CHAPTER THIRTEEN

HIT OR MISS

As the new decade began, Odetta found her career mired in the same place it had been for several years: she had no full-time manager or record deal (her stint with Verve had produced only one album), and she was trying to find a way forward. “She seemed to be not at all in tune with the times,” wrote one critic who saw her at the Mariposa Folk Festival in Canada during the summer of 1970. “The folk music she had been doing so powerfully was no longer in demand and her ventures into pop were sadly missing their mark. Like numerous other artists I consider carryovers from the days of folk, she seemed adrift from the mainstream of music and struggling to find a place to plant her feet.”¹

An old friend, Herb Cohen, offered to help. Odetta had known Cohen since the early 1950s in Los Angeles, when he was among the young folkniks who showed up regularly for hootenannies at Butch and Bess Lomax Hawes’s home. Back then, Cohen was already thinking about how to monetize folk music. “He decided he was going to pull us all together professionally and have us make money with our songs,” Jo Mapes recalled.² Cohen’s Unicorn Coffeehouse was the first of its kind in the city, and he later opened Cosmo Alley, where Odetta performed a number of times.

According to Robert Carl Cohen (no relation), who had attended Odetta’s high school and saw her at Cosmo Alley, Cohen the young impresario already displayed the pugnacious tendencies for which he’d become well known. “She apparently performed gratis across the street from Cosmo Alley, at a jewelry store, which then got a rock through their window,” Robert Cohen said. “The word was that Herbie Cohen didn’t like her performing free of charge at this jewelry store. He only wanted her to perform at his place.” In the rock era, Herb Cohen would become known in musical circles as a litigious, gun-carrying intimidator whose stints with stars such as Frank Zappa, Tom Waits, and Linda Ronstadt all ended in lawsuits. “Something always went wrong at the end,” is how Jac Holzman, the founder of Elektra Records, once put it.³

Odetta signed with Cohen’s Third Story Productions in August of 1970, and he quickly delivered her a multi-album deal with Polydor Records. She began work on Odetta Sings, pouring her heart into what would culminate in a fully realized rock album. It featured an all-star group of musicians, including the Muscle Shoals rhythm section that had powered big hits for Aretha Franklin and Wilson Pickett; Carole King on piano; and on backup vocals Merry Clayton, who had recently stamped her ticket to rock immortality by duetting with Mick Jagger on the Rolling Stones’s “Gimme Shelter.”

For the song list, Odetta mined the best contemporary writers, including Elton John (“Take Me to the Pilot”), Randy Newman (“Mama Told Me Not to Come”), Paul McCartney (“Every Night”), and Jagger and Keith Richards (“No Expectations”). Her muscular vocals may not have had the gravelly soul of Franklin, who by then had almost single-handedly transformed American music with her gritty rhythm and blues, but they seemed well suited to rock, and the Muscle Shoals sound helped Odetta find an edge that had been lacking in her previous efforts at handling contemporary songs.

Odetta even included a pair of new originals. “Movin’ It On” was a plea for perseverance in the face of an unjust world, a kind of civil rights anthem for an incremental era when big gains were hard to come by and the tendency to succumb to defeatism had to be fought at every turn. Odetta sang it with contagious exuberance.

Any old way you can make it, baby

Keep on movin’ it on

If you can’t fly, run

If you can’t run, walk

If you can’t walk, crawl

Any old way you can make it, baby

Keep on movin’ it on

“Hit or Miss,” featured on a single with “Take Me to the Pilot,” centered around the kind of self-affirmation that Odetta often called upon in her later career. Its catchy drumbeat and funky bass riff seemed geared toward radio play. Given the subsequent popular reception to the album, however, there’s a retrospective pathos in the lyrics, or perhaps Odetta was doubting her foray into rock.

Sittin’ here all by myself

Tryin’ to be everybody else

Can’t you see?

I gotta be me

Ain’t nobody just like this

I gotta be me

Baby, hit or miss

The album landed by the late fall, and had it been up to the critics, it would have been a smash. They loved it and Odetta’s newest incarnation. Cashbox called it “spectacular” and concluded, “Now you know why when Odetta sings, people listen!” Billboard raved about Odetta’s “exceptional talents” and “an equally exceptional album.”⁴

