CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN’

When RCA released Odetta’s third record for the label, It’s a Mighty World, in January 1964, her new producer, Jack Somer, pushed for a single, and Odetta, true to her commitment to the African American struggle, decided to donate her share of the proceeds to civil rights groups. If she couldn’t stomach meetings and politics, she would continue to find other ways to help.

In Somer, Odetta at least had a champion in her corner. He was the fair-haired boy at RCA, having started out as an audio engineer before landing in the pop department as a producer and working with people like Lena Horne and his childhood friend, Peter Nero. Odetta would become his favorite. “She was a giant,” Somer later gushed, “a wonderful, energetic, sincere, beautiful artist.” He added, a bit ruefully, “I did everything I could to serve her and to promote her and to help her.”¹

The LP featured the lineup that would be Odetta’s mainstay for the next few years, with Bruce Langhorne on guitar and Raphael “Les” Grinage on bass. Grinage, like his predecessor, Bill Lee, had a jazz background, having performed with Earl Hines, Bill Evans, and Charles Mingus. Like Lee, he brought an improviser’s talent to the mix. “I believe that if I miss a note he knows before I do,” Odetta once said.² When Grinage and Langhorne played with her, the trio warmed up more like a jazz outfit than a folk group, as Hootenanny magazine noted:

Their musical rite is generally initiated by Langhorne, who strums a simple chord progression on the guitar. The bass player joins him and Odetta improvises lyrics—at times happy, or even childlike, and at other times, plaintive or mournful, depending on her mood. Eventually they all sing. They sing about current events, their impending concert, about each other, or about nothing in particular. The process stops as quickly as it begins—and they are ready to perform.³

All of Odetta’s albums for RCA were recorded at the label’s Studio A on East Twenty-Fourth Street, in the wee hours of the morning, as was Odetta’s custom. After she’d dipped her toes into contemporary material on her previous record, It’s a Mighty World largely returned to her comfort zone, focusing mostly on traditional folk. The title track was an exception, though: it was Odetta’s first attempt at writing a pop song. The tune itself was a simple, catchy, even danceable vamp, with Odetta strumming a steady rhythm, Langhorne adding bluesy fills behind her, and Grinage supplying the pulse. In keeping with Odetta’s usual themes, the song’s message was about empowerment:

Take a look at you

You’re a mighty soul

You’re a mighty soul

And you’re part of a mighty world

When the sessions ended at 3 or 4 a.m., the musicians and their producer often headed straight for an all-night Japanese restaurant near Times Square. “Always had the same meal,” Somer recalled. “It was steamed sea bass and everybody would pluck the fish off the body with chopsticks, but Les always plucked out the eyes ceremonially. . . . He ate them. He was from somewhere in the South where it was normal everyday procedure. Sometimes it rather spoiled my appetite, but after you’ve been recording all night, you get hungry.”⁴

The album’s single had “It’s a Mighty World” on the B side. Side A featured Odetta’s rousing version of “Got My Mind on Freedom.” It had started life as an old spiritual, but during the Freedom Rides, an activist had substituted the word “freedom” for “Jesus” in the lyric: “Woke this morning, with my mind stayed on Jesus.” The song had become a favorite in the civil rights movement, whose focus in the early months of 1964 was on securing a vote in Congress for the Civil Rights Act. For Odetta, the song was emblematic of the two concerns that consumed her: freedom for African Americans and personal freedom from the constraints society had placed on her. Odetta had high hopes for the record, Somer said, after deciding to donate the proceeds to the groups then lobbying for passage of the bill. “We released the record as a single, and our wonderful white promotion department . . . never promoted it,” he said. “I don’t think the NAACP or whoever, maybe it was CORE, maybe it was SNCC, I don’t remember. . . . I don’t think they made a nickel on it, which I thought was tragic because I thought the song was wonderful.”⁵

By the time Odetta went out on a tour of colleges and large theaters in support of the record, the Beatles owned four of the top ten songs on the Billboard charts in the weeks following their epoch-making February appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. Reviewers continued to describe Odetta’s audiences as “captivated” and moved to “thunderous applause,” but some writers made ominous references, intended or not, to the dawn of the rock era. “Any doubts that the folk singers were on the way out . . . were dispelled when Odetta, backed up by a strong show, grossed $1,200 in the Queen Elizabeth [Theatre],” Box Office magazine reported after a concert in Vancouver. Two days earlier, Seattle’s Moore Theatre remained two-thirds empty for Odetta’s concert there.⁶

In May, she took her act on the most extensive foreign tour of her career, six weeks in Scandinavia, England, and Africa. With Langhorne unavailable, Peter Childs, a young Oberlin graduate who had recently been a member of a folk-bluegrass outfit called the Knob Lick Upper 10,000, managed by Al Grossman, agreed to go on the trip as backup guitarist. Grinage came along, and Charlie Rothschild served as road manager.

