Odetta’s One Grain of Sand 9781501333323, 9781501333354, 9781501333347

Citation preview

ONE GRAIN OF SAND Praise for the series: It was only a matter of time before a clever publisher realized that there is an audience for whom Exile on Main Street or Electric Ladyland are as significant and worthy of study as The Catcher in the Rye or Middlemarch … The series … is freewheeling and eclectic, ranging from minute rock-geek analysis to idiosyncratic personal celebration — The New York Times Book Review Ideal for the rock geek who thinks liner notes just aren’t enough — Rolling Stone One of the coolest publishing imprints on the planet — Bookslut These are for the insane collectors out there who appreciate fantastic design, well-executed thinking, and things that make your house look cool. Each volume in this series takes a seminal album and breaks it down in startling minutiae. We love these. We are huge nerds — Vice A brilliant series … each one a work of real love — NME (UK) Passionate, obsessive, and smart — Nylon Religious tracts for the rock ’n’ roll faithful — Boldtype [A] consistently excellent series — Uncut (UK) We … aren’t naive enough to think that we’re your only source for reading about music (but if we had our way … watch out). For those of you who really like to know everything there is to know about an album, you’d do well to check out Bloomsbury’s “33 1/3” series of books — Pitchfork For reviews of individual titles in the series, please visit our blog at 333sound.com and our website at http:​//www​.bloo​msbur​y.com​/ musi​cands​ounds​tudie​s Follow us on Twitter: @333books Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/33.3books For a complete list of books in this series, see the back of this book.

Forthcoming in the series: Hamilton by Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Switched on Bach by Roshanak Kheshti Southern Accents by Michael Washburn Golden Hits of the Shangri-Las by Ada Wolin Timeless by Martin Deykers The Holy Bible by David Evans Tin Drum by Agata Pyzik The Wild Tchoupitoulas by Bryan Wagner Blue Lines by Ian Bourland Diamond Dogs by Glenn Hendler xx by Jane Morgan Voodoo by Faith A. Pennick Boy in Da Corner by Sandra Song Band of Gypsys by Michael E. Veal and many more …

One Grain of Sand

Matthew Frye Jacobson

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Inc 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in the United States of America 2019 Copyright © Matthew Frye Jacobson, 2019 For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 121 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: 333sound.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Inc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: PB: 978-1-5013-3332-3 ePDF: 978-1-5013-3334-7 eBook: 978-1-5013-3333-0 1

Series: 33 3

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

To Odetta’s memory, and to all those who fight her fights

vi

Contents

Introduction: One Grain of Sand Midnight Special: The Archivist Cool Water: The Coffeehouse Moses, Moses: Spiritual Geographies Cotton Fields: Social Geographies Conclusion: Ain’t No Grave

1 13 39 61 89 117

Acknowledgments Notes

121 126

Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folksong—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side of the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people. —W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk1 Odetta Felious can harden her voice into a blunt cudgel, deadly with hatred. She can rumble it like a distant thunder, freighted with vengeance. She can slur it with sobs, thrust from a heartbroken soul. She can breathe it out, light as thistledown, or turn it out perfectly formed, every word etched and delineated, as starchy and clean as a little girl’s pinafore. —Doris Lockerman, “Odetta Was Born with a Voice Like a Weapon” 2 I have never been a migratory worker, but I know how it feels to ‘Ramble Round Your City.’ Through folk music, history can be closer and warmer. —Odetta, liner notes for One Grain of Sand

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk [1903] (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 189. 2 Doris Lockerman, “Odetta Was Born with a Voice Like a Weapon,” The Atlanta Constitution, March 1, 1962, p. 26. 1

Introduction: One Grain of Sand

When twenty-year-old Odetta Felious Holmes—classically trained as a vocalist and poised to become “the next Marian Anderson”—veered away from both opera and musical theater in favor of performing politically charged field hollers, prison songs, work songs, and spirituals before mixed-race audiences in 1950s’ coffeehouses, she was making a portentous decision for both American music and Civil Rights culture. Released the same year as her famous rendition of “I’m on My Way” at the March on Washington, One Grain of Sand captures the social justice project that was Odetta’s voice. “There was no way I could say the things I was thinking, but I could sing them,” she later remarked. In pieces like “Midnight Special,” “Moses, Moses,” “Ain’t No Grave,” and “Ramblin’ Round Your City,” One Grain of Sand embodies Odetta’s approach to the folk repertoire as both an archive of black history and a vehicle for radical expression. For many among her audience, a song like “Cotton Fields” represented a first introduction to black history at a time when there was as yet no academic discipline going by this name, and when history books themselves still peddled convenient fictions of a fundamentally “happy” plantation past. And for many