Odetta hired a band of long-haired young rock musicians and took her new act on the road, appearing with Elton John at the Troubadour and opening for James Taylor and Neil Diamond. Sometimes she even put down her acoustic guitar and grabbed an electric herself. After her failure to get live audiences to connect with her interpretations of Dylan and the Beatles—not to mention the rejection of her blues material by hard-core folk fans—she clearly had trepidation about how she would be received. And she must have wondered whether the rock generation would embrace her. The previous summer, she’d appeared on the bottom end of a mismatched bill with Led Zeppelin at a New York festival, and, as she tried edifying the crowd with a version of “Home on the Range,” she endured “a barrage of boos [that] grew to humiliating proportions” and calls to “Get off the stage!” the Chicago Tribune reported. “A lot of people were surprised at the direction of [Odetta Sings],” she told Rolling Stone when the record came out. “I’m a big woman and I’m black, so you get the stereotype—everyone expects the traditional stuff and there’s really not that much traditional stuff in my repertoire. The album isn’t really a change. It’s all part of a gradual development.”⁵

But critical acclaim aside, it became pretty clear that the youth market wasn’t buying Odetta as a rock star. At a concert with Diamond at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles, she was “politely received,” Billboard said. For an appearance on KCET TV in LA in front of a studio audience, Odetta wore a gold sequined top and white skirt (her head covered by an African scarf), as she sang half a dozen songs with her group. She lit into “Take Me to the Pilot” and other new material, but the applause showed more respect than enthusiasm. And once again, she faced blowback, including from a critic who noted that “she seemed willing to fall in line for the rock audience’s approval.”⁶

There’s little doubt that the album, now long out of print, sold poorly. A later note from one of Odetta’s attorneys put her songwriting royalties for the two originals on the LP at less than five hundred dollars. Polydor, trying to recoup losses, in 1972 sued Herb Cohen’s firm, Third Story, for going ten thousand dollars over budget (sixty-one thousand dollars today) in producing the record. Cohen, in turn, sued Odetta and the record’s producer, John Boylan.⁷ Eventually the parties settled out of court, but that was the end of Odetta’s run at Polydor and the end of Cohen’s brief stint as Odetta’s manager.

What went wrong? It’s not a case of an artist mishandling material, because Odetta got it mostly right. (If there’s any doubt about her abilities in the genre, her electrified version of Woody Guthrie’s “Rambling Round Your City,” recorded around this time during a Guthrie tribute concert at the Hollywood Bowl and available on several compilations, makes clear that her voice could propel arena rock.) It may have had something to do with Odetta’s persona in a business that increasingly relied on image to sell records: a heavy-set black woman with an Afro who often favored African attire just wasn’t going to excite the young white teens and twenty-somethings going to rock concerts and buying most of the rock records. She had never cultivated much of a black audience, and a rock album wasn’t going to change that equation.

Could it also have been the Aretha Franklin effect? No matter how powerful her voice, Odetta just couldn’t match Franklin’s soulfulness, which had made the big-boned preacher’s daughter a crossover star. As Ralph Gleason had noted in the San Francisco Chronicle: “This society is more and more moving toward a rhythmic orientation in its music and the impact of Aretha Franklin on all popular music is, like the Jordan river, deep and wide.”⁸

Or did Odetta just not relate to a love song like Paul McCartney’s “Every Night” the way she did to the prison and work songs she’d sung to get her hate out? “She tried rock. She tried everything,” recalled Odetta’s good friend Frederick Warhanek, who’d met her when he was program director at KPFK radio in Los Angeles. “It just wasn’t really her. . . . When something doesn’t work and you really work at it, it’s difficult for an artist to reinvent themselves.”⁹

What followed was a long sojourn in the musical desert. Odetta returned to performing folk songs, but the jobs grew scarcer. Odetta had provided regular financial support to her mother, but in the summer of 1972, Flora Felious wrote to Odetta to tell her not to send her any more checks. “Baby you are not working. and dont no where your getting money to send me. now please dont think that I am not thankful. yes I am. But baby how are you paying your Bill. . . . now if you send me eny more money I will send it back.” (The checks kept coming.) Charlie Rothschild recalled that Odetta, who had no real savings, was struggling financially in the early 1970s. “For a long time, she lived impoverished here in Manhattan,” he said. “And it was sorry to see. She didn’t have any money. I don’t know whether she was getting aid or assistance or whatever. She was working, doing like shitty jobs and little shitty concerts, just to survive.”¹⁰

A few years earlier, she’d purchased an inexpensive two-bedroom co-op apartment on the eighth floor at 1270 Fifth Avenue, at 108th Street, with views of Central Park. The building was one of the first on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan to accept blacks, longtime residents recalled. Today, the red-brick edifice with the trim green awning cuts a stately figure in a gentrified neighborhood, but back when Odetta arrived, the conditions were poor, according to Peggy Strait, who has lived there for more than half a century. “At that time this was a very undesirable neighborhood,” she recalled. “We would have muggers climbing in the windows. Things were so bad that I still have the letter that I wrote to Mayor John Lindsay saying we need to have more protection in this neighborhood.”¹¹