At thirty-three, Odetta was now a veteran performer with a decade of work behind her, no longer the shy, soft-spoken singer she had been when she started performing. It’s on this tour that we get some of our first glimpses of the Odetta that friends and colleagues would remember most: the steely, powerful, charismatic presence who inspired an equal measure of awe and fear in musicians and nonmusicians alike. “Les used to call her ‘d’tatris,’ short for dictatrix, and she ruled the roost,” Childs said. After their Sabena Airlines flight from New York’s Kennedy Airport touched down in Brussels on the morning of May 30, the group made its way to the Amigo Hotel in the middle of a thunderstorm. “We were in our hotel room looking out the window at the thunderstorm and the rain splashing down on the cobblestones in Brussels and the lightning was illuminating her face,” Childs recalled. “And I don’t know how many pictures you’ve seen of Odetta really smiling happily. But it’s like the radiant face of a 16-year-old girl. And that is the primary memory that I will always carry around of Odetta.”⁷

In Brussels, Odetta performed for Belgian TV’s Face Au Public, where her exhilarating finale of “Got My Mind on Freedom,” with Grinage singing harmony, brought the crowd to its feet. There was a layover in London to record for ITV—a less jubilant affair, after producers nearly hid Odetta in front of a black background—then the tour moved on to Sweden and Finland for two weeks of twice-daily shows at amusement parks, where she was feted and treated like a star, Rothschild recalled.

They spent the first two weeks of July in Africa, Odetta’s second time on the continent. Performing in Tanganyika and Nigeria, Odetta was driven around in a Mercedes and treated like royalty wherever she went. In Lagos, they saw crippled beggars in front of their hotel, Grinage and Childs scored some heavy-duty black ganja, and the whole group partied with some of the military officers who would soon stage a coup to end Nigeria’s first brief run at democracy. “Going to Africa with Odetta was an experience,” Childs said, “because she was a queen, she was a famous American folk singer . . . she was traditionally built and she was a black sister from America. And they fell all over themselves to get to her. I’m thinking now of all those colonels in the Nigerian army that later ruined Nigeria. But they were fun to party with.”⁸

Odetta wanted more than a cursory look this time around. She sought out African artists and out of the way places, trying to get a sense of Africa’s essence. During the Lagos trip, she arranged for the group to visit Ede, a traditional tribal town in southwest Nigeria, where the local king, known as the Timi of Ede, was also a master of the “talking drums.” Their Mercedes careered through the jungle for several hours before they reached a village with stucco dwellings, where they got out and were met by the Timi’s drum corps, half a dozen drummers ranging from a boy of maybe four on up to a thirty-year-old with flaming red eyes.

Their drums, with goatskin heads and leather strings that could be used to raise and lower the instruments’ pitch, mimicked the tone of the Yoruba language as they “spoke” about the visitors. “They saw Odetta and they said, ‘Here is a woman who is known as a queen among women,’” Childs said. “And they looked at Les who was a portly chap and they said, ‘Here is the smiling elephant who shakes the trees as he stalks through the jungle.’ And they looked at me and said something about liking the skirts and being unbeatable in a fight.”⁹

After sightseeing trips to Egypt and Ethiopia, the group headed home on July 15 on a Pan Am flight from London to Los Angeles, flying over the North Pole. When they arrived at LAX, Childs said, Odetta used the sheer power of her presence to save him from a drug bust.

I hate to admit to such idiocy, but I had about a pound of pot in my baggage. And it was right there on top, rolled in baggies and stuffed into socks. And she knew I had it. . . . And she was right in line in customs ahead of me. And they were opening every single bag. . . . She went through just ahead of me and then they reached in and opened up my bag. And then Odetta turned and just put something [over] on the customs guy. I don’t think she even spoke. She just put something on him, his hand stopped in midair, he closed my suitcase and just passed it through. Now that’s the kind of personal presence that I’m talking about.¹⁰

All in all, it was a much better African sojourn than her first brief encounter two years earlier when she’d felt out of sorts and disappointed that it hadn’t felt like home. They returned to the East Coast in time for Odetta and Childs to perform at the Newport Folk Festival at the end of July, and it’s probably no coincidence that Odetta wore colorful African robes on stage. With seventy thousand people attending over four days and nights, the festival shattered attendance records and was a huge critical success. “All this happened during a time when many have been saying the folk boom is dead or dying,” Robert Shelton noted in the New York Times.¹¹

Bob Dylan by then had emerged as folk’s first among equals, a rock star in the making, and though he still wielded an acoustic guitar and harmonica, his songwriting had already begun to shift from consciousness-raising folk songs like “Masters of War” and “The Times They Are A-Changin’” to more pop-oriented material like “All I Really Wanna Do” and “Mr. Tambourine Man.” It was Dylan’s Sunday night performance that preceded Odetta’s, but given the nation’s political mood, she managed to upstage him, at least in the eyes of the critics.

The festival happened in the middle of the Freedom Summer, when young black and white college students descended on Mississippi to help SNCC and CORE register black voters under the watchful and threatening eyes of the Ku Klux Klan and their partners in local sheriff’s departments. Almost immediately, two white college students from New York, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman, along with James Chaney, a young black Mississippian, had disappeared and were feared dead. Their bullet-riddled bodies would be discovered a little more than a week after the festival ended.