O ne G rain of S and

among her audience, black and white, this young woman’s pride in black artistry and resolve, and her open rage and her challenge to whites to recognize who they were and who they had been, too, modeled the very honesty and courage that the movement now called for. In 1965 Harry Belafonte and Odetta traveled to Selma for the famous march to Montgomery in the wake of the Bloody Sunday confrontation on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. At one juncture, as Belafonte recounted at a 2009 memorial service for Odetta, the two were supposed to have shared a car with Viola Gregg Liuzzo, a white Civil Rights worker who had come down from Detroit, but Liuzzo had some sort of emergency to attend to, and so the two performers told her to take the car and go on ahead without them. When they later learned that Liuzzo had been stopped on the road and murdered at the hands of the Ku Klux Klan, Odetta said to Belafonte, “You know, Harry, we’re going to have to give some serious consideration as to why it was her instead of us. What does this tell us we need to do?”1 It is a chilling reminder of the danger couched behind the phrase “Civil Rights work,” and of the ways that “cultural workers” like Belafonte, Odetta, Dick Gregory, Mahalia Jackson, and Nina Simone were risking far more than their sponsorship and their markets when they took up the cause. While Odetta might have wondered what she and Belafonte “needed to do” next, by 1965 she had already done far more for Civil Rights than many realize. It is worth considering what it meant, politically, for a twenty-three-year-old African American woman to take the stage as early as 1953, to face an all- or predominantly white audience, and to sing songs like 2

I N T R O DU C T IO N : O N E G R A I N O F S A N D

“Take this Hammer,” “Water Boy,” and “Another Man Done Gone,” so evocative of slavery and of emancipation’s broken promises. As a young girl Odetta had moved from her native Birmingham, Alabama, to Los Angeles, where she received classical training as a singer. She began with piano lessons, but her piano teacher quickly pegged the young girl as someone with the talent for classical voice training. Odetta’s mother, who worked as a cleaning woman for the Turnabout Theatre in LA, was able to get her a hearing, whereupon the owners of the theater itself consented to fund her training.2 “I had a teacher who, because I was a big black young lady— young girl—she was going to make me into another Marian Anderson,” Odetta later told an interviewer. “Well I adored Marian Anderson, and still do. But I knew I didn’t want to be anybody else,” didn’t want to be “‘another’ anything.” Nor did she want to be yet another victim of the classical world’s racism, and she noted well that Anderson—even as the best classical singer in the world—was made to struggle.3 After a successful run in Finian’s Rainbow that had been arranged for her by the Turnabout Theatre at the age of nineteen, Odetta departed from the anticipated path and the associated expectations that went along with her musical training, and took up folk singing, including work songs, prison songs, and field hollers, alongside folk standards already made popular by singers like Woody Guthrie, Josh White, and the Weavers. High school friend Jo Mapes, a rising talent on the California folk scene herself, introduced Odetta to the coffeehouses of San Francisco and North Beach, and even taught her a few guitar chords.4 Classical “was a nice exercise but it had nothing to do with my life,” 3

O ne G rain of S and

Odetta explained in retrospect. “The folk songs were the anger, the venom, the hatred of myself and everybody else and everything else. I could get my rocks off within those work songs and things without having to say ‘I hate you and I hate me.’ In fact, it was the area of the work songs that helped heal me.”5 “The paradox—and a fearful paradox it is,” wrote her friend James Baldwin, —is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent, as long as he is unwilling to accept his past. To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like clay in a season of drought. How can the American Negro’s past be used?6 It is thus the “anger,” the “venom,” and the “healing” in Odetta’s repertoire that most interest me here, and the politics of these, the “usable past-ness” of these. Self-described as one of the last of the Bohemians, Odetta joined a musical community in the early 1950s that incrementally became the political community she served and helped to galvanize and inspire in the 1960s.7 There was a significant racial politics to Odetta’s aesthetic choices—there were undeniably political valences to her sonic palette of contralto wails and guttural growls, and to her work on stage, not simply as a performer, but as a public archivist, delivering up to consciousness some long-suppressed historical sounds and scenes that might motivate the black people in her audience and that might accuse, remind, challenge, and prod the white people. “The sorrow of her race is in her voice,” one reviewer wrote in 4

