On Dec. 10, 1959, CBS, in partnership with Revlon, broadcast a prime-time special called “Tonight With Belafonte,” produced and hosted by Harry Belafonte, the debonair and rawboned Jamaican-American singer.These weren’t easy years for Black families to gather around the television. The moment is when the subject watched Elvis Presley’s appearance on “The Ed Sullivan Show” on Sept. 9, 1956.For Black audiences and many future musicians, the crucial moment came three years later. She once called it mere “self-defense.”Before long, to her dismay, Grossman’s better-known white clients — Dylan; Joan Baez; Peter, Paul and Mary — vastly eclipsed her in popularity. He said that the first time he heard her, “I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson.”He bought her 1957 album “Ballads and Blues.” “I learned almost every song off the record, right then and there, even borrowing the hammering-on style,” Dylan said. “There was no way I could say the things I was thinking, but I could sing them,” she said. The songs she heard and later went in search of — convict songs, spirituals, slave songs — provided a political awakening.Of this awakening, she would say: “It straightened my back and it kinked my hair.” She realized early that “society’s foot is on your throat” and “every which way you turn you can’t get from under that foot.” About singing these old songs, she said: “I could get my rocks off, being furious.”Odetta began playing clubs in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, where she ultimately moved. Born on New Year’s Eve in 1930 in Birmingham, Alabama, Odetta Holmes grew up to become a paradoxical phenomenon: an actress, civil rights activist, and musician transgressing She Remembering Odetta, Whose Powerful Voice Met a Profound Moment Diese Ausgabe - Odetta - der Billigserie (7 LPs plus Radioaufnahmen auf 4 CDs für knapp 12 €) ist absolut empfehlenswert.
In 1999 she released her first studio album in 14 years, Blues Everywhere I Go.
This was years before the “Black is beautiful” movement, and unstraightened hair was a real rarity — so much so that, for a time, the cut was called “an Odetta.”Zack’s biography, a solid work of reportage and writing, is one of two new books that assess Odetta’s life and legacy.
This moment fueled Odetta’s musical genius, she was so affected by that folk session that she eventually quit her job with the travelling show to stay in San Francisco. She communicated her ideas with the stroke of her guitar strings. A waterboy for a college football team discovers he has a … She could overpower some songs; at other times she could sound remote and steely. One executive asked, “Excuse me, Harry, but what is an Odetta?” Revlon was bemused to learn she did not wear makeup.The hourlong show was commercial-free except for a Revlon spot at the beginning and end. It’s somewhat extreme, but not farfetched, to call Odetta a perfectionist. Her performances throughout New York and California would eventually award her the opportunity to successfully produce her own albums and tour across the world.Odetta was drawn to the art of music when she was just a little girl.
The lyrics would pour out of her the way water spills out of cups. He teaches American Studies and African-American Studies at Yale, and his book expands the context of Odetta’s songs, setting her alongside figures like Zora Neale Hurston, W.E.B.
Odetta accompanied him and 250,000 people on the March on Washington. Odetta’s performance of this song visually represents musical immersion. When he developed black lung disease, the family moved to Los Angeles to find cleaner air.