By the end of 1972, Odetta had another career setback. It looked like the Bessie Smith film that she and Danny had failed to produce was now finally being made, based on a new biography of Smith by Chris Albertson. Albertson had even pushed for Odetta in the lead role, and there were reports that she’d won it, but producers instead chose Roberta Flack, one of the nation’s hottest young pop singers. “I wanted Odetta from the beginning because she is close to the spirit of Bessie’s music,” Albertson said at the time, “but her name wasn’t big enough to interest potential backers.”¹²

Odetta, who longed to portray Bessie, later called it the most searing disappointment of her career, acknowledging for the first time why she’d sought the role for so long. “Outside of my love for her, maybe I wanted to do it because in doing it, I could also learn, via the acting, her in-charge attitude,” she said. “When the deal fell through I went into a blue funk. . . . Never again will I put all my expectations on the line.”¹³ (The Flack film never materialized, however, and a Bessie Smith bio didn’t appear until 2015, when it starred Queen Latifah.)

Odetta tried to stay active as her concert work ebbed, making herself available for benefits, often without pay other than expenses, to support various left-wing causes. If her rage had fueled her singing early on, it continued to stoke her desire to improve the world. “We . . . played so many benefits together,” David Amram recalled, “that whenever we played when we were actually paid, it was a banner occasion.” Odetta often recoiled at the idea of detailing all of the things she did, as if doing so usurped attention from the causes themselves. But prodded by a reporter, she rattled off a bunch: Vietnam, Laos, police brutality, pollution, the white man’s arrogance (the reporter’s paraphrase), and “my black children.” “You’d better not misquote me on this,” Odetta said. “If there’s one thing that bothers me it’s integration. Integration means black children having to adjust completely to a white child’s world. . . . I want the black child to know where he comes from and be able to make a contribution to any situation he is in, black and black, black and white or whatever.” And what exactly was she doing to help her black children? “They’re not headline getters, sweetie,” Odetta said, and that was true enough in most cases, small fund-raisers for school, arts, and church programs.¹⁴

She got the most ink for singing against the Vietnam War, and while Odetta may not have been Bessie Smith, she had long since shied away from making outright political statements beyond her music. At one early 1970s midnight rally for the kickoff of a “Peace Fast” at All Souls Unitarian Church in Washington, DC, Odetta led young antiwar activists in singing peace songs. “Odetta raised the voice that is like a great cave with firelight leaping on its walls and sang ‘This Land Is Your Land,’” the columnist Mary McGrory wrote. Then: “The young people locked arms and rocked back and forth and sang ‘We Shall Overcome,’ and it was a reminder of the days when demonstrations had worked. . . . Singing and marching had made the difference in the civil rights movement. Nothing seemed likely to move the man in the White House”—Richard Nixon—“to more rapid troop withdrawals.” Still, Senator Eugene McCarthy, hero of the left, embraced her and said, “I think I’ll recommend Odetta to President Nixon for the Supreme Court as a strict constructionist from the South.” Odetta walked off the stage with both hands raised—one with her fingers in a V for peace, the other in a clenched fist for black power. Her Afro had grown longer.¹⁵

She embraced her folk repertoire, and even as her popularity waned at home, she remained a good draw overseas and, in most years, spent several months abroad. “Part of what she did was travel out of the country more because folk music was still a thing everywhere else,” Boots Jaffee recalled. “And even if it wasn’t a thing, American artists were still a thing and so she did that.”¹⁶

There were tours in Israel and Scandinavia and music festivals in Europe. At the Berlin Jazz Festival in 1973, she made such an impression that B. B. King had trouble following her after the crowd gave her a standing ovation, according to a report in Melody Maker. “Applause was so great that the King band had difficulty getting back on stage.” “Yeah, yeah. We love her too,” King told the crowd.¹⁷

In 1974, Odetta spent more than a month on a tour of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, one of the early American cultural emissaries during the era of detente. Voice of America broadcasts had long featured American vernacular music, and Soviet listeners had shown an insatiable desire for it, especially jazz. Young people came out in force to see Odetta at sold-out halls in Moscow, Leningrad, Vilnius, Yerevan, Kislovodsk, Baku, Minsk, and Pyatigorsk in a series arranged privately with the Soviet Ministry of Culture and with the blessing of the US Embassy in Moscow. The same folk music that had become passé back home seemed to enthrall her Soviet crowds, despite the language barrier. “Odetta, an intense American folk singer, has entranced audiences here by belting out a repertory ranging from spirituals to work songs and children’s play tunes, backed by nothing more than the driving rhythm of her own guitar,” the New York Times said. “Between songs, young men or women would often dart up on stage to kiss her and present her bouquets wrapped in cellophane,” the Times added. “‘Odetta,’ one young man called out as she was leaving a performance in Yerevan, ‘will you ask all your brothers and sisters to come over and sing for us too?’”¹⁸