I N T R O DU C T IO N : O N E G R A I N O F S A N D

1959; “The protest, too, at the misfortune of being ever in the minority, ever against the world. And the pride, also, that comes of physical strength and unashamed feeling. . . . [Her Town Hall performance] gave us the picture of a strong and indomitable people, gave it to us with organ sounds and dark cathedral colors.”8 In Blues People—published the same year as One Grain of Sand—LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka) wrote of the cultural and social trajectory that middle-class African Americans had traced as they “moved successfully into the featureless syndrome” of mainstream (white) American life, “purg[ing] themselves of ‘stink’ and color to crawl into those casually sanctified halls of white middle-brow culture.” In one sense, he wrote, They have traveled a complete circle, stepping right back into the heart of a paternal and patriarchal society— from slave to citizen—and have run through blues and discarded it on the way. But they had to, it was one of those ugly reminders that they had once been outside the walls of the city. And there are not too many people in this country, black or white, who’d be willing to admit that.9 Jones/Baraka was not talking about Odetta’s brand of “blues,” exactly, but nonetheless she was definitely among those “willing to admit” of that existence “outside the walls,” and to chronicle both the pain and the triumph that was archived in music’s “ugly reminders”—blues, shouts, spirituals, hollers, and otherwise. She once took a sledgehammer to some stones, simply in order to “get the feel” for the songs of the county farm. “She got the feel of the song alright,” wrote an 5

O ne G rain of S and

interviewer. “And a bent back. ‘So now I know the secret of folk singing,’ says she. ‘Feel the emotions, but steer clear of the sledge.’ ”10 It was because of her fine-grained understanding of the repertoire—her deep feeling for the history that had produced the songs—that fellow folk singer Richie Havens described Odetta as “not just a singer [but] . . . an educator.”11 She cut a powerful figure, even as a young woman. She occupied the stage and commanded a room like the classical diva she had been trained to be. She insisted on the beauty of blackness long before the notion “black is beautiful” had been popularized by the Black Consciousness Movement or had become iconic in the figure of Angela Davis—the hairdo later known as a “natural” or an “Afro” was for a brief time called an “Odetta,” after her short-cropped style.12 And she presented a persona of power and force that ran far enough ahead of second-wave feminism that many critics had no idea exactly what to make of it. “There are those who say she sounds like a man,” the Chicago Tribune noted flatly. Grasping for some kind of critical principle, others would write of the “tenderness and strength, boldness and meekness” with which she conjoined “the masculine and feminine of song . . . with a natural vigor and grace.” Yet another would note, “Negro spirituals, as they are most often heard in concert programs, have become art songs, emasculated of all their roughness. Not so with Odetta.”13 Her queering of prevailing gender conventions was a signature element of Odetta’s style in a work song like “I’ve Been Driving on Bald Mountain” or “Ancestors: Suite,” an epic journey through the history of black life in the South, but like black pride itself, it was an instrument of critique and resistance within a repertoire that 6

I N T R O DU C T IO N : O N E G R A I N O F S A N D

was fully intended to address the history of injustice and the realities of a radical political moment. One Grain of Sand wrapped up Odetta’s relationship with Vanguard Records; she had signed a new contract with RCA in late 1962, and One Grain was released on January 1, 1963.14 It rang in an extraordinary year, even for a historical stretch in which every year was noteworthy in its own way. Marking the one hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, 1963 was bound to be a unique moment of contest, elaborately observed in some quarters and violently defaced in others. That April witnessed the Civil Rights movement’s “Birmingham Campaign,” a closely coordinated campaign of non-violent, direct action against the practices and institutions of segregation. This was a virtual laboratory in the tactic that Martin Luther King, Jr. described as seeking to “create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.”15 The campaign was greeted by the snarling German Shepherds and explosive water cannons, unleashed on young black protesters by sheriff Eugene “Bull” Connor, that have become the stuff of Civil Rights iconography. King himself was arrested and taken to jail on April 12 (Good Friday), where, on smuggled scraps of paper, he penned the now immortal “Letter from Birmingham City Jail.” “We know through painful experience,” he wrote, “that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.”16 The Gaston Motel, where King had been staying in Birmingham, was nearly leveled by a bomb in May. In a Civil Rights speech on June 11, John F. Kennedy spoke 7

O ne G rain of S and

on TV from the Oval Office, laying out the terms of what would ultimately be the next year’s milestone Civil Rights Act. Hours later Medgar Evers, the NAACP field secretary in Mississippi, was gunned down in his driveway in Jackson. August saw the March on Washington for Justice and Jobs, where King gave his famous “I have a dream” speech while flanked by noted black activists and artists, Odetta included. September suffered the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing—Birmingham again—in which four young girls were killed when a bomb ripped through the black church in the minutes before a Sunday service. The year closed out with the assassination of the Movement’s most significant white ally, President Kennedy, in November; and finally a “Boycott of Christmas” led by six highly visible artists, including Odetta, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and James Baldwin, because as a society the United States was now clearly “mocking the Prince of Peace.” Amid the ubiquitous centenary observances of the Emancipation Proclamation, Baldwin wrote to his nephew (now immortalized in The Fire Next Time), “You know, and I know, that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon.”17 It is best to read Odetta’s One Grain of Sand as poignant commentary on this atmosphere of hope and destruction, and also as an archival foray into the past—at once bitter and “usable”—that helped to explain it. The exercise requires what Alexandra Vazquez, the brilliant analyst of Cuban music and performance, calls “listening in detail.”18 The album’s title cut, “One Grain of Sand,” is a gentle lullaby written by Pete Seeger for his baby daughter in 1956.19 In delicate, reverent 8