So although Dylan was the clear audience favorite, it was Odetta’s spiritual crescendo, when she brought Peter, Paul and Mary; the Freedom Singers; Pete Seeger; and the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem to the stage to sing “Got My Mind on Freedom” and “We Shall Overcome” that summed up the nation’s mood. The performers all joined hands as they had the previous year, this time with Odetta out in front of them, her natural hair and African attire adding another layer of intention to the message of freedom for all. “The festival closed in a symbolic finale merging music and social meaning,” Shelton wrote in the Times. “Odetta led other performers and an audience of 15,000 in two songs of the Negro integration movement. The social commitment of folk music blended with its esthetic core in a triumphant conclusion. There was a democratizing spirit about this fusion of Negro and white musical forms and about the people who are the conveyor belts of these traditions that was little short of inspirational.”¹²

To be sure, although Odetta no longer reigned supreme in folk, she remained a potent force in music. That was evident a month after Newport, when a young Carly Simon, still in college, performed at the Potting Shed in Lenox, Massachusetts, as part of the Simon Sisters, her duo with sister Lucy. Odetta had been Simon’s inspiration to begin singing in the first place, and in the gymnasium at Riverdale Country School in the Bronx, Simon had often regaled students with “Bald Headed Woman,” even imitating Odetta’s hand claps. But when her heroine showed up at the Potting Shed, seated at the front table, it was more than the stage-averse Simon could handle as the duo launched into their first song. “I just fainted. I just lost it and I fainted right onto [Odetta’s] table,” Simon recalled. “And the next thing I knew I was kind of being brought to back stage with Odetta kind of fanning my face because my sister had had time to tell her this is all because of you, thank you very much Odetta.”¹³

Still, one’s head would have to have been in the sand not to notice the Beatles, the Dave Clark Five, the Animals, the Rolling Stones, and the Kinks lighting up the US charts that summer and fall, brash British bands inspired by American blues and rock ’n’ roll to create a new pop aesthetic for young people to latch onto. Odetta’s immediate answer was Odetta Sings of Many Things released by RCA in September, and of all her early-period folk albums, it seems the most sea-tossed, as if she—and whoever was managing her career—didn’t know how to navigate the waters churning around her. With Langhorne and Grinage backing her, the songs were well played and passionately sung as usual, especially “Wayfarin’ Stranger,” a traditional folk tune most associated until then with Burl Ives, and “Sea Lion Woman,” an old children’s song that Nina Simone had reimagined and released that year as the B side of “Mississippi Goddam.” But the whole package seemed to add up to less than the sum of its parts, perhaps because it was one of the few Odetta LPs from the period that lacked a strong freedom song to anchor it. If her music was going to evolve, she was going to have to find new ways to inspire her listeners.

Her next spark would flicker from an unlikely source. In the late fall or early winter of 1964–65, Jack Somer was sitting in his second-floor office at RCA when his secretary rang through and said a young man on the phone wanted to play him some music. “Make an appointment for him,” Somer told her.¹⁴ A few days later, Paul Simon, twenty-four, walked in with a dub of a song called “Sounds of Silence.” He wanted Odetta to record it.

Simon and Garfunkel had included the original acoustic version of “Sounds of Silence” on their debut LP, Wednesday Morning 3 AM, which had recently been released to lukewarm reviews. It would be almost a year before their producer at Columbia Records, none other than Tom Wilson, would add electric instruments to the mix without their knowledge and re-release it as a single, making stars of the duo. With that destiny lying in the future, Simon seems to have sought out Odetta to build some prestige as a songwriter.

“Let me think about it,” Odetta told Somer, who believed Simon’s song was just right for her, but in the end she decided not to record it.¹⁵ However, the episode spurred discussions about what Odetta could record next to advance her career. She suggested an album of songs by Buffy Sainte-Marie, a Canadian-born Cree Indian singer who had just released her first record, which included her antiwar anthem “Universal Soldier.”

In the end, they discarded the idea in favor of an LP of songs by another promising young songwriter: Bob Dylan. Odetta Sings Dylan, released in March of 1965, would be the first major album of Dylan covers (the little-known Linda Mason had released a forgettable Dylan collection the previous year). The songs, as one would expect, included plenty of Dylan’s protest material, such as “The Times They Are A-Changin,’” “Masters of War,” and “With God on Our Side,” but also more introspective tunes like “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright,” already practically a nightclub standard among young folk singers. The most remarkable thing about the record is that seven of the songs hadn’t yet been released by Dylan, including “Baby I’m in the Mood for You,” “Paths of Victory,” and “Long Ago, Far Away,” all of which Dylan had recorded as demos for the music publisher M. Witmark & Sons a few years earlier—the tapes of which, it seems, Al Grossman had provided to Odetta.

That helps explain the visitor Odetta received during one of the late-night recording sessions in Studio A. “It might have been 1, 2 in the morning, the door to the control room opens up and in walks Bob Dylan,” Somer recalled. “And he didn’t step in more than 3 or 4 feet, and it was in the middle of a take. She saw him, she stopped playing, she looked through the glass and she said, ‘Get your white ass out of here!’ And he turned around and left. He wanted to hear what she was doing and she didn’t want any part of his being there.” Odetta recalled a politer exchange, perhaps one that occurred a bit later outside the control room: “He came by RCA with his entourage. And I said, ‘Oh, no. I’m not going to have the writer sit up here telling me I didn’t mean it like that.’ And he says, ‘Well, can I correct some words?’” Working from Dylan’s demos, the publisher had incorrectly transcribed some lyrics. After he made the corrections, Odetta recalled, “I said, ‘Now ya gotta get out.’ And he understood.”¹⁶

Odetta doesn’t seem to have been a particular devotee of Dylan’s lyrics, requiring lyric sheets even for “Blowin’ in the Wind” (released this time under its original title). She didn’t try to sound like Dylan or capture the feel of his arrangements. In fact, she seemed to go out of her way to put her own stamp on the material. She took his perky folk ditty “Baby I’m in the Mood for You” and set it to a mid-tempo rock beat that had an almost country flavor. Likewise, on “With God on Our Side,” she, Langhorne, and Grinage gave it a propulsive energy that sets it apart from Dylan’s more poetic folk minstrel version. And “Masters of War,” perhaps the album’s most enduring achievement, spotlights the riveting power of Odetta’s singing, over a brooding minor key backdrop, taking Dylan’s antiwar imagery to an emotional, almost operatic crescendo.

