Raymond H. Young, who had been repeatedly demanding money. She was near the height of her popularity and a major concert draw and recording artist with notable acting credits to her name, but Dandetta Productions, her and Danny’s firm, was hemorrhaging money.

Other than trying to hype the stillborn Bessie Smith movie, Danny had promoted a few concerts for Joan Baez, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, and others in California, and had a small stable of artists in his management roster. But aside from Judy Collins, whom he briefly managed, none were the kind of performers one could build a business on, as Al Grossman had done with Odetta early on.

John Winn, a folk singer from Missouri who had been among Danny’s first clients, recalled that things didn’t go well from the beginning. It had started with an audition in Chicago, in which Danny had deferred to Odetta in choosing the talent. “I sang for Odetta,” Winn recalled. “Danny said, ‘What do you think?’ and Odetta said, ‘I think he’s really good. Sign him.’ So that was the beginning of the relationship.”¹

Danny tried to market the average-sized Winn, who had a trained tenor, as “Big John Winn,” a kind of roving lumberjack-turned-songster. When Winn showed up to one of his first gigs, at a folk club in Minneapolis, the owner took one look at him and furrowed his brow. “You’re Big John Winn? I was expecting someone wearing a checkered wool shirt with an ax over his shoulder.” “I was a lyric tenor of the troubadour persuasion, so [Danny’s] sales pitch did not show an understanding of the product he was selling,” Winn said. “Not a good fit for me, so when his follow-up skills began to fade away so did my relationship with Dandetta Productions. I have no recollection of how it finally ended, but one day it clearly was not there anymore. He just seemed to disappear back into Odetta’s shadow.”²

Collins had a better experience, at least initially. A novice performer, she’d met Danny at the Gate of Horn in 1960 after first being floored by Odetta’s act. “I’m sitting there and the lights go down and through the back entrance comes this gorgeous creature in this green silk long dress, and she had some kind of perfume that was so enchanting,” Collins recalled. “And she came through the door and walked up onto the stage and began to sing and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.”³

Collins never signed a contract with Danny, but over drinks at the club, they agreed he would become her manager, Odetta’s clout paving the way, and for about a year and a half, he “arranged a number of very good dates,” Collins said. She realized at some point, however, that his knowledge of the folk clubs was the extent of his expertise, and she didn’t need his services. Before it ended, the married Collins had to rebuff Danny’s advances. “Danny asked me point-blank why he had been unsuccessful in establishing a more personal—meaning sexual—relationship with me,” she recalled.⁴

Dandetta’s financial troubles were reflected in Odetta and Danny’s 1962 federal taxes, which would show that while Odetta earned $19,256 in record royalties that year, Dandetta lost $23,186 ($185,000 today). That left more than $20,000 in concert wages and other income, but with rents for two apartments, coast-to-coast travel, and other expenses, Odetta wasn’t putting away any money during what would be her peak earning years, when she might have built a nest egg. “I don’t know what [Danny] was doing, but he wasn’t in show business,” recalled Charlie Rothschild, who was by then road-managing acts for Grossman. “And then he said, ‘I’ll manage you and your career will be better.’ . . . And all her monies and savings got pissed away.”⁵

Gitter and Odetta finally settled their litigation in April. She agreed to pay him 20 percent of the gross revenue for her fall 1957 tour and to record one LP for Riverside, which also settled its lawsuit with Odetta. The settlement marked a sad end to Odetta’s first managerial relationship and the personal friendship she and Gitter had shared. In the more than four decades in Odetta’s life that followed, she doesn’t appear to ever have mentioned Gitter in an interview, choosing instead to remember that his partner “Tom Wilson recorded me . . . when I cut tracks for the first record company that signed me.”⁶

With the legal squabble behind her, Odetta made plans that month to begin recording what would turn out to be Odetta and the Blues to fulfill her obligation to Riverside. By then, she’d already agreed to leave Vanguard for RCA, for whom she also wanted to record blues. So, with largely the same tight backing group, anchored by trumpeter Buck Clayton, formerly of Count Basie’s orchestra; clarinetist Buster Bailey, who once played with Bessie Smith; and stride pianist Dick Wellstood, Odetta recorded dueling blues LPs two weeks apart in Manhattan: April 11–12 at Plaza Sound Studios on West Fiftieth Street for Riverside and April 25–26 at RCA Victor Studio B on East Twenty-Fourth Street for an LP entitled Sometimes I Feel Like Cryin’.