I N T R O DU C T IO N : O N E G R A I N O F S A N D

tones, the singer expresses humility and wonder before the magnificence of creation: One grain of sand One drop of water in the deep blue sea One grain of sand One little you, one little me Perhaps more than is typical of Odetta, her rendition here hews extremely closely to Seeger’s original. A subtle and loving accompaniment has been dropped in underneath Seeger’s a capella vocal line (Odetta on guitar, Bill Lee on bass), but Odetta’s vocal line itself replicates Seeger’s with remarkable fidelity. The song gives voice to and honors the immensity of the love that binds us—“I love you so / More than you’ll ever, ever, ever know”—but it is also a tender expression of awe before the immensity of a universe whose own miraculous nature is a revelation in its every single mote—in “one grain of sand in all the world . . . , one little boy, one little girl . . ., one little star up in the lonely blue. . ., one little me, one little you.” This notion of the miracle within each microcosm supplies the framing device for my approach to One Grain of Sand itself. The album, it seems to me, embodies an extensive, curated archive of African American struggle, pain, rage, and resilience since emancipation. The book is not a track-by-track accounting of the entire album, but is arranged in four parts, each one taking a particular song as a “grain of sand” that carries and reveals its own immensity of larger histories. “Midnight Special” opens onto the prison song as a genre, and on the deep, post-emancipation history 9

O ne G rain of S and

of southern criminal justice from which it emerged. “Cool Water,” Odetta’s refashioning of a popular 1930s’ “cowboy” song into a Civil Rights ballad, prompts an examination of the political work that folk music was carrying out in these years, and folk culture’s remaking of the 1950s’ coffeehouse into an important site of political work across generational and racial lines. “Moses, Moses” illuminates the blurred boundary between the sacred and the secular in Civil Rights discourse, and Odetta’s deep engagement with the vast body of biblically based, liberatory narratives at play in African American culture. And “Cotton Fields” and “Boll Weevil” at once emerge from and speak to one hundred years of southern political economy—the South’s peonage system in the wake of slavery—and one hundred years of American rumination over the meaning of “the South” as fact and symbol. Odetta’s musical archive across these four areas—the prison, the coffeehouse, the church, and the plantation—presents a rich record of African American life, thought, and politics between Emancipation and the March on Washington—the epic of post-emancipation history in, as it were, one grain of sand. The work presented here began as part of a book on the cultural history of the Civil Rights era, a book that—as my own understanding of Odetta and her significance grew— took the title Odetta’s Voice and Other Weapons. That book is yet to be written, but I am sincere in both my argument that Odetta’s artistry was a “weapon” in the Civil Rights struggle, and that cultural work in general was crucial to the era’s politics. One contention here is that Odetta’s work between 1953 and 1963 cannot be fully understood in isolation from 10

I N T R O DU C T IO N : O N E G R A I N O F S A N D

the timetables of Civil Rights history—Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Emmett Till murder (1955), the Montgomery Bus Boycott and emergence of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC, 1956–57), the integration of Little Rock’s Central High (1957), the sit-in movement and the emergence of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC, 1960), The Freedom Rides (1961), and the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom (1963). She began these years singing in small coffeehouses like the Tin Angel in North Beach and the Gate of Horn in Chicago; by 1960 she was playing before larger crowds on college campuses across the country. This trajectory was inseparable from the rise of SNCC and the sit-in movement. By 1963 she would be among the performers sharing the stage with Martin Luther King, Jr., before hundreds of thousands, at the March on Washington. My more radical claim is that the Civil Rights movement cannot be fully understood in isolation from the cultural work that people like Odetta— and Harry Belafonte, Diahann Carroll, Sidney Poitier, Nina Simone, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, and Jim Brown—were doing in these years.20 It was, so to say, all the tiny but rapidly multiplying “publics” of the Tin Angel and Gate of Horn who later turned out en masse for the March. Odetta herself said this best. “You know, they told me in grammar school, as we were reading about slavery, that the slaves were happy and singing all the time. That was at a time when I felt—I think we all go through this—it couldn’t be in the book if it weren’t true. And I believed—I swallowed that thing, and it damaged me; I still have scars from that.” But it was folk music—literally the music of the “folk”—their 11

O ne G rain of S and

sorrow songs and field hollers and blues and prison songs— that called out these lies and set history right for Odetta. What they had been singing was not happiness. The music “straightened my back and kinked my hair.”21 This book sets out to elaborate all that Odetta might have meant by this, and to explore how it was so.