She must have known that her Dylan interpretations would be scrutinized in a way that her renditions of dusty ballads and work songs wouldn’t. The session was tense, especially for “Mr. Tambourine Man,” often considered the song that set Dylan forth into his most creative period as a songwriter. He wouldn’t release it on vinyl until about a week after Odetta’s record came out, although he’d been singing it live for the better part of a year. Odetta opted for a nearly eleven-minute-long version—twice as long as Dylan’s—a more moody, ephemeral reading of the tune. But three hours and ten takes hadn’t satisfied her, and at 3 a.m. Somer decided to douse the lights in the studio and isolate Odetta from the others. “I can do nothing to ease that struggle,” Somer recalled. “Odetta is best left alone when a troublesome interpretation is gestating within her; she is deeply jealous of her music, even when it goes badly.” He went on:

Finally, on the 11th take, Odetta arrives at whatever destination she was seeking. “Mmmmmm. . . .” She says into the loudspeaker. It is a sigh of relief, a moan of pleasure, a groan of joy. And three heartbeats later a similar sound comes from the phantom Bruce Langhorne: “Uh-uh. . . . mmmmmm. . . .” From both phantoms comes the soft strum of guitars, followed next by the gutty beat of the bass. And the sighs and groans pick up on the beat. It is an improvisation, a wordless conversation, a celebration of life that grows more vital with each beat. It’s a Southern sound, a Black sound, a beautiful sound.¹⁷

Afterward Somer and the musicians went out for steamed bass and boiled rice and watched the sun come up in the east.

The impact of Odetta Sings Dylan was mixed, as were the reviews. “She made Dylan famous,” said Wavy Gravy, the counterculture icon and good friend of both Dylan and Odetta. “She made an album of all Dylan songs and it helped to skyrocket the little fella. For sure. . . . She was the Big O.” Variety echoed this view, calling the LP “a recognition of young singer-composer Bob Dylan as one of the most creative and influential personalities on the folk-pop scene.” When Elvis, who had “become fascinated with the work of Odetta” (and Dylan) in the mid-sixties, heard her version of “Tomorrow Is a Long Time,” he decided to record it himself.¹⁸

But not everyone was so impressed. “She is as authoritative as the Delphic oracle in ‘The Times They Are A-Changin,’ brave and bluesy in ‘Walkin’ Down the Line’; but she melts the fierceness of ‘Masters of War’ into a mere lament,” Time said. That was Robert Shelton’s conclusion when Odetta performed the new material at New York’s Town Hall, singling out three of the Dylan covers as the weakest moments of the evening. “Two seemed overly syncopated for their content and ‘Mr. Tambourine Man,’ a most difficult mood piece to project with meaning, became leaden-tempoed and prolix.”¹⁹

Though Odetta insisted that her music had to evolve, some of her early fans were distressed at her new direction. The criticism seems a bit shrill in retrospect, as if they wanted Odetta to remain sealed in amber from her earliest days on the folk scene. Izzy Young blamed Al Grossman for her supposed downfall. “He ruined Odetta,” he told the folklorist Richard Reuss that summer. “He tried to make an image of her like the female Belafonte or something—didn’t work. And now it’s very sad to see her putting out an album of Bob Dylan songs. I mean that is the saddest thing of all.”²⁰

Once again RCA chose not to release any singles, and the LP never dented the charts. An album of songs by folk music’s poet and prophet didn’t translate into a hit. “I think she did that [record] in hopes that something would come out of it,” Charlie Rothschild said. “But they were very supportive of her, they liked her. It just didn’t evolve.”²¹

When Harry Belafonte asked Odetta to support Martin Luther King’s nonviolent campaign in Selma, Alabama, in March of 1965, she heeded the call as usual. Despite the heroic efforts of civil rights workers over several years to register black voters in the South, they remained shamefully disenfranchised. Nowhere was that more evident than in Selma, where whites had used the usual tactics—including literacy tests and physical intimidation—to exclude all but 335 of the city’s 15,000 blacks of voting age from the rolls.

With passage of the Civil Rights Act the previous summer, President Lyndon Johnson, in his State of the Union address at the beginning of the year, had announced plans to push for voting rights legislation at about the same time the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and SNCC began a new effort to force the issue in Selma. Sheriff Jim Clark and Alabama State Troopers had no qualms about subjecting civil rights protesters to billy clubs, cattle prods, nightsticks, and even bullets, and when officers shot and killed a young black activist named Jimmie Lee Jackson, it raised both the tensions and the stakes in the Selma campaign.

On March 7—a day that would become known as “Bloody Sunday”—SNCC’s John Lewis had attempted to lead around six hundred marchers from Selma to Montgomery for a protest at the Alabama State Capitol. But when they tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge over the Alabama River, Clark’s men and state troopers had viciously attacked them with nightsticks, whips, and tear gas, wounding dozens of people and leaving Lewis with a fractured skull.