An audience of twenty-five hundred brought her back for three curtain calls after a two-hour performance in Rossiya Concert Hall across Red Square from the Kremlin, as a nation that had once welcomed her idol Paul Robeson in the 1930s gave her an equally warm embrace. “I can’t believe I’m here,” Odetta cried out backstage. “I wanted to come here for a long time,” she said. “I was and am interested in the fact that despite our different systems we are human beings. I pick [sic] you and you say ouch. It is that area of communication, similarity and oneness I am looking for not only in the Soviet Union but in the United States as well.”¹⁹

She also did concerts behind the Iron Curtain in Yugoslavia and Hungary. A report by the United States Information Agency noted the Soviet press was “highly favorable” about her tour.²⁰ “Her voice is an instrument of limitless range, rarest depth and purest tone,” an editor of the government run Izvestia enthused. “Her main virtue consists of her ability to reach the heart and touch our spiritual strings.” Most importantly, he concluded:

Soviet audiences opened their hands not only to applaud the vocal mastery of Odetta. Now, as a historical turn is taking place in the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, a turn from confrontation to partnership, the role of our countries’ artists is growing more critical to developing a climate of joint understanding and friendship between two great peoples, from which in large degree hangs the fate of the world.²¹

She’d clearly made an impact. The night of her concert in Minsk, some fans wrote to her in New York. “Odetta!! We are happy to see you in our country, to listen to the wonderful songs of your people. . . . We admire your brilliant talent, your voice. . . . Hope to see you in our city again. Your Soviet friends.”²²

Letters like that one must have heartened her as she continued to try to jump-start her career at home. She worked to burnish her acting résumé, although, like many black actors, she found good parts difficult to come by. In 1974, she appeared in a much-feted TV movie, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, based on the Ernest J. Gaines novel and starring Cicely Tyson as a former slave recounting her hardscrabble life. While the movie broke ground in its unglossy depiction of slavery and won a slew of Emmys, Odetta appeared on camera only briefly—as a slave named Big Laura.

In her serious stage-acting debut, she portrayed a slave yet again the following year in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible at the Stratford Festival in Ontario. Although excited for the role of Tituba, Odetta couldn’t help noting the sameness in the types of parts offered to her. “It’s only that people don’t think of casting a black person unless the author says so,” she said.²³

Her rave reviews beg the question of why she didn’t have more opportunities to act. The drama critic for the Globe and Mail said, “[S]he outshone a stage full of Shakespeareans,” while the Montreal Star pointed out that “Odetta as Tituba was wonderful with her super opulent humanity.” “Doing live theater particularly helped me to get away from self-consciousness of the body, which I always had,” Odetta said later. “When I made my debut in ‘The Crucible’ . . . I soon discovered I wouldn’t have the guitar to hide behind. And I couldn’t even close my eyes anymore!” The lack of a real manager probably forestalled any more sustained entrée into the field.²⁴

Musically, she failed to get anything going on a commercial level in the 1970s, and she didn’t hide her rage about it. She sang with symphony orchestras in pops concerts around the country, earning the usual good reviews wherever she went, but nothing more. At one point, she cut a tape in Nashville with a young band called the Nashville Huggies, trying to interest the country music establishment, to no avail. “Nothing, zero. Don’t call us, we’ll call you,” was how the Chicago Tribune characterized the response. The paper asked Odetta if she was disheartened. “‘Disheartened!’ booms the rich voice, sending seismic shocks thru Ma Bell’s line from New York. ‘That’s a beautiful understatement. Damn right I’m disheartened—and spitting mad, too. There are a lot of us with talent and experience who can’t get record contracts. Seems like companies are interested only in new acts that do freaky things. Those people are strange at best, but talented . . .?’”²⁵

“If I was white and looked like a dog and had the talent that I do have, you’d be hearing more . . . from me,” she told another reporter. She claimed, a little disingenuously, that she hadn’t caved in to pressure to record a commercial hit or changed musical directions like other rock and folk musicians. “If I did that it would be as if I had been working on my dream house for 23 years and then after getting to where I wanted, I poured kerosene all over it and burned it down.”²⁶

