EPILOGUE

“WHO WILL BE THE ODETTA OF NOW?”

On the night of February 24, 2009, thousands of people packed Riverside Church in New York’s Morningside Heights neighborhood, filling the pews and balconies and spilling over into the aisles to spend the next four hours eulogizing, memorializing, and celebrating Odetta. In many ways, it was a testament to the sheer number of lives she touched—from the innumerable musicians she inspired to the myriad causes she supported and raised money for to the untold numbers of people who absorbed her stirring example of racial pride—in a long career that may not have gone entirely according to plan but left a lasting mark nonetheless. “Odetta did not need a percussionist to find a beat for her music,” the Reverend Brad Braxton told the gathering of white and black mourners. “The syncopation in her song was the human heartbeat in all of us that pounds away with a hope for a brighter world.”¹

There were moving tributes and remembrances from Pete Seeger, Joan Baez, Maya Angelou, Peter Yarrow, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Oscar Brand, David Amram, Josh White Jr., and Maria Muldaur, among many others. Most of them offered a variation on Muldaur’s testimony: “I heard the voice of Odetta and it changed my life.”² Weeks shy of ninety, Seeger led everyone in a sing-along of “Take This Hammer,” the song Odetta had shouted like a storm in Topanga Canyon half a century earlier. Wavy Gravy, who had done so many benefits with Odetta, read a haiku he’d written for the occasion.

Odetta sang out

Her mighty song “Oh, Freedom”

Now she’s free at last

Harry Belafonte recalled “the hundreds of times I have had to call upon her for many moments in the civil rights movement” before declaring, “Odetta gave me the motor, the engine, the vision, about how to use the moment that was cast upon me.”³

There was plenty of joy, an abundance of camaraderie among a roomful of strangers, and much music. A group including Steve Earle, Peter Yarrow, Josh White Jr., and Tom Chapin sang “This Land Is Your Land,” the song Odetta hoped would become the new national anthem. Sweet Honey in the Rock intoned “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” a gospel folk song that Odetta used to sing a cappella to bring down the house at Carnegie Hall. In a touching finale, all the musicians who were there, along with friends and family and nearly everyone in the church, joined in to sing “This Little Light of Mine,” Odetta’s ode to the civil rights cause and to the universal urge to feel free.

Despite the outpouring, the public seemed pretty quick to forget what a vital force Odetta had been in the America of the 1950s and 1960s. A decade after her death, John Seiter, her former drummer, said that when he starts whipping out the names of people he performed with back then, “some people have never heard of her. And you just go, what?” Odetta’s friend Selma Thaler has had those moments too. “You know, I’ve seen on PBS they have historical folk music programs or whatever,” Thaler said. “She’s never in them. It bothers the hell out of me.”⁴

Still, there has been recognition of the imprint Odetta left on the world. In 2011, Time named the top one hundred “most extraordinary English-language popular recordings” since the magazine’s founding in 1923. Odetta’s “Take This Hammer,” from Odetta at the Gate of Horn, was one of ten songs chosen from the 1950s, alongside “Jailhouse Rock,” “Tutti Frutti,” and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin.” In 2014, the Alvin Ailey Dance Company created the touring ballet Odetta, in which the dancers interpreted her songs and some of her spoken monologues about race. That same year, the movie Selma was released, and it was Odetta’s version of Bob Dylan’s “Masters of War” that played during the climactic scene when marchers were beaten down trying to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge.

New York City, where she lived most of her life, installed a plaque honoring Odetta at her 1270 Fifth Avenue co-op. In a small ceremony featuring music and several speeches, her neighbor Peggy Strait noted that Odetta had been active in the building to the very end, joining a fight to preserve a clause in the building’s tenancy agreement that allowed apartments to be transferred to heirs without the board’s review. “She stood for the rights of people,” Strait said. “She fought locally for the same things she fought for out in the world.”⁵

Odetta’s influence on a new musical generation continues. In 2015, the singer and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens channeled Odetta in a new version of “Water Boy” on her solo debut. More recently, when Miley Cyrus performed Dylan’s “Baby I’m in the Mood for You” on The Tonight Show, it was Odetta’s arrangement that she adapted.

Perhaps Odetta would have been most gratified to hear that her own song “Hit or Miss” had taken on a second life, appearing (with unintended irony) in a Southern Comfort commercial and on a single by Tom Jones—recognition for the songwriting abilities that she undersold and probably underused.

In 2016, the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened in Washington, DC, and Odetta was featured in an exhibit alongside Lead Belly and Josh White, including one of the few images of her performing during the March on Washington and one of her Africanesque robes.

Her friends will always wonder about unexploited opportunities and unfortunate decisions that sidelined Odetta for so many years. “Nobody managed her,” Selma Thaler observed. “Nobody told her what to wear. Nobody advised. She was on her own. And she was a classic. You know classics sort of fade in and out. It’s hurtful to me; it really is, because I think she was so extraordinary.”⁶

But then again, they remind themselves, her lifelong quest to uplift African Americans and engage the human spirit did leave behind an important legacy. “I think an argument could be made that she never found her niche,” her former guitarist Peter Childs said. “But Lord, look what she did in the process of looking for it. The core of the whole 1960s thing was spiritual. It had to do with feeling the common humanity of the human race, feeling that the whole human race was a bunch of bodies moving. . . . I really believe that the real effect that she had, the real contribution, is impossible to put into words.”⁷

Harry Belafonte reached a similar conclusion. “The power of what she brought and contributed cannot be measured just in terms of how many people showed up at the concert,” he said. “That’s a numerical judgment. But I think the people who heard her became deeply committed to a force and something that she brought to the table that was so artful.”⁸

At her memorial, Belafonte mused about who might be the next Odetta to come along to help fight the next fight and bring to light the next injustice, in words that seem more relevant today than ever before. “Who did she inspire? Who will be the Odetta of now? Who will have her courage to stand up in the face of so much and relentlessly impose art and goodness and conscience on the needs of her time. Who will fill that space?”⁹