Two days after Bloody Sunday, King arrived in Selma and led a group of protesters back to the Edmund Pettus Bridge, but after being ordered to turn back, they retreated after a short prayer. Plans were already underway for a repeat of the full march that Lewis had attempted. By then, President Johnson had addressed a joint session of Congress and pushed for a voting rights bill, using language that anyone familiar with the music of the civil rights movement would understand:

What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and state of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause too. Because it’s not just Negroes, but really it’s all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And we shall overcome.

On March 21, a Sunday, the forty-six-mile march from Selma to Montgomery began with thirty-two hundred people at the doors of an African Methodist Episcopal Church, but only three hundred could make the entire trek because of court-ordered limits on certain roads. The New Yorker described the initial group as a mix of “local Negroes, Northern clergymen, members of labor unions, delegates from state and city governments, entertainers, mothers pushing baby carriages, members of civil rights groups more or less at odds with one another, isolated, shaggy marchers with an air of simple vagrancy, doctors, lawyers, teachers, children, college students,” and random civilians.²²

Over the first two days, the marchers, led by King and protected by US Army soldiers and federalized Alabama National Guardsmen, recrossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, marched down highways and through swampland, and sang freedom songs, while enduring insults along the way from white onlookers, including children who yelled “Nigger lover!” and “White Nigger!” They also worried over rumors of snipers, a Ku Klux Klan attack, and a segregationist plot to unleash a den of deadly copperheads and cottonmouths at one of their campsites.²³

By Tuesday evening, the footsore marchers arrived at a farm belonging to black millionaire A. G. Gaston in Burkville, where they would camp for the night. It was there, the New Yorker reported, where “Odetta appeared at the campsite, and found all the other marchers, including another singer, Pete Seeger, fast asleep.”²⁴ (Only a few entertainers had made all or part of the march up until that point, including Bonanza star Pernell Roberts, journeyman actor Gary Merrill, Seeger, and Len Chandler.)

There’s no evidence that Odetta marched the following day, and many years later she confirmed that she had not. But she was among the stars Belafonte had recruited, at King’s request, for a celebratory concert Wednesday night, before the final day’s march into Montgomery to present Governor Wallace with a list of demands. “I was calling on short notice, and yet the cause was so compelling, the news photos of violence on the Pettus Bridge so fresh, that almost everyone I reached out to agreed to come,” Belafonte recalled. “Nina Simone, Joan Baez, Johnny Mathis, Billy Eckstine, Tony Bennett, Odetta, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Chad Mitchell Trio, and more all said yes.”²⁵

The show was to take place at the last campsite: the athletic field of the City of St. Jude in Montgomery, a forty-acre complex of Roman Catholic institutions for Negroes (including the South’s first integrated hospital, plus a school and orphanage). But with the crowd swelling to ten thousand or more, including marchers and supporters who streamed in for the concert, the equipment was hours late in arriving and the ground so muddy that a makeshift stage had to be fashioned on coffins donated by black undertakers in Selma. In the dark, audience members pushed toward the stage, and claustrophobia, panic, and exhaustion set in, delaying the concert. “Overcomed [sic] either by the crowd or by the stars, people started fainting . . . in spite of Ossie Davis’ constant plea for everyone ‘to keep calm,’” Jet reported.²⁶

The show finally began close to midnight, with a bus behind the stage serving as a makeshift green room. Sammy Davis Jr. sang the National Anthem, Peter, Paul and Mary did “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “If I Had a Hammer,” Nina Simone snarled out “Mississippi Goddam,” and Dick Gregory and Nipsey Russell told jokes. After Shelley Winters addressed the crowd, Belafonte kissed her on the cheek, saying, “If Wallace could have seen that.” “When Odetta came back to the bus after performing, the applause from her peers was deafening,” according to one report.²⁷

In hindsight, it seems almost matter of fact to hear about stars showing up to sing for the marchers in the dead of night, but given the violence that already had occurred during the first Selma march and countless other demonstrations in the South, and the vitriol and hatred coming from white spectators along the way this time around, it was hardly a given that everyone would be protected when they trotted on stage to perform, even with armed troops forming a perimeter around the campsite. “Several more rumors of plots to assassinate Martin were swirling and circulating,” Coretta Scott King recalled. “That night, as we stood on the stage, I thought about what sitting ducks we were, out in the open night, with the bright stage lights beaming down on us.” Martin Luther King called for “every self-respecting Negro here” to join them in Montgomery for the final demonstration the next day in front of the Capitol.²⁸

With the marchers at the campsite, the stars stayed in the Greystone Motel in Montgomery that night, kept awake by shouting segregationists outside. On Thursday morning, March 25, when everyone gathered for the final four-mile march to the city center, a disagreement broke out as to who should go first, the famous names likely to attract the attention of the media or the three hundred marchers who’d braved the entire five-day ordeal. “All you dignitaries got to get behind me,” Profit Barlow, a 17-year-old marcher, shouted. “I didn’t see any of you fellows in Selma, and I didn’t see you on the way to Montgomery. Ain’t nobody going to get in front of me but Dr. King.” Odetta weighed in. “Man, don’t let the morale crumble,” she said. “The original three-hundred deserve to be first.” Her point of view won the day, with the three hundred leading, followed by King, A. Philip Randolph, and other dignitaries.²⁹