Once again, she was hardly alone among her contemporaries, although she was quicker to blame racism than most. “The 70s had become a pretty arid musical climate . . . for many of us,” Peter Yarrow noted. But Odetta suffered the added indignity that her bedrock influence on popular music was already being diminished. “A lot of people ask me if I went into folk music because of Joan Baez or Bob Dylan,” Odetta seethed in one interview. “But I’m the mama and they’re the children, and I influenced those singers.”²⁷

In the summer of 1976, at the John Henry Faulk Festival in West Virginia, Odetta met the blues singer Louisiana Red, and the two fell in love—or at least he did. She seemed to need a little convincing. Born Iverson Minter in Vicksburg, Mississippi, in 1932, Red had had a traumatic childhood, even by the standards of Southern bluesmen. His mother died of pneumonia when he was a baby and his father was lynched by the Klan when Red was five. He started playing guitar on the streets to earn money at fourteen. By the 1950s, he’d begun recording for various small labels in a country blues style. Despite being an affecting singer and above-average guitarist, he never achieved the kind of fame that Odetta did and had more name recognition in Europe than in the States.

After their initial meeting, Red wrote Odetta an anguished letter, telling her that he missed her and “I sleep with you [sic] Photo every night.” Soon enough Odetta came around, and by the fall, they were a couple. “We’re starting our lives together and now that I’m part of a unit, I think I can come back out here to live again,” she told a reporter in San Francisco. For a time they seemed smitten, Odetta introducing Red as her “husband,” although they never formally married. A photo of the couple that ran in a Halifax, Canada, newspaper in the summer of 1977, when they appeared in concert together, shows a beaming Red standing behind Odetta with his arms draped around her. She’s wearing a headscarf, and her left hand is rested lovingly on his right arm.²⁸

Odetta’s friends were taken with Red, but they wondered whether the cultured Odetta had much in common with her backwoods companion. “He was such a sweetheart but just a little country,” Frederick Warhanek recalled. “Knowing Odetta as I did, I didn’t see too much of a future for that.” Carrie Thaler had the same foreboding. “They seemed very much in love,” she recalled. “Very different worlds. I really liked Red, but you could tell he had no education, had one of the hardest lives I ever heard of, growing up. He was a great guy and they seemed happy together to me, but I didn’t spend that much time with them. . . . Someone must have broken somebody’s heart.”²⁹

The relationship—long distance for the most part, unless their musical paths happened to cross or they both had time off together—lasted until about 1978, when it seemed to dim, although Odetta never told her friends why. Red later moved to Europe, where he could count on more regular work, and that’s where he lived until his death in 2012.

By the late 1970s and early 1980s, Odetta’s appearance began to undergo a change as she entered middle age. She often kept her slightly graying hair hidden under colorful African headwraps, with a small, jeweled bead laced through a few braids of hair adorning the middle of her forehead—what she sometimes called her “third eye.” Around her neck, she wore a pendant emblazoned with the words “I Am” to remind herself that no one, even a cold-blooded music executive, has the power to negate a human being. When she performed, she often kept a lighted stick of incense attached to the tuning pegs of her guitar.

Her music changed too. She had jettisoned chain gang songs and work songs like “John Henry” because she said she could no longer summon the hate they required to sing. And while she still had plenty of adoring audiences and earned her share of rave reviews from critics who now identified her as a “living legend,” some listeners began to turn on her. Once Odetta’s guitar style had been so distinctive and an integral part of how she conveyed emotion in her music, but now she used a rhythmic strum to string together three, four, or more songs at a time, changing only the chords as she moved from, say, “Sail Away, Ladies” to “900 Miles.” Vocally, she began adding all manner of slurs, whoops, and filigrees that displayed an impressive control but weren’t pleasing to everyone’s ear.

A fan named Richard Hart wrote to her in exasperation after attending one of her concerts then.

Dear Odetta. . . . What happened to that beautiful singing you are so capable of? You have a great voice, why must you make those strange, unbeautiful sounds? Is it so important to be different[?] Is it not enough to sing beautiful folk songs in a normal manner, from beginning to end—instead of singing them in 8 or 10 strung together and complete with screeching, squealing and grating sounds?³⁰

Her banter in between songs, often about racism or spirituality, proved to be a double-edged sword in an era noted for its relative political apathy. Her barbs against government inaction on poverty, her calls for social justice, and her pleas that her audience get out and vote inspired some but irritated others, especially when her anger was aroused. “Odetta talks aimlessly and too much,” Richard Harrington, music critic for the Washington Post, complained. “The time would be better spent keeping her guitar in tune. Failure in that area becomes particularly bothersome in the context of her simplistic chug-a-chug strumming style. After more than two decades, one expects improvement.”³¹