By early 1962, the focal point of the civil rights movement had shifted to Albany, Georgia, where young activists in the so-called Albany Movement sought to overturn segregation in public facilities. Mass arrests of peaceful protesters, including Martin Luther King Jr., were chronicled in newspapers and on TV, with one commentator noting that the images presented a “deeply moving picture of American citizens rising up . . . to demand their simple constitutional rights.”⁷

It was at that point that Odetta decided to do her first tour of Southern colleges. She’d been spreading her message of black pride and black history to audiences in the rest of the nation, but now she felt the time was right to make her presence felt in places where the stakes were higher. It took Britain’s Melody Maker to point out the significance of her itinerary. “Folk singer Odetta is currently touring the South, singing Negro work songs, spirituals and Civil War songs!” the magazine reported.⁸ While the tour would mostly take her to black colleges such as Kentucky State College, Le Moyne College in Memphis, and Southern University in New Orleans, she also performed for schools, and in towns, in the midst of segregation battles. In some cases, her bass player, Bill Lee, accompanied her, while in others she went by herself.

“When she first started out doing folk music, she had to travel down South singing by herself—no road manager, no other male person with Odetta,” Josh White Jr. recalled. “And nobody fucked with Odetta. Nobody fucked with Odetta. Just take a look at her, then hear her sing. Do you want to mess with that? Hell no.” To underscore how unsettling the South could be for a black performer, White recalled a trip with his father down to South Carolina when the younger White was a boy. “I remember, before I was double digits, going down to South Carolina either to do a gig and/or see his mother from Greenville. And I remember leaving New York City, driving out of Jersey and going down South and when we got to, I think it was in North Carolina, there was a big placard, with a Klansman on a horse . . . saying ‘Welcome to Klan country.’ And [Odetta] went down there by herself. Lotta respect for the lady.”⁹

Odetta, a few years later, recalled why she headed to the South during a crucial period in the civil rights movement. “At one point I made the decision that we would play and sing to any students, segregated school or not,” she said. “I felt that we could do that and we should do that, because there are all kinds of people to get to and perhaps do something.” In January, she and the black folk singer Leon Bibb performed at the University of Texas in Austin. The school had accepted its first black student half a decade earlier, but blacks on campus were still trying to force the integration of university dorms and athletics, and that fall they would ask Martin Luther King Jr. for help, according to an article in the Dallas Morning News headlined “Officials at UT Disturbed by Report Dr. King Invited.” In the city of Austin, public facilities and many private businesses remained segregated.¹⁰

In reviewing the concert at the university’s Gregory Gym for the school newspaper, a student reporter steered clear of any overt references to civil rights, though the undercurrent was clear enough. “Powerful voices which emoted an understanding and feeling of the text from which they sang, as though they were singing of their wanderings, found their way into every nook and cranny of the building—and into the receptive souls of their captive audience,” wrote Bill Hampton, later a longtime editor at the New York Times. He particularly noted Odetta’s rendition of Jimmy Driftwood’s “He Had a Long Chain On,” which would have been heard as a freedom song and which “was a tear-moving song that enrapt beautiful emotions and left the audience moved.”¹¹

In February, when Odetta appeared at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, a similar situation prevailed. The school was officially integrated, but the few black students on campus couldn’t participate in all school activities and much of the town remained segregated. During Odetta’s visit, a drive was in full swing to try to integrate the Carolina Theater in nearby Durham, which catered to students from the University of North Carolina and Duke University.