During the march in, Odetta briefly linked arms with Rosa Parks, who had been shunted aside at times that morning, unrecognized by some organizers and police. (Asked many years later which songs inspired her the most, Parks said, “Essentially, all the songs Odetta sings.”) Odetta said she was marching to pay “an overdue debt.” Earlier that month, she’d been defensive when a New York Times reporter had asked her why she didn’t take part in pickets and demonstrations. “I could run around like a chicken with its head cut off,” she said. “But you have to choose. Many times it is felt you’re not accomplishing anything unless you get your head knocked.”³⁰

At a platform erected in front of the Capitol, the entertainers continued singing until all the marchers, now swelled to some thirty thousand, had arrived. “It’s a great day, great day, great day,” Belafonte told the crowd. “And there’s millions on the way!” “‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ spilled into ‘Blowin’ in the Wind,’ ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain,’ and ‘This Land is Your Land’ among patriotic folk songs and spirituals led by singers grouped around the cluster of microphones—Odetta, Leon Bibb, Oscar Brand, Len Chandler in a pith helmet, Joan Baez barefoot in a velvet dress,” one of King’s biographers wrote. King spoke in front of the Capitol steps where Jefferson Davis had taken the oath as president of the Confederacy. “I know Governor Wallace is waiting for us to leave so that his town can return to normalcy,” King told the throngs. He added, “The only normalcy we shall be satisfied with is the normalcy of brotherhood . . . the normalcy of justice . . . the normalcy of peace.”³¹

After the rally, participants were warned to get out of Montgomery before dark, as this invading army was clearly in enemy territory. A rush ensued to find rides on chartered buses or with volunteers ferrying marchers out of town in cars and pickup trucks. Harriet Hutchinson (née Cohen), a junior at Newark State College in New Jersey, had come with a group of students and spent the night in the campsite before joining the final march. But after all the speeches, she got separated from her group; she recalled:

I was wandering around on some street and all of a sudden this very large black woman walks out on the porch and I did a double-take because I knew who it was. And I said, oh my goodness, that’s Odetta. And she says, “Honey, you lost?” and I was, yes, I was. I was way lost. So she went inside . . . made a phone call and told me which direction I needed to go to get [transportation]. I was on the last truck out of Montgomery. . . . So basically, Odetta saved my life.³²

Viola Liuzzo didn’t fare so well. Luizzo, thirty-nine, a white mother of five and wife of a Teamsters official from Detroit, had driven to Alabama to volunteer after watching the attack on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. As Liuzzo ferried marchers back to Selma in her green Oldsmobile, Ku Klux Klansmen pulled up beside her car in neighboring Lowndes County and put two bullets in her head, killing her instantly.

More than four decades after Selma, Belafonte recalled that he and Odetta narrowly avoided being in the car with Liuzzo. “We were supposed to have been in her car,” he said. “But because she had an urgency, we deferred to her to take the car to go. And when the car did not come back we heard that the Klan had met her on the way and murdered her.” When they got the news, Belafonte said, Odetta told him: “You know, Harry, we’re gonna have to give some serious consideration to why it was her and not us. What does this tell us we need to do?” Curiously, Belafonte didn’t include the story in his memoir, instead recalling that it had been Tony Bennett who had declined a seat in Liuzzo’s car for the fateful ride. Whatever the case, it was clear that all those who campaigned for voting rights in Selma did so at some considerable risk. Less than six months later, President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law.³³

It had been nearly six years since Odetta and Danny Gordon had married in Chicago. Odetta had been on the road almost constantly since then, pausing only occasionally to enjoy any kind of domestic life. By April of 1965, their marriage was irrevocably broken. “I knew there were problems,” Selma Thaler recalled, but Odetta wasn’t one to share much of her private side, even with close friends. “It was not the kind of thing that she would have sat down and told me specifically.” Danny filed for divorce in California, citing “extreme cruelty” and “grievous mental suffering.” Odetta didn’t contest the divorce, which would become final a little more than a year later.³⁴

Since the demise of their marriage occurred five years before California popularized the “no fault” divorce, the charges in the complaint must be viewed with more than a little skepticism. In order to obtain even a mutually agreed-upon dissolution, couples had to convince the court that one party had suffered dreadfully at the hands of the other. Aside from bilking Odetta financially, Danny had hardly been the model husband, propositioning Judy Collins less than two years after his wedding, and in a casual manner that suggests it wasn’t an isolated incident. Odetta later on made it clear she had given up by then on finding bliss with Danny—and also that her career had to come first. “Anything or anybody who affected my throat has had to get out of my life, O.K.,” she said. “Marriage went like that.” And she had this advice for young artists, not citing Danny but probably with him at least partly in mind: “Be careful of those who are spotlight-seekers and star-fuckers.”³⁵

Since Danny had ostensibly been helping manage Odetta, the divorce left her with half a manager in Al Grossman at a time when her career really needed steering. And Grossman now had his hands full, with Dylan’s star heading into the stratosphere and an ever-expanding client list including Mimi and Richard Farina, Ian & Sylvia, Gordon Lightfoot, John Lee Hooker, Phil Ochs, and of course, Peter, Paul and Mary.