John McWhorter, a black writer and linguist, recalled seeing an Odetta show in the early 1980s at New York University, where he was a student. “She rocked the house, the young and mostly white students delighted to be sitting at the feet of a black Earth goddess ‘telling it like it is,’” McWhorter remembered. “I thought I had a good time. But later my white roommate rocked me by dismissing the whole thing. His problem with Odetta was her smugness, her obvious expectation that her audience bow to her moral superiority.” McWhorter partly questioned whether racism was at work in his friend’s critique. “But I also knew that few white performers could have gotten away with the Odetta tone, and that since white eighteen-year-olds could not have played any part in the oppression that Odetta had encountered in her life, it was a bit of an act to require them to accept her saintliness without question.”³²

Some of Odetta’s longtime friends suspected that whatever her political message and her desire to edify, she also was struggling emotionally. “When I saw her in the 1980s she seemed disappointed or something like that, and she would almost turn on the audience, sort of kind of lecturing and so on,” recalled Lance Greening, who had spent so many nights with Odetta at the Gate of Horn or at the Greenings’ Chicago-area home. “I hate to tell tales on people, but she was having a hard time . . . having to do these small shows when she had been doing concerts with tremendous attendance.” Roger Deitz, a folk musician who performed with Odetta a lot during this period, mused that journeyman artists like himself couldn’t possibly understand what she was going through, doing two or three shows a night at a small club when she’d once sold out Carnegie Hall. “I don’t know what it’s like when you’ve been to the mountaintop and then you’re now just trying to keep the apartment rent going,” he said. “How many people manage to scale the heights to be Tom Paxton or Pete Seeger or Odetta? . . . There are not very many.”³³

It was during this chapter of her life, as her career and personal life foundered, that friends began to realize Odetta’s drinking had become a serious problem. She had always been a social drinker. The singer Nancy Griffith recalled Odetta once telling her, “All god’s children needs vodka.” But now Odetta had trouble stopping. “She did have problems with alcohol, that’s definite,” Frederick Warhanek said. “I was quite young at the time and I was drinking too much too. And I said both of us got to stop this.”³⁴

No one can know exactly what demons Odetta wrestled then, because she kept so much of her interior life to herself. But to have been “black and turned away,” as her friend Maya Angelou said, then to have savored the warm embrace of adoring crowds and to have felt beloved—in spite of what she’d once been made to believe of her lowly status in the world—and then to have come off the mountaintop to look square at what she’d come to feel was a racist music establishment that was ignoring her talents must have been hard.

“She did use alcohol to medicate her emotional pain, in my view,” Selma Thaler recalled. “It had become an issue between us as well. She said, ‘Stop tryna’ fix me.’”³⁵ Odetta’s drinking caused a rift with Thaler, whose family had been so close to Odetta almost from the beginning of her career and had even lent her thousands of dollars to help her pay back taxes, with the IRS threatening enforcement actions earlier in the decade. But while Odetta swallowed her pride to take the money, she didn’t want help with her alcohol problems. The rift lasted several years, but they later resumed their friendship after Carrie Thaler brokered a rapprochement.

Though her struggles were largely hidden from the public and don’t seem to have affected Odetta’s ability to sing, they did spill over into her work. “We did a folk festival at UCLA [in the early nineties],” recalled Roger McGuinn, the former leader of the Byrds, “and she came out of the dressing room and”—he made a whoosh sound—“big cloud of alcohol.” “She was drinking a lot,” said McGuinn, who had fallen in love with Odetta’s music as a teenager at the Gate of Horn. “She smelled like alcohol every time I saw her. And I saw her several times in different places.”³⁶

Odetta developed a reputation during this time, fairly or not, as a performer who could be difficult to deal with offstage, oversensitive to any perceived slights or treatment she felt was unbefitting a star, and withering to anyone, even a fan, who interrupted her backstage as she tried to get into the right frame of mind to sing. Her gruffness with promoters and stagehands, particularly those she didn’t know well, may have poured forth from the well of resentment she felt at being overlooked in the cultural pantheon. If the establishment wasn’t going to let her in the door, then at least she was going to be in control and call the shots at her concerts. Adding to the volatility of these situations was Odetta’s preconcert preparation, which required her to shut off the world and get into an almost trancelike state. “I’m two different personalities, one as a performer and one as a civilian,” she explained once. “Before a concert, I close everything out—put blinders on—and must be alone. Afterwards I need a few minutes to touch my feet back to earth.”³⁷

Once shy to a fault, Odetta now had a directness that could be scathing. And she apparently felt no need to explain herself to those impresarios she rubbed wrong; in the end, she had less interest in winning their love than in making sure they knew who was working for whom. Odetta’s nonmusical friends rarely saw this side of her, unless they paid an unexpected visit before a concert. For them, she remained a shining light, a mother bear, a tigress of benevolence, whose focus always remained on their well-being. Fellow musicians saw flashes of her fury and tried to make sense of it, although to fully appreciate it maybe you’d have to have been a black female, born under Jim Crow, raised under Jim Crow lite, and had the life and career arc that Odetta had had, with all her triumphs and disenchantments.