Odetta later recalled the segregation she and Lee faced in one of the unspecified Southern towns—and their small act of defiance:

They told Bill that he couldn’t eat in the dining room [of the hotel] and by the time I’m hearing this, it’s time for us to go to the concert. And Bill is saying that the clerk at the desk said that we couldn’t use the front door. And I said, “Well I never thought that renting a room had anything to do with doors, front or back” . . . And so we go downstairs and this clerk is there yelling and screaming and Bill is putting down his bass. I said, “Hey, the only way he can argue is for us to sit up here and argue with him, right? So the thing to do is just to walk out.” So we walk out of the front door.¹²

Their stand could easily have landed them in jail. But, perhaps owing to her childhood in Los Angeles, where the racism was less overt, Odetta didn’t have much stomach for the kind of boots-on-the-ground activism—the sit-ins and Freedom Rides and confrontations with racist sheriffs’ departments and theater and café owners—taking place throughout the South. This hit home when, in the same town with the segregated hotel, she and Lee went to a Negro restaurant and were greeted by local blacks. “How proud they were that we were at the hotel, and I remember the shame, you know, absolute shame I felt. And it was with this experience that I said, ‘Hey, forget, just forget the segregated [schools], just forget it, because I’m not going to go back into that situation, though it needs to be helped, and I realize that there are kids there who are not necessarily of the opinion of the school segregation.”¹³

Odetta, for the most part, would use her music, along with her commentaries about the songs, and her image to help move the nation toward a better path. She sang to inspire but, by and large, avoided directly confronting authorities down South as others did. So does that make her a civil rights “activist,” a term so often applied to her in later years? That’s a matter of interpretation.

The folk singers Len Chandler and Jack Landrón (Jackie Washington) clearly crossed the line into activism by going to the South for voter registration drives later in the 1960s, putting their lives in real jeopardy. Landrón, who dodged bullets on at least one occasion, didn’t see Odetta as an activist. “I would say like with many artists, it was her talent, her being, her way of applying her talent . . . that was so important about her,” he said. “The term activist is where I sort of hesitate with all these performers. . . . This is not to diminish her or anybody else’[s] interest or sincerity in wanting to change the situation in America. Everybody was impacted by it. But the term activist I hear applied to so many people, and I would not have called Odetta an activist.” He went on: “Having lived in Mississippi for the better part of a year and doing the kind of stuff that was not dramatic or wonderful, that I was doing, then I ran into these people. Joan Baez would come to town, then do a concert and leave town! To me, this is not activism.”¹⁴

There are nuances, of course. Baez frequently spoke out about civil rights and marched with King throughout the 1960s, not to mention staunchly opposing the Vietnam War later on. That’s a different kind of activism from, say, the work of the four original members of the Freedom Singers, who started out protesting segregation in Albany, Georgia, and getting arrested, jailed, tossed out of college in some cases, before they formed a group under the auspices of SNCC to sing freedom songs across the United States. “I was dragged up the courthouse steps in Albany, Georgia,” Rutha Mae Harris, one of the Freedom Singers, recalled. “We had workshops to teach us how to protect ourselves, so you know how to protect yourself when you’re being dragged.”¹⁵

But there’s certainly an argument to be made that Odetta was indeed an activist, even if her work was more concentrated on influencing young minds in the North than in battling Southern racism firsthand. Odetta recalled a concert a couple of years later at Oberlin College where her songs actually moved spirits. “They had this Mississippi registration table for demonstration and this one student I knew was very interested in civil rights,” Odetta said. “But his roommate was apathetic. This boy just couldn’t get him interested. After the concert, he was one of the most interested at the table. Asked questions, nosed around, finally sat down and helped. So you never know what will affect them.”¹⁶

Indeed, for the young, mostly white, mostly middle-class folk music fans who made up the lion’s share of Odetta’s audiences, her songs served to open eyes. The journalist Andrew Rosenthal recalled the impact of hearing her slave and chain gang songs as a teenager in the early 1960s:

Her songs were at first difficult for my young ear: the power of her voice, and their unfamiliar rhythms. But in listening to Odetta, and asking my parents what her words were about, my eyes were opened to the crimes and tragedies embedded in American history. . . . “No More Auction Block for Me” led to conversations about slavery, about the “many thousand gone” in the Middle Passage, about the “driver’s lash” that enforced the bondage of men, women and children. “Another Man Done Gone” shocked me with the atrocity of chain gangs and taught me about the lynchings that were a depraved public entertainment in the South. Each of Odetta’s songs fed my dawning awareness of America’s racial traumas and the civil rights movement that was spreading across the nation.¹⁷

