Odetta by Ian Zack

In 1978 my husband and I went to the Philadelphia Folk Festival. Our interest in folk rock turned into a deep love of folk music.

We attended concerts around Philly and bought recordings and listened to WXPN on the radio, discovering favorite singers.

One name we heard was Odetta, Odetta, and we knew she was a queen who had once ruled and was still worshipped.

I was a child in the 1950s, cushioned in my working class white neighborhood, unaware of things beyond my front door when Odetta was breaking into songs that stirred souls and feed movements and engendered a whole generation of singers whose names filled the airwaves of my sixties teenage years.

I knew so little about her.

Ian Zack's Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest  is a wonderful biography of Odetta that presents her life, her art, and her legacy.

Odetta's amazing voice spurred teachers to encourage training and her mother scrimped to find the funds for voice lessons. After high school, Odetta worked menial jobs days and studied European classical music nights, singing in the Verdi Requiem and Bach's Mass in B Minor. Odetta loved opera and art songs but knew her career options were nil because of her color.

Odetta was cast for a revival of Yip Harburg's Finian's Rainbow in 1950 which led to her work with Turnabout Theater Jr.

Folk music was the new big thing, The Weavers success spurring an interest in folk songs. Friends took Odetta to hear a concert including Lead Belly songs and it "touched the core of me," she said. It changed the twenty-year-old's life.

The shy girl whose voice was a powerful instrument sang with her eyes closed as she inhabited the songs of her people.
She eschewed straightening her hair, cutting it short and leaving it natural, unwittingly engendering a movement.

Pete Seeger became her biggest fan and promoter. Generations claimed Odetta as their spiritual mother including Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, Carly Simon, The Kinks, Grace Slick, and Janis Ian.

There are so many interesting stories in these pages. Odetta was on the TV Western Have Gun--Will Travel because Richard Boone was a fan. The script was a "clear endorsement of black rights," Zack writes.

With the arrival of the Beatles, popular music took a new turn and Odetta struggled to attract the new audience--basically, my generation. She had a series of flops. Her love life had its ups and downs, mostly downs, with a failed marriage and unsustainable relationships.

And yet with age, she became more comfortable with herself, confident on stage, celebrating her African American heritage. President Clinton awarded her the National Medal of the Arts and Humanities, confessing that she had inspired him as a boy.

I enjoyed this biography as a vehicle for learning more about this iconic singer and the role of folk music in American history. It was also a nostalgic trip 'down memory lane', recalling the first time I heard many of the artists who inform the story.

I was given access to a free ebook by the publisher through Edelweiss. My review is fair and unbiased.

Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest
Ian Zack
Beacon Press
Publication Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN 9780807035320, 0807035327
Hardcover $28.95 USD, $38.95 CAD, £22.50 GBP

from the publisher:

The first in-depth biography of the legendary singer and “Voice of the Civil Rights Movement,” who combatted racism and prejudice through her music.

Odetta channeled her anger and despair into some the most powerful folk music the world has ever heard. Through her lyrics and iconic persona, Odetta made lasting political, social, and cultural change.

A leader of the 1960s folk revival, Odetta is one of the most important singers of the last hundred years. Her music has influenced a huge number of artists over many decades, including Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, the Kinks, Jewel, and, more recently, Rhiannon Giddens and Miley Cyrus.

But Odetta’s importance extends far beyond music. Journalist Ian Zack follows Odetta from her beginnings in deeply segregated Birmingham, Alabama, to stardom in San Francisco and New York. Odetta used her fame to bring attention to the civil rights movement, working alongside Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, and other artists. Her opera-trained voice echoed at the 1963 March on Washington and the Selma to Montgomery march, and she arranged a tour throughout the deeply segregated South. Her “Freedom Trilogy” songs became rallying cries for protesters everywhere.

Through interviews with Joan Baez, Harry Belafonte, Judy Collins, Carly Simon, and many others, Zack brings Odetta back into the spotlight, reminding the world of the folk music that powered the civil rights movement and continues to influence generations of musicians today.

In Hoboken by Christian Bauman

In Hoboken by Christian Bauman centers on a returning army vet and folksinger "born fifty years too late."

The novel is a study of a group of diverse friends bound by a shared history and a love of music and is informed by Bauman's experience as a vet and "itinerant guitar player." (You can hear the author sing online, including Waiting for the Fun here.)