David Amram had his own theory about why Odetta was so ornery in the latter part of her career, a trait that earned her the nickname “Odacious” from the trumpeter Clark Terry. “Sometimes when she would get angry or upset, which was for a very good reason . . . and if she wasn’t with someone who loved her and cared for her, she had a hard time getting out of that,” Amram said. “And people said that’s because she used to drink and do this and that. But a lot of people did that. Above and beyond that I think she had a certain built in sense of decency and honor and a purity that she never could abandon. . . . She could never let anything slide.”³⁸

Most of her fans, of course, wouldn’t have suspected any behind-the-scenes turmoil, and that was a tribute to Odetta’s professionalism as a performer. On stage, she was a diva, whose presence could still electrify on the best of nights, even as she battled through tough times. “She was still one of the top acts,” Roger Deitz said. “I can only see what she was doing [on stage] and . . . if you listen to that voice and the control and what she sang, she certainly wasn’t cheating anyone out of the money they spent to go listen to Odetta.” Once in the mid-1980s at Godfrey Daniels, a small folk club in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Odetta had what organizers remembered as a “breakdown” before the show, sobbing and moaning in the basement green room. No one knew what was going on, but they stood guard to make sure no one bothered her. “And then she would come out and do a dynamite show, regardless,” said Dave Fry, the founder of the club.³⁹

And there were certainly bright spots even in the hardest of times. In a run stretching from 1983 to 1995, Odetta sang every New Year’s Eve at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine on Amsterdam Avenue on the Upper West Side of New York. The church, known for its immense sanctuary and breathtaking stained-glass windows, held an annual “Concert for Peace” to ring in the New Year, with singing, poetry, and spoken prayers for peace by luminaries such as Jason Robards and Leonard Bernstein. After rebuffing an invitation twice, Odetta relented. “She would often shun holiday concerts because she never got any birthday presents as a child (born New Year’s Eve) and holidays depressed her,” according to a newspaper account. But when Odetta sang “This Little Light of Mine” a cappella from the pulpit and ten thousand people holding lit candles joined in, their voices soaring up to the church’s immense vaulted ceilings, it proved transformative. A candlelighting ceremony and Odetta’s song became the traditional climax of the program. “The whole season is up for me now,” Odetta said. If Odetta’s best-known song had been the “Freedom Trilogy” early in her career, “This Little Light” took on the role in her later years. It had been written as a gospel tune and adapted with a civil rights theme in the 1960s, but it also had a simple, universal message of empowerment. With all her ups and downs, Odetta may have sung it as much for her own salvation as for her audience’s.⁴⁰

In the same vein, she also began accepting occasional teaching gigs, not necessarily focused on music but on life. A semester-long workshop at Evergreen State College in Washington had the title “Odetta’s Philosophy,” and hearing her describe it, it seems to have evolved into a kind of group analysis, providing an emotional outlet not only for her students but for herself.

The only thing I had to bring was a box of Kleenex. We would get into areas of talking and people would start crying; they were able to talk about things they couldn’t with their families or their friends or in their classes. We would hold each other and let the tears flow. When they were finished with whatever they were gonna say, (they) would reaffirm themselves by saying, “I am.”⁴¹

During the ’80s, Odetta finally found a manager, Len Rosenfeld, who had her best interests at heart. A gentle giant at six feet four, Rosenfeld had repped Josh White, the Clancy Brothers, and other folk acts. He wasn’t a high-powered dealmaker by any stretch, but he genuinely cared for Odetta and had a reputation as a manager who put his artists first. “Len was very paternal,” recalled Roger Deitz, whom Rosenfeld also managed during that time. “She found someone who was going to care about her more than I think he cared about himself and how much money he made.”⁴² Rosenfeld’s selflessness sometimes manifested itself in a tendency to “forget” to cash his own commission checks if he believed his client needed the money more than he did.

Odetta’s sister, Jimmie Lee, moved in with her late in the decade, doing secretarial work and helping with bookkeeping and other household management tasks left undone by Odetta, who was a pack rat and so disorganized that she neglected to open the royalty checks that still arrived quarterly. “At this time the Felious fillies were reunited,” Jan Ford recalled. “They lived and worked together as a team. Odetta often expressed how good it felt to come home to my mom. They had an unshakeable bond.”⁴³ They helped one another cope with the death of their mother, Flora, in 1988.