They also had an impact on young blacks coming of age and trying to find their place in a white-centric society. Bernice Johnson Reagon, another member of the Freedom Singers, recalled what Odetta meant for a friend of Reagon’s who was trying to break racial barriers. “A dear friend of mine who was in one of the early classes of African American students integrating the University of North Carolina to this day says that the singing of Odetta and Nina Simone kept her sane as she completed undergraduate work in a culture that was not yet welcoming to her development or her future,” Reagon said. “In her dorm room their album covers helped to create a physical cultural force that helped her to survive.”¹⁸

Odetta helped set Reagon on her path too. When Odetta’s Southern tour brought her to Atlanta on March 3, 1962, to perform solo before a near-capacity crowd at Morehouse College, Reagon, then nineteen, was in the audience at the school’s gymnasium. Newly suspended from Albany State College for her activism and now attending Spelman College, Reagon had agreed to become part of the inaugural group of Freedom Singers, who, encouraged by Pete Seeger, would go on to perform in forty-six states in the space of less than a year, logging fifty thousand miles in a Buick station wagon. The group needed a repertoire, and the historian Howard Zinn, who’d been advising SNCC, brought Reagon to hear Odetta. Doris Lockerman, an editor and columnist at the Atlanta Constitution, had previewed the concert thusly: “From the beginning, Odetta, the daughter of a Negro steel mill worker, had a voice like a weapon.”¹⁹

Singing chain gang songs for an audience at a black college in Georgia, at that very moment the focus of the civil rights struggle, was far different from singing to whites in New York or Boston. “She had a powerful presence and was at the same time gentle, she looked beautiful and young, and her hair was cut short and natural,” Reagon recalled. “When she began to sing, I could not believe what I was hearing! I was thunderstruck!”²⁰

Odetta sang “Gallows Pole,” “Cotton Fields,” and “Prettiest Chain,” a work song she’d once performed in Carnegie Hall. “And she hit the guitar,” Reagon recalled of the Morehouse show. “Now in the course of the concert she also played the guitar, but she slapped the guitar. I thought I had died and gone to heaven. In Georgia, where I grew up in the country, the roads were built by chain gang labor. I knew the sound, because as the men worked, they sang. But I never thought I’d hear it coming from a concert stage. . . . She was just, the spring of 1962, what I needed to begin my life as a freedom fighter and as a Freedom Singer.”²¹

The Atlanta Constitution reported that when Odetta had finished singing, “a shouting, screaming, standing audience demanded her re-appearance again and again.” “There is a personal magnetism and proud humility about Odetta that is impossible to catch on television or records,” Stuart Culpepper wrote in his review of the concert. “It must be seen to be fully believed and appreciated. She sings with her eyes closed, head tilted back, completely, personally involved with each emotion in her songs. When finished with a number she greets the audience with a smile big and warm enough to heat the coldest room.”²²

Odetta’s blues albums, hitting store shelves that summer and fall, failed to have a similar impact. Coveting, as Odetta did, a role as Bessie Smith, the idea of establishing her blues bona fides on record probably seemed like a smart move. However, attempting to do so just as folk music reached a boiling point in America was, at least in hindsight, ill-advised. And Odetta lacked the raw sensuality to pull it off.

Odetta and the Blues, her one entry for Riverside, debuted in July and featured songs from a who’s who of prewar blues queens: Smith, Ma Rainey, Mama Yancey, Ida Cox, and Ethel Waters. The Dixieland jazz sextet behind Odetta lent the music authority, and her vocals boomed as ever on classic numbers such as “Weeping Willow Blues” and “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out.” But reviews were mixed, at best, a far cry from the near universal acclaim for her folk singing. “One of the truly great blues singers comes flowing forth on ‘Odetta and the Blues,’” Bob Scott of the Los Angeles Times raved. However John S. Wilson, music critic for the New York Times, wrote in DownBeat that “on a basic blues, she lacks the warmth and sense of involvement that make a blues singer. The result is that, although there are often suggestive reflections of Bessie Smith that spark out from her singing, she gives the impression of a rather steely Bessie Smith—an iron maiden rather than the very pliably fleshed Bessie.”²³