12

Midnight Special: The Archivist

“Midnight Special” is perhaps more familiar than any other song on One Grain of Sand. An earlier generation knew a version performed by Huddie Ledbetter and recorded by John and Alan Lomax at Angola Prison (Louisiana) in 1934. Later listeners knew the popular version from Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 1969 album Willy and the Poor Boys. There have been many other adaptations across several genres along the way, by Big Bill Broonzy, Josh White, Harry Belafonte, the Kingston Trio, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Bobby Darin, Little Richard, the Beatles, Cisco Houston, Mungo Jerry, Van Morrison, Eric Clapton, Buckwheat Zydeco, and ABBA. Folk radio shows in Chicago (WFMT) and Berkeley (KPFA) went by the name Midnight Special, as did a popular TV concert show (NBC, 1972–81) whose opening theme was rendered by Johnny Rivers, best known for “Secret Agent Man.” But Odetta’s recording is the one that will stay with you once you have heard it. Unlike all the other performers—even Leadbelly, in the Angola Prison recording—she sang “Midnight Special” in somber tones and with a gravity that took the song all the way back to where it came from: an early twentieth-century penal and convict

O ne G rain of S and

labor system that at once drew upon and sought to extend the nineteenth-century rule of slavery. Though “the Midnight Special” itself was a train—most likely the Missouri Pacific Railroad’s Houstonian, which departed Houston for New Orleans every night around midnight—this is not a train song after the fashion of “Rock Island Line” or “Lonesome Whistle.” Rather, it is a prison song; its ambiguous mixture of hope and despair is firmly fixed within the walls of a county farm, whose grim darkness is momentarily brightened each night by the light of a passing train. Let the Midnight Special shine her light on me, Let the Midnight Special shine her ever-lovin’ light on me. Most renditions cast “Midnight Special” as a song of hope. Even Josh White (whose version appeared on Southern Exposure: An Album of Jim Crow Blues) and Leadbelly (who sang the song from prison) perform it mostly in bright, major notes and in the up-tempo clip of a speeding train. White throws in a very spritely guitar break; later Leadbelly versions present the chorus in sunny, four-part harmonies. Appearing on Hullabaloo in 1964, Johnny Rivers gave the song a rockabilly lilt, while white teenagers did the frug in front of the bandstand. No darkness here. And indeed, as the standard story goes, inmates (though at exactly which prison is a matter of some dispute) held a superstition that if one were illuminated in the light of the passing train, it meant that a pardon was immanent. The 1938 WPA guide to Mississippi states that on visitor’s day at 14

M I D N IG H T SP E C IA L : T H E A R C H I V I ST

the state’s largest prison, Parchman Farm, “a train called the ‘Midnight Special’ brings the visitors to the farm, arriving about dawn and leaving at dusk. The Negro prisoners have made up ballads about the train, which they sing and chant while they work. . . . One song is ‘Heah comes yo’ woman, a pardon in her han’  /  Gonna say to de boss, I wants mah man / Let the Midnight Special shine its light on me.’” Camp One at Parchman was actually close enough to the tracks that a cell might momentarily bathe in the approaching train’s light, but the song has “made the rounds of other penitentiaries,” according to Stephen Wade; its vernacular verses now gather up specific details, names, and lore from other prisons in other locales as well, Angola included.1 So, yes, the ever-lovin’ light of hope. But there are other ways of understanding this song; and as Odetta showed, there are other ways of singing it, too. Back in 1927, even before the Angola Prison recording, Carl Sandberg had interpreted it this way in The American Songbook: This arrangement is from the song as rendered by midnight prowlers in Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas. It is impressionistic in style, delivering the substance of two lives in brief array. We see the man behind the bars looking out toward Roberta, who carries a document given her by some politician or precinct worker. The warden tells her, probably, the day is not Visitor’s Day. As her man considers that he has twenty years yet to serve, he cries out that he would rather be under the wheels of a fast midnight train.2 15