Having a constant companion helped ground Odetta, who rarely spoke about her private life but occasionally revealed her difficulties with relationships and her tendency to be a loner. “I’m a gypsy and a hermit,” she said in 1986. “I have a lot of children, but none of my own.”⁴⁴

She also had to deal with whispers about her sexuality. Odetta’s cropped hair as a younger woman, large size, friendships with lesbians, and a singing voice that sounded almost masculine at the low range contributed to the talk from people in the industry and casual observers who assumed that she preferred women. “She was a large woman who had a complex sexual identity,” Ash Grove owner Ed Pearl offered. “Odetta was a big woman, strong voice and the short haircut and the whole very forceful personality,” Jack Landrón recalled. “She was never very tee-hee womanly so it was almost assumed that she was, I don’t think we used the term lesbian, but that kind of lady.”⁴⁵

Those rumors have outlived her. (On Answers.com, the question “Was Odetta a lesbian?” is answered by a simple, anonymous “Yes she was.”) Her friends, however, insist that Odetta was decidedly heterosexual throughout her life. “She was very, very unlesbian,” Frederick Warhanek said. “She did experiment, which was not unusual, but no.” “They’re judging her by her appearance,” posited Carrie Thaler, who had many deep-into-the-night conversations with Odetta. “I would have talked to her about that.” And one of her old guitar players who didn’t want to go on the record recalled Odetta seducing him during a foreign tour back in the 1960s. “I can guarantee you that she wasn’t just purely lesbian,” he joked.⁴⁶

Even during the times when she was squirreling herself away at home, Odetta made an exception when it came to going down to the clubs to hear and encourage young singers, maybe even giving singing lessons to the most promising ones. And when she ventured out, it would usually be in style, thanks to a devoted fan from Brooklyn who called himself Stereo Mike. He owned a big black car, and after he got off from his day job, he’d drive into Manhattan to make sure Odetta was treated like a star, David Amram recalled:

He had a used limo that he would simonize and shine it up. He had one of those chauffeur’s caps with a black brim and he’d put on a black suit and he looked like a limo driver. And he would go pick up Odetta, who would get all dressed up and they would go cruising down to the Village. . . . Odetta would go, looking like a regal queen. . . . She used to make these grand entrances and all these young folk players and singer songwriters would see her coming in with a limo driver. She enjoyed that so much.⁴⁷

For the genuine star treatment, she could still go overseas. In 1989 Odetta toured Australia again, and her arrival was treated as big news in the media, with newspaper and radio interviews and performances on national TV. When she sang in Sydney Town Hall, Garry Shead went to see her and they reconnected, more than two decades after their broken engagement. He was married, but clearly they hadn’t lost their affection for one another. “We went out that night and I went back to her hotel with her,” Shead said. “And even though I was married, we kind of went there together but we didn’t do anything, it was just so lovely. We went to a coffee shop that night in King’s Cross, where she stayed, and it was still the same kind of love we had for each other.”⁴⁸

Toward the end of the decade, there were stirrings of interest in Odetta’s music. A live album, Movin’ It On, recorded at a concert in Wisconsin, came out on the independent Rose Quartz label in 1987. The following year she teamed with her old bass player Bill Lee to re-record Christmas Spirituals (later retitled Beautiful Star) for another indie, Alcazar Productions, her first studio release in nearly twenty years. While the beautifully captured renditions of spirituals from her 1959 Vanguard LP didn’t push many musical boundaries, they were all the proof needed that Odetta’s vocal power and artistry remained undiminished as she approached sixty—and a further reminder that one of America’s great voices had been marginalized for far too long. “Odetta remains woefully underrecorded after 40 years in the music business,” Bob Darden wrote in Billboard in early 1989. “She only has 20 or so albums to her credit, many of which are currently out of print.”⁴⁹

Odetta couldn’t help but wonder why the music business had passed her by for so long. “You definitely got the sense that, you know, she wanted that recognition again,” said Robbie Woliver, one of the owners of Folk City in Greenwich Village, where Odetta often held court with up-and-coming musicians and stayed until the lights went out at four in the morning. “She knew that she deserved that recognition and even these new kids that she was watching every day at the club, she knew that they wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for her probably.”⁵⁰

After a fallow period, folk music had started to gain some traction again thanks to singer-songwriters like Suzanne Vega and Tracy Chapman, both of whom credited Odetta as an inspiration. Odetta had been saying for years, perhaps a bit wistfully, that “another folk boom” was in the offing.⁵¹ Little did she know that it wouldn’t be folk music that would rejuvenate her career but another genre that her fans had once rejected for her.