Odetta had little time to ponder her next move. She headed to the Far East with Langhorne and Grinage in mid-April for a two-month tour, first stopping in Australia, which had been a bit late to embrace the folk boom. Critics were calling the arrival of top US folk artists in Australia that spring and summer, including Odetta, Judy Collins, and Josh White, an “American Folk Music Invasion.”³⁶ They seemed especially eager to hear Odetta, whom they had seen on Harry Belafonte’s TV special and heard on their duet single “Hole in the Bucket.”

Odetta performed one-night stands in five cities, Brisbane, Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth, and sang on the Australian Bandstand TV show, modeled on American Bandstand. More of the usual accolades followed her concerts, including her “triumphant” performance in Sydney, where she sang four encores and only failed to impress when she sang Dylan’s “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” and “With God on Our Side.” In Melbourne, an almost-capacity crowd, mainly of young people, applauded her work songs and blues and “refused to allow Odetta to leave the stage until she had sung at least three encores.” “She was a big hit,” Charlie Rothschild recalled. “We did five towns. Sellouts. They were decent sized venues. And she was treated as a superstar over there.”³⁷

If the US was in the midst of racial turmoil, Odetta didn’t escape it in Australia, where the aboriginal problem was just starting to come to a head. The country’s indigenous people lacked the right to vote, were often refused service in restaurants and hotels, and had little economic opportunity beyond their squalid camps outside of towns. A month before Odetta arrived, a group of Sydney University students, branded the “freedom riders” by the press, had toured aboriginal communities for two weeks to call attention to their plight. When reporters questioned her, Odetta, no longer polite to a fault, weighed in on the controversy with a directness that would be her hallmark as a mature adult. “You have racial prejudice in Australia,” she said. “I have seen and heard of some pitiful conditions regarding your aborigines. Things in Australia seem to be running along the same lines as in America.”³⁸

In May, the tour reached Japan for shows in Tokyo, Osaka, Sapporo, and other cities. At Tokyo’s Kōsei Nenkin hall, Odetta overcame the language barrier to get the audience singing and clapping to freedom songs. “The audience was completely caught by the voluminous singing of Odetta,” Billboard reported. “She sung many folk songs and spirituals, but ‘Water Boy’ and ‘We Shall Overcome’ were most impressive. She repeated the latter five times, singing together with the audience.”³⁹ During days off, they toured Hiroshima at Odetta’s request and rode a bullet train. Odetta learned a Japanese folk song and Pete Seeger and Alex Comfort’s “One Man’s Hands” in Japanese to sing in her concerts, winning over her crowds with her effort.

On June 5, she performed at Aichi Cultural Auditorium in Nagoya City. No one singing along in the hall that night better illustrated the spiritual force of Odetta’s music than Kenichi Takeda, a skinny nineteen-year-old living in Tokyo who had recently lost his mother to tuberculosis. He was so moved by Odetta that he remained in his seat until every last member of the audience of fifteen hundred had filed politely out of the theater. “It was her voice that immediately penetrated my soul,” he recalled. “I remember it rang like bells in a cathedral.” Takeda would arrange to meet Odetta on her next trip to Japan, and she became a lifelong friend and his “spiritual mother,” he said. Sensing his deep loss, she would later dedicate a version of “Hey Jude” to Takeda from the stage. “She . . . taught me of the greater things that connect us as human beings: the dream of freedom,” Takeda said.⁴⁰ For Odetta, her Japan visits would soothe her from the daily fractures over race in the United States. “Japan is a second homeland for me because here I can forget racial prejudice and sing truly as an individual human being,” she would tell the press in Tokyo a couple of years later.⁴¹

Back from Asia, she arrived in August at the Newport Folk Festival, where Bob Dylan picked up a black Stratocaster to play an electric set, and his apostasy put a big nail in the coffin of the folk revival. A night earlier, Odetta had performed, “really belting it . . . and the audience loved every minute of it,” Billboard reported, but more telling was the focus on Dylan by the press and the fans who either loved or hated his new direction. In contrast, on the grounds of the festival, as one reporter noted, “Pete Seeger, Odetta, and even Peter, Paul and Mary, went about virtually unnoticed.”⁴²

As musical tastes morphed in the US and young fans drifted toward folk rock, there was plenty of excitement for American folk acts overseas, an avenue that Odetta would increasingly turn to. She had the same effect on her foreign audiences that she’d had in front of American crowds when folk music was still new and exciting.

Right after Newport, Odetta returned to Sweden for two weeks of shows, and from there, she, Langhorne, and Grinage flew to Israel. They debuted in Tel Aviv, then moved on to Beersheba, Haifa, and Jerusalem, where they performed at Binyanei Ha’Uma concert hall. According to one account that appeared in the Jerusalem Post, hundreds of people stayed behind after Odetta’s last encore, “even after the lights were turned on, standing at their seats and clapping frantically.” “Israelis have been known for either being very bad or very good audiences,” M. Geringer wrote, “but there was never any question from the beginning as to her reception. She captivated us and made the house come down.”⁴³

She flew back home, clearly energized by her travels. “Let me tell you about the countries we’ve covered,” she enthused to a reporter soon after. “Australia, and Japan. Finland, Sweden, and Denmark. Belgium and England. Israel and Africa. Fantastic! . . . Relationships [overseas] are growing.”⁴⁴

On the heels of her ecstatic reception in Israel, Odetta got her first chance to see how her music would play in the place of her birth. She’d been back to Birmingham a couple of times to visit family but never to perform. And she’d sworn off doing shows in places that were segregated. But she made an exception when asked to help raise money for an arts center for impoverished children in Macon County, home to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute.