O ne G rain of S and

The “probably” here is interesting (“The warden tells her, probably, . . .”), because there is no mention of a warden in the verse as Sandburg transcribes it. Perhaps this is what he meant by “impressionistic style.” This version does end, though, on the line “Oh, twenty long years in de penitentiary.” Whether or not the onrush of light connotes suicide on the tracks in Odetta’s rendition, there is no question that she shares this darker understanding of the song’s meaning. Her last verse puts the case fairly plainly: if this is a song about release at all, it is about release through death. I’m going to leave you And my time ain’t long, I’ll be done with my grievin’ And my great long song. Interestingly, this is a verse that does not exist in most other versions of the song, including Odetta’s own Gate of Horn recording in 1957, which is rendered far more hopefully. (In the self-authored liner notes to that album, Odetta wrote, “In this prison song, the light . . . means freedom itself.” She had rethought that interpretation by One Grain of Sand, and she had restructured the song, as well.) The “I’m going to leave you” verse is adapted from a traditional one, rendered by folklorist Benjamin Botkin as, “I’m gwine away to leave you, an’ my time ain’t long  /  The man is gonna call me an’ I’m a-goin’ home.”3 Here the “ever-lovin’ light” of the oncoming train might be either a reference to death on the tracks, as in The American Songbook, or an inmate’s metaphor for the end of earthly troubles (as in Dylan’s later “I see my light come shinin’ / From the west down to the east / Any day now, any 16

M I D N IG H T SP E C IA L : T H E A R C H I V I ST

day now / I shall be released”). But in either case, her song is not about literally getting out of jail. In truth, Odetta’s 1963 rendering announces this as a song of an inmate’s despair long before she gets to these lines. A comparison with Leadbelly and Josh White—the two versions she was likely working with—is instructive. Here as elsewhere, Odetta proves herself as not only a student of Leadbelly but also one of his most important translators, working in conversation with his repertoire, but with perhaps more fidelity to the ambient history than to his renditions of the songs themselves. In the process, she also challenges the gendered conventions by which the “authenticity” of a figure like Leadbelly was popularly understood and discussed. First, her tempo: Odetta’s rendition is andante, or a walking pace (96 beats per minute), as against Leadbelly’s allegro (150 beats per minute) and Josh White’s positively ripping presto (192 beats per minute). This is a change of immense emotional impact—hers bears a heaviness of expression that is simply unlike any other version of the song extant. She also employs a darkness of voice that is in sharp contrast to the brighter tones of both Leadbelly and White. The very first line (“Well you wake up in the morning”) contains two highly pronounced sliding or “bent” notes— the hallmark of blues—on “wake” and “morning,” and she articulates the word “morning” itself somewhere between “mourn” and “moan.” Three seconds into the cut, that is, she has established a lament. This is quickly followed (“hear the ding-dong ring”) by a particular articulation of “ding-dong” in which she hits the d’s extra hard and drags the syllable “dong” behind the beat in such a way as to express a crushing 17

O ne G rain of S and

weariness and perhaps even a subtle disgust. The remaining lines of the first verse bemoan the prison’s starvation rations (“march to the table / you see the same old thing”—utensils and a pan but no food—a subtle rasp on the word “same old thing” here adding a layer of bitterness), then decry a life under perpetual threat (“if you say a thing about it / you’re in trouble with the man”), before arriving at a chorus that she also intones in adante, blued notes: “Let the Midnight Special . . . ” If this powerful musical frame of lamentation introduces a shade of meaning wholly absent in other versions, that meaning is augmented by Odetta’s reversal of the verses. This anguished opening contrasts sharply with the Leadbelly version, for instance, which commences with “Miss Rosie’s” arrival waving a “piece of paper in her hand”—that pardon or commutation, which most interpretations presume. Having immediately established the fact of pardon, Leadbelly’s chorus about the “ever-lovin’ light” of the Midnight Special registers as jubilant. Josh White, for his part, opens his upbeat rendition not with a verse at all, but with an amended, hopeful chorus: “Hey looka looka yonder / What in the world do I see / That Midnight Special / With its light on me.” Odetta’s version, in opening as gravely as it does, encourages us to interpret “Miss Rosie” quite differently by the time we meet her, as does her placement of the “pardon” in the penultimate verse (directly ahead of the release-through-death verse, “I’m going to leave you”). Often overlooked, it seems to me, is that even before she appears waving that magical “piece of paper in her hand,” the verity of Rosie’s visit is called into question. The narrator has 18

M I D N IG H T SP E C IA L : T H E A R C H I V I ST

spotted her, evidently from a distance, and this is relayed in the form of a dialogue with a cellmate. Yonder comes Miss Rosie. How in the world do you know? (How can you possibly tell it is her, all the way from here?) Well I knowed her by her apron And the dress she wore. You sure about that? Even the most hopeful versions of the song leave room for an interpretation in which Rosie’s sighting is mistaken, or fanciful—as fanciful as the superstition that the light of the Midnight Special might auger liberation. A black woman in 1920s’ Louisiana or Alabama storms over the horizon demanding that the white Captain “let loose mah man,” really? Hopeful seems more likely wishful. But Odetta’s version goes further. By its darkness, its mournfulness; by its blued notes and its solemn pace; by its ending not on liberation, but on death, this rendering roots the narrative in the African American past and present in such a way as to affirm—an unspoken truth that everybody knows—that the most fundamentally fanciful thing here is not the vision of Miss Rosie arriving with a pardon, but the very idea of a pardon. The depth and solemnity of her voice, as she sings lines like “you’re in trouble with the man,” “oh man, you better walk right,” “Sheriff he’ll arrest you,” or “you’re penitentiary bound” embed the song within a set of social realities that had fully defined African American life in the south across generations of woefully incomplete “emancipation” between Reconstruction and Odetta’s own 19