The novel is set in 1995 in Hoboken, NJ and the city comes alive through the characters and story. I was reminded of Seinfeld or Friends, how the story keeps your interest because you like these characters.

The focus is on Thatcher, army vet and son of a famous mother and secretly the son of a famous folk singer. His old bandmates are forming a new group. They have day jobs so they can live, but music gives them life. Thatcher finds work at a mental health clinic, friending the patient Orris.

Bandmates include Thatcher's old friend James and the older, talented but crippled Marsh. Thatcher has a warm relation with the talented female singer Lou.

Even the supporting characters are terrific such as the landlady Mrs. Quatrone with her memories of Hoboken in the 1970s and 1980s, the decline and resurrection of flowers in the window boxes signifying the economic and social changes.

Bauman has a subtle wit that brought chuckles.

By the time first rounds were drunk and guitars tuned it was 1:30 A.M. They put themselves into a loose circle in the middle of the room, eyeing one another. Thatcher couldn't decide whether it reminded him of Old West gunslingers or lonely hearts at an eighth-grade dance.~ from In Hoboken by Christian Bauman

Crisis moments come to my favorite characters with a death and near death and accident. In the end, Thatcher must face his demons.

Tell me, what part of any of this isn't disturbing?~from In Hoboken by Christian Bauman

Thanks to the 'Net, I was able to find a copy of this 2008 novel. Bauman's other novels include The Ice Beneath You and Voodoo Lounge.

 book description:

The son of a feminist icon and a folk singer whose suicide gained him cult status, Thatcher Smith was born potential royalty in New York’s music scene. Instead, he keeps his parentage secret first by disappearing into the army then by taking his guitar across the river to working class Hoboken, New Jersey to form a band. There, amidst the dive bars and all-night diners of 1995, Thatcher and his friends struggle to make meaningful music in a culture turning away from it. A wicked sense of humor is key for the motley crew: Marsh, the beloved, polio-stricken local rock and roll kingpin; lesbian songwriting chanteuse Lou, to whom Thatcher is both deeply attracted and loves like a sister; James, guitar virtuoso, daytime World Trade Center employee, and owner of the floor Thatcher sleeps on; and locals like Orris, the overweight, half-blind, mad prophet of Hoboken’s west side, and patient at the mental-health clinic where Thatcher is a clerk. As in Roddy Doyle’s The Commitments and Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity, music is the heart of the story, but in In Hoboken the place and the people are what make it vibrantly come alive.
 
“While the book is a work of fiction, it aptly captures the early music scene—namely the musicians who came to Hoboken with little else but a dream and a guitar strapped over their shoulders.” —Hoboken Reporter

Wasn't That a Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle for the Soul of America

We sang the songs in elementary school music classes.

I Ride an Old Paint
Drill Ye Tarriers, Drill
Big Rock Candy Mountain
The Erie Canal
On Top of Old Smokey
Paddy Works on the Railway

And in scouts and church camp.

Michael, Row the Boat Ashore
Kumbaya 
If I Had a Hammer
Little Boxes

We heard the songs on the radio and played them on our record players and hi-fis and cassette players and CD players.

This Land is your Land 
Good Night, Irene
Turn! Turn! Turn!
Kisses Sweeter Than Wine
Tom Dooley
Guantanamo

Generations of musicians have recorded the songs.

Where Have All the Flowers Gone
Wimoweh
Sloop John B

I sang St. James Infirmary and Leatherwing Bat as bedtime songs.

On family trips we sang to Dangerous Songs, belting out Garbage and Beans in My Ears.

In a live concert at Penn's Landing in Philadelphia, Pete Seeger taught the crowd The Garden Song.

The music sang and recorded by Pete Seeger definitely imparted certain values. And that is exactly what Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, Lee Hays, and Fred Hellerman intended. "Cultural equity and global harmony" were the suspect values lurking behind the Weaver's music. It doesn't sound dangerous, just mainstream liberal-progressive stuff. Except those values had led Pete and Ronnie and Lee and Fred to join the Communist party and although they had dropped out, they could not escape the association. And being pro-union, anti-war, globalists extolling the common man in those days was just as bad as wearing a big red "S" for Socialist.

Wasn't That a Time by Jesse Jarnow is the story of the Weavers and the early folk music scene, presenting their battles with the House Un-American Committee and Blacklisting.

