![]() “And there was ’Detta, anything but slim, anything but a dainty beauty.” Mapes and Odetta went to a bar called Vesuvio that night and returned to Mapes’s apartment, where they stayed up singing songs that were generally categorized as blues or gospel but were beginning to be described as folk: “Take This Hammer,” “Another Man Done Gone,” “I’ve Been ’Buked and I’ve Been Scorned.” “She was one of the Ziegfeld girls, dressed up like one, who came down the famous Ziegfeld stairway,” Mapes said. Her childhood friend Jo Mapes was living there, and came out to see the woman she knew as ’Detta. In July, 1951, Odetta visited San Francisco as part of a summer-stock performance of “Finian’s Rainbow,” her first trip away from home. Their version sounds like a field of Disney bluebells breaking into song. The Weavers dropped the statutory rape, kept the river, and tacked a marriage announcement to the top of the song. Lead Belly’s original, itself likely a remodelling of a Texas folk ballad, talks of a woman who is “too young” and who vexes the singer so much that he talks of “jumping in, into the river” and drowning. “No American could escape that song unless you plugged up your ears and went out into the wilderness,” Pete Seeger, then a member of the Weavers, later said. That summer, in 1950, the folk quartet the Weavers put their chirpy, orchestral version of Lead Belly’s “Goodnight, Irene” at No. Reese also encouraged Odetta to open herself up to the burgeoning folk movement but, as Ian Zack writes in “ Odetta: A Life in Music and Protest,” she had been “taught to look down on such lowbrow fare, wasn’t quite ready to heed that advice.” Her childhood voice coach had died, and Odetta had started working with a singer from New York named Paul Reese, who coaxed her considerable lower range into a true contralto voice. Odetta joined the show as a chorus member, and received positive reviews. A romp about a leprechaun laced with a dash of social-justice pedagogy, “Finian’s Rainbow” tells the story of a racist senator who is zapped into being Black, so that he may experience the sting of Jim Crow laws firsthand. In 1950, “Finian’s Rainbow,” first a Broadway hit in 1947, was revived for an outdoor presentation at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park. “I had a dream of getting a quartet together,” Odetta said, years later, “learning the repertoire of the oratorios, and then offering ourselves to schools and churches.” Marian Anderson and Roland Hayes had found fame in both Europe and America, so the idea of a Black classical-music career was not unrealistic. After high school, Odetta worked in a department store and a button factory while studying European classical music at Los Angeles City College in the evenings. A contralto who recorded some of the earliest opera sides for Victor Talking Machine Company’s Red Seal label, Spencer taught Odetta German lieder and other art songs. When Flora began working as a custodian for a puppet show called the Turnabout Theatre, one of its founders, Harry Burnett, heard Odetta singing-or “screeching,” as Odetta described it-and decided to pay for her lessons with a voice teacher named Janet Spencer. Her piano teacher told Flora that Odetta should start taking voice lessons. One day, while singing scales with a friend, Odetta hit a high C. But, in 1937, few people outside the academy were talking about folk music, and there wasn’t a single figure in popular culture who looked like Odetta.Īt eleven, Odetta began taking piano lessons. Twenty years later, Odetta would redirect the path of something called “folk music” by synthesizing the stagecraft of opera and country on prime-time television. Odetta raised her eyebrows at the rough-hewn songs and comic sketches, but she listened. He took over the radio on Saturday nights and tuned in to the Grand Ole Opry, broadcast directly from Nashville. Her stepfather, Zadock Felious, had a different taste in music. On Saturday afternoons, Odetta and Jimmie Lee listened to the Metropolitan Opera on KECA. At home, Flora stressed the importance of “proper diction” and straightened her daughters’ hair. Only six, she was already bigger than the other kids when she arrived in East Hollywood with her mother, Flora, and her younger sister Jimmie Lee. ![]() In 1937, Odetta Felious Holmes moved from Birmingham, Alabama, to Los Angeles. ![]()
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