Martin Luther King had called Birmingham “the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States”—section 597 of the city code had even made it unlawful “for a Negro and a white person to play together or in company with each other in any game of cards, dice, dominoes or checkers.” The city had made progress in the two years since the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church, integrating several schools under court order, integrating restaurants and lunch counters, removing “whites only” signs at public water fountains and restrooms, opening some jobs to blacks, and allowing mixed audiences at the Municipal Auditorium where Odetta was scheduled to perform. “We haven’t had any miracles here, and we don’t expect any,” a white minister, the Rev. John C. Turner, had remarked as the city undertook those changes, “but we have made a beginning.”⁴⁵

On October 2, shortly after her Eastern Airlines flight touched down at Birmingham International Airport around two in the afternoon, Odetta made her way to the A. C. Gaston Motel. For many years, it had been the only deluxe accommodation open to black visitors in the city and had been used by King and other civil rights leaders as a headquarters during the historic 1963 campaign. Her concert was slated for 8:30 that night. She wasn’t about to go wandering around beforehand. “I was lost in that city,” she admitted.⁴⁶

Two years earlier, Birmingham voters had elected Albert Boutwell as mayor over Bull Connor, the commissioner of public safety and public symbol of the city’s racist regime. Boutwell, a former lieutenant governor, was considered a moderate but had nevertheless defended the city’s “habits of tradition” and warned against outside interference in Birmingham’s racial struggles. “Anything is better than Connor,” a black insurance agent named John Drew, told the New York Times. “But the new administration is a complete disappointment to us. It had such a great challenge, but it is a do-nothing administration. The mayor is a weak, sick old man.”⁴⁷

Still, Boutwell was trying. The week before Odetta’s visit, he’d sent a letter to concert organizers, recognizing “the accomplishments of Odetta Gordon, and the singular contribution she has made and [is] making to the arts and culture of America.”⁴⁸ But getting an audience for her in Birmingham presented a challenge. For one thing, neither the Birmingham News (the largest white-owned newspaper at the time) nor the Birmingham World (the longest-running African American–owned paper) advertised or covered the concert. Both white-owned and black-owned Southern papers then often steered clear of race issues for fear of offending advertisers.

The only place to read about Odetta’s visit, in fact, was the Southern Courier, a paper founded a few months earlier by two Harvard undergraduates—veterans of the Freedom Summer—to cover the events of the civil rights movement in the South that the local press was neglecting. The Courier reported that the concert promoter, a veterinarian named Dr. Doris Mitchell, “had run into a stone wall” in Birmingham. “Some people told her that Birmingham was not the place for Odetta to sing, even though this is where she was born,” the paper said.⁴⁹

Bill Barclift, a white student at Birmingham-Southern College, told a reporter that Odetta wasn’t well known in Birmingham. “Folksinging is a fad in the North that hasn’t reached here yet,” he said. “All the fads trickle down here eventually, but it is sort of like the Great Lakes—they will get down here some time, but it will take a while because that Mississippi flows slow.” A local merchant added, “Negroes have never heard of her. You’ve got to remember this is a mining town and most people don’t go for cultural stuff.” Jesse Lewis, a black advertising executive, predicted fewer than 150 African Americans would attend the show. “This is a show for white people,” he said.⁵⁰

The concert, held the same night as the annual Ole Miss–Alabama football game, drew a thousand people in a venue that seats at least five thousand. That probably accounts for the show’s late start, with Odetta and promoters hoping for a larger turnout. She finally appeared from behind a velvet curtain wearing a long white gown and opened the show with “If I Had a Hammer,” followed by “House of the Rising Sun” and “Joshua Fit de Battle of Jericho.” She then dedicated—boldly, given the mostly white Alabama audience—“Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down” to the people who died for the civil rights movement, “not excluding Malcolm X,” who’d been assassinated earlier in the year.⁵¹

The applause grew louder after each song. When she introduced her final number, “Got My Mind on Freedom,” she beseeched her audience: “Help sing this song. Even if you are not in favor of the civil rights movement, there must be something you want to be free of.” The crowd demanded an encore, and she came back out to sing “Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me ’Round.” Then someone shouted “We Shall Overcome!” She obliged, and everyone joined in. She received several standing ovations.⁵²

The concert must have been bittersweet for Odetta. Given the size of the crowd, it was hardly a hero’s welcome for a returning daughter who’d done so much to promote the cause of black culture, freedom, and pride in America. The lack of interest among working-class blacks in Birmingham was probably more of an indication that they still weren’t part of America’s cultural mainstream than it was a commentary on her music.

But she’d gotten the crowd going. And after the concert, behind closed doors, probably—unreported even by the Courier—she received another dose of recognition: a key to the city that had two years earlier tried to break black spirits with firehouses and attack dogs. It was a gold bangle about three inches long, with “City of Birmingham” highlighted in blue around a gold emblem of city hall. It seems likely that Mayor Boutwell presented it to her. His appointment book for the night of the concert has the notation “Odetta Gordon-8:30 pm Negro singer.” She kept the key as one of her prized mementos, although one could certainly understand her muted response when a reporter asked a few weeks later about the trip to Birmingham. “For a big city, that’s a little key,” Odetta offered. “Don’t guess it opens anything.”⁵³