It was an age of fear. President Eisenhower had denounced Communists as traitors and a threat. Idealists like Pete Seeger, Ronnie Gilbert, and Lee Hayes were attracted to the Communist party for its high ideals of equality. Events in the USSR disquieted American communists and they drifted away from the Party. But they held onto the values which in time became mainstream progressive liberal values.

Meanwhile, the Weaver brought Folk Music from square 'ethnic' music to mainstream, dominating the airwaves and influencing a generation of younger musicians, even while turning it into counter-culture protest music.

Music--Art--was a weapon, Pete Seeger believed. And his goal was to impact how Americans thought, through music, changing our values.

Although not strictly a biography, we learn about the Weaver's personal lives, their demons and struggles, the arc of their careers. We learn how their music changed as they struggled to walk the fine line between commercial success and staying true to their values. Pete left the group and several talented young men replaced Pete, but in the end, the group broke up.

So many folk singer's names appeared: Huddie Ledbetter, Josh White, Malvina Reynolds, Paul Robeson, Oscar Brand, Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Dave Von Ronk, Alan Lomax, The Kingston Trio, Peter, Paul and Mary, Alan Arkin, Will Geer, Holly Near--and of course, Woody Guthrie and his son Arlo.

Seeger became an environmentalist activist with the Clearwater Hudson River restoration. We loved singing with the songs on the Clearwater album--"You can't eat the oysters in New Haven Harbor, you can't eat the oysters that live in the bay, 'cause New Haven sewage is dumping down on 'em, if I were an oyster I'd get out today."

As I read the book I realized how deeply the Weavers music changed America. I remembered the last time we saw Seeger live, thousands under a huge tent along the Delaware River, hanging on his every word, being taught new songs and singing along with his standards. We felt a community of spirit in the singing. How many of us knew or remembered that Seeger had appeared before the House and was convicted of perjury?

I received a free ebook from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for a fair and unbiased review.

Wasn't That a Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle for the Soul of America
by Jesse Jarnow
Perseus Books, Da Capo Press
Pub Date 06 Nov 2018
Hardcover $27.00 (USD)
ISBN: 9780306902079

read an article with Jarnow at
https://www.dacapopress.com/articles/a-talk-with-jesse-jarnow-author-of-wasnt-that-a-time/

from the publisher

The dramatic untold story of the Weavers, the hit-making folk-pop quartet destroyed with the aid of the United States government--and who changed the world, anyway.

Following a series of top 10 hits that became instant American standards, the Weavers dissolved at the height of their fame. Wasn't That a Time: The Weavers, the Blacklist, and the Battle for the Soul of America details the remarkable rise of Pete Seeger's unlikely band of folk heroes, from basement hootenannies to the top of the charts, before a coordinated harassment campaign at the hands of Congress's House Un-American Activities Committee and the emergent right-wing media saw them unable to find work and dropped by their label while their songs still hovered on Billboard's lists.

Turning the black-and-white 1950s into vivid color, Wasn't That a Time uses the Weavers to illuminate a dark and complex period of American history. Emerging while a highly divided populace was bombarded and further divided by fake news--and progressive organizations and individuals found themselves repressed under the pretenses of national security--the Weavers would rise, fall, and rise again. With origins in the radical folk collective the Almanac Singers and the ambitious People's Songs, both pioneering the use of music as a transformative political organizing tool, the singing activists in the Weavers set out to change the world with songs as their weapons.

Using previously unseen journals and letters, unreleased recordings, once-secret government documents, and other archival research, veteran music journalist and WFMU DJ Jesse Jarnow uncovers the immense hopes, incredible pressures, and daily struggles of the four distinct and often unharmonious personalities at the heart of the Weavers. With a class and race-conscious global vision of music that now make them seem like time travelers from the 21st century, the Weavers would transform material from American blues singer Lead Belly ("Goodnight Irene"), the Bahamas ("Wreck of the John B"), and South Africa ("Wimoweh") into songs that remain ubiquitous from rock clubs to Broadway shows.

Featuring quotes about the Weavers' influence from David Crosby, the Beach Boys' Al Jardine, and the Byrds' Roger McGuinn, Wasn't That a Time explores how the group's innocent-sounding harmonies might be heard as a threat worthy of decades of investigation by the FBI--and how the band's late '50s reformation engendered a new generation of musicians to take up the Weavers' non-violent weaponry: eclectic songs, joyous harmonies, and the power of music.