A single, featuring Rainey’s “Oh, My Babe” and Waters’s “Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor,” went nowhere. Her fans simply didn’t want to hear Odetta sing the blues. “The great Odetta . . . is currently under fire for doing a blues album that is closer to jazz than folk,” Time noted that fall. Even Odetta’s friends questioned her choices. “She wasn’t a blues shouter,” Frank Hamilton opined. “And she wasn’t a Bessie Smith. That wasn’t her bag.”²⁴

Sometimes I Feel Like Cryin’, her RCA debut, arrived in September and fared little better with a different set of classic blues shouts. “Now, it seems, Odetta wants to be a blues singer,” DownBeat sniffed. “Unfortunately, this talented young woman is not of the blues—or, as she sometimes sings it, ‘ba-lews’—and, judging from this record, she never will be.”²⁵

Odetta later chalked up the chilly reception to her early blues records as musical typecasting. “Back then there were people who wanted to make sure that the music stayed where it was,” she said. “But I’m not a purist in any way, shape or form.”²⁶ Her critics, however, mostly got it right. Odetta had a voice that most singers could only envy, but at that point in her life, it lacked the intoxicating blend of warmth and melancholy that makes for great blues singing. Her folk singing could seemingly move mountains, but a blues siren she was not, despite her deep wishes to the contrary.

Her folk fans could take heart in her final Vanguard release, Odetta at Town Hall, out simultaneously with the Riverside and RCA LPs. While the album, recorded earlier in the year, broke little new ground, it was an excellent document of her live shows in 1962 and it garnered predictably stellar reviews. However, the over-the-top panning from the anti-Odetta faction at Little Sandy Review bears repeating, even if it failed to acknowledge that Odetta had been married for three years:

There is a point at which dignity verges on grandiosity, and Miss Felious [sic] unfortunately hovers uncomfortably close to this point all too often. The theatricality of this Town Hall performance, like that of her Carnegie Hall album, leads one to surmise that all that is left for her is to appear at the Metropolitan Opera clad in Wagnerian horned helmet and chain mail. It little matters what type of music she sings, for her monstrous stage image pounds her material into whimpering insignificance. . . . Odetta fans may want to buy it for the applause.²⁷

As mean-spirited as the review was, it brought out a larger point. Odetta’s music was, by and large, very serious. And that wasn’t what the youngest record buyers were looking for. Al Grossman seemed to recognize this. By 1962, he’d created a new folk hit-maker, Peter, Paul and Mary, putting Peter Yarrow together with two other hip young singers from the Greenwich Village scene, Noel Stookey (who used his middle name, Paul) and Mary Travers, whom Grossman had first met at Dean Gitter’s dinner party five years earlier. Stookey, for one, wasn’t sure at first about joining the group, but Grossman, aside from his talents as a persuader, had cachet. “Albert was the Village mogul; he was handling Odetta and producing things, he was the big time,” Stookey recalled.²⁸

By the time they recorded their debut record for Warner Bros., Peter, Paul and Mary, they had perfected an effervescent pop-oriented folk sound that lit up radio airwaves and sent record store cash registers a-ringing. In October 1962, the album landed at the top of the Billboard charts, on its way to selling more than two million copies, while the group’s reworking of the Weavers’ “If I Had a Hammer” made the top ten as a single.

If Odetta was going to get to that level in 1963, the move from Vanguard to RCA, the label of Elvis and Harry Belafonte, was at least a start. “Vanguard was a classically oriented record label, and the Solomon brothers put out good music [but] didn’t know bubkes about oiling the wheel,” Charlie Rothschild recalled. What Grossman had created with Peter, Paul and Mary, though, was a well-oiled, carefully stage-managed pop machine. “Albert understood that music was becoming an industry,” the record executive Bob Krasnow recalled. Grossman had assumed the role of image maker, as much as a music manager. Travers, a sexy blonde, was told to stay out of the sun and instructed not to speak during concerts to add to her “mystical quality”—a requirement she and Yarrow argued about privately, but she went along with it for a decade. It’s hard to imagine Odetta putting up with that kind of Svengali act. But aside from her failed attempt to present herself as a blues singer, Odetta’s sound hadn’t changed much in the decade she’d been performing. And if one thing was clear by the end of 1962, it was that the ground was shifting beneath her feet.²⁹