O ne G rain of S and

1963. Writing about Vera Hall, the woman first recorded singing “Another Man Done Gone,” one of the many songs of the county farm that Odetta would pluck from the archive, Alan Lomax noted, Like every underprivileged Negro in the South, Vera Hall knew all about the county farm and the state pen. . . . Although Vera Hall was a peaceloving cook and washerwoman and the pillar of the choir in her Baptist church, she knew about these things and she knew, as well, a song from the prison, a song about escape. Hall herself told Lomax, “Those old timey songs I just heard the people sing [were] something that just followed us.”4 This is precisely the place where Odetta sings from—from the shared black experience with ubiquitous lawmen and  their lawless practices of persecution, caprice, cruelty, and bondage. Among all the scores of artists to take up “Midnight Special” over the years, she alone rendered it as a prison song in the full realism and critical capacity of the genre. One Grain of Sand also includes another of the prison songs, “Roll on, Buddy,” whose narrative is cast as a grueling day of labor under the oversight of a “boss.” I looked at the sun, the sun looked low; Looked at my boss, was it time to go? He said, “Roll on, Buddy . . .” Later verses roll on into an inmate’s lament and an inmate’s defiance: “This old hammer is a little too heavy for my size,” and “This old hammer killed John Henry / But it won’t kill me, won’t kill me.” Both the song’s county farm setting and 20

M I D N IG H T SP E C IA L : T H E A R C H I V I ST

its description of hard labor and black defiance or resilience prompted Odetta, in later renditions, to combine “Roll on, Buddy” in medley form with the more overtly oppositional “Take this Hammer”: Well you can take this hammer, carry it to the captain, Take this hammer, carry it to the captain, Take this hammer, down to the captain, Tell him I’m done, boy, tell him I’m gone. I don’t want your cold iron shackles, I don’t want your cold iron shackles, I don’t want your cold iron shackles, On my leg, boy, on my leg. The song finally alludes to a Yoruba myth—via the Georgia and Carolina Sea Islands, and much later made famous in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon—that slaves might become empowered by a conjure man to escape the brutalities of slavery by taking wing and flying back to Africa. If he asks you, was I runnin’, If he asks you, was I runnin’, If he asks you, was I runnin’, Tell him I’m flyin’, boy, tell him I’m flyin’. Here, then, is what was most at stake for Odetta in breaking with Leadbelly, Josh White, and others to sing “Midnight Special” as a song of despair: her approach here embodies critical aspects of her folk repertoire in general—its archival intent, as an excavation of black history, and its supreme fidelity to the moral compass of a song rather than to its 21

O ne G rain of S and

musicological specificities or what John and Alan Lomax thought of as its “cultural purity.”5 To note the blue, mournful tone of her voice on “Midnight Special”—its texture, its depth, its somber grain, and occasional rasp or wail—is to note that hers is a voice conveying a burden. Commenting on Odetta’s percussive vocals on “Water Boy,” critic Sara Marcus describes the “sharp, guttural Waow!, mimicking the sound of hammer striking rock that’s heard on field recordings of prison work songs,” “part snarl, part half-swallowed scream.”6 This is about as close as anyone is going to come to describing this sound, but equally powerful is the way Odetta, over the course of that song, drags this sound behind the beat by just a split second, so that the listener is made to actually feel the immense effort and the burden of the work. This, for Odetta, was the very point—not the song as song, but as a record of collective pain, sorrow, rage, indomitability, defiance, resilience. In this respect, Odetta’s art—at once steeped in and speaking from the specificities of a long history of racial violence and injustice—is in deeper conversation with that of James Weldon Johnson, Zora Neale Hurston, or even W. E. B. Du Bois than it is with fellow folk singers Pete Seeger, Bob Dylan, or Joan Baez. Odetta was a lifelong student of music, to be sure, receiving classical training in her youth, earning a degree from Los Angeles City College in classical music and musical comedy, and later conducting research in the Library of Congress folk collections at various University of California campuses.7 But her real historical work was not strictly musical; rather, she was a social and political historian whose archive happened to be music. “My education on several levels started with my 22

M I D N IG H T SP E C IA L : T H E A R C H I V I ST

getting into folk music,” she later said. “I started learning history that we were not being taught in school. The ‘heroes’ that we learned about in school were the ones who garnered money for themselves and had their boots on our necks.”8 This is why the prison songs (“Midnight Special,” “Take This Hammer,” “He Had a Long Chain On”) and the work songs (“Water Boy,” “I’ve Been Driving on Bald Mountain”) were so significant—in some sense even more so than the slavery songs like “No More Auction Block for Me (Many Thousands Gone)”: they documented the extension of slavery into a period that most Americans had been taught as school children to associate with “freedom.” The hell of convict leasing paradoxically began with the Thirteenth Amendment, passed in 1865: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States.” This exception became a way of life—and death—across the old confederacy. As one Yazoo Delta planter put it in 1866, “I think God intended niggers to be slaves. Now since man has deranged God’s plan, I think the best we can do is keep ‘em as near to a state of bondage as we can.”9 Convict labor quickly became a staple of local and regional economies in the south, upheld by a fretwork of stereotypes and racist slanders regarding black criminality on the one hand, and a series of racially targeted laws on the other—Mississippi’s “Pig Law,” for instance, making common theft of a farm animal punishable by five years in prison. More frequently applied were laws regarding “vagrancy,” “public nuisance,” “insulting gestures,” or “criminal mischief,” laws intended to criminalize black life in general, naming 23

O ne G rain of S and

ill-defined crimes whose proof—unlike theft or murder— resided purely in the eye of the beholder. By the collapse of Reconstruction in 1877, all the southern states but Virginia had a system in place for “farming out” convicts, relying on the combination of trumped up legal charges and forced labor.10 (“Oh man, you better walk right.”) By the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, gangs of involuntary black laborers—by the tens of thousands, in chains and under the watchful guard of armed overseers— could be found doing the most backbreaking and dangerous work there was to be done across the former slave states: clearing malarial swamps in Louisiana, mining coal in Alabama, blasting tunnels for the railroad in the mountains of Georgia, working the turpentine farms in Florida. In Mississippi they were returned to the cotton fields where their parents had worked as slaves, including the several thousand acres of Parchman Farm. One Parchman warden candidly admitted, “The mission of the penitentiary had always been primarily economic: to be frugal with state funds; to be self-supporting. . . and to make a profit growing cotton. Good security, public safety, and humane treatment of prisoners were all subordinated to economic efficiency— the penitentiary was just one more large plantation.”11 The point of this system was not deserved punishment for actual crimes. Nor “rehabilitation.” The point was forced labor. Though enabled by the constitutional amendment that outlawed slavery, the convict labor system was entirely continuous with the antebellum regime. A penologist who visited Mississippi from the north in the 1920s wrote that the profits on Parchman Farm’s cotton were “secured by 24

M I D N IG H T SP E C IA L : T H E A R C H I V I ST

reducing the men to a condition of abject slavery.” According to one scholar, In design, [Parchman Farm] resembled an antebellum plantation with convicts in place of slaves. Both systems used captive labor to grow the same crops in identical ways. Both relied on a small staff of rural, lower-class whites to supervise the black labor gangs. And both staffs mixed physical punishment with paternalistic rewards in order to motivate their workers. What this meant, in simple terms, was the ability “to drive and handle niggers.”12 Adds another, inmates “were still being run into the fields by white men on horses to pick cotton shortly after 4 a.m., and the offspring of the same bloodhounds and German shepherds that once tracked down escaped slaves were ever present to menace and worry them.”13 Vernacular usage of the word “captain” (“cap’n”) to refer to the chain gang’s overseer marked a widespread recognition of exactly this continuity. Though anti-peonage or other legislation might be introduced to curb the practice and its worst excesses after the turn of the century, by then, in the words of author Douglas Blackmon, “the resubjugation of southern blacks was achieved in such broad totality, and reaffirmed with such crushing consequences for millions of individuals, that codes and statutes were increasingly unnecessary for its preservation.”14 Under this regime, inmates prayed for luck, not justice, which is where the superstition and lore of the Midnight Special came from in the first place.15 In Mississippi (to take a case) during the first generation after passage of the convict 25

O ne G rain of S and

labor laws, no leased convict ever survived the brutalities of the system long enough to serve out a full ten-year sentence.16 And there were few actual “Miss Rosies” to speak of. Every now and then a white former employer might petition for leniency on behalf of an inmate because he needed the labor, but the only sure path to a pardon was to kill another inmate who was in the act of escaping. (The most famous “pardon” of the period, ironically, was the widely rumored but fictional one arranged for Leadbelly by ballad hunter John Lomax. “Don’t be uneasy,” Lomax wrote his wife, who might have worried about her husband’s traveling about with a “dangerous” ex-con. “He thinks I freed him.”17) Even though Odetta casts “Midnight Special” in the original pronouns of a “man’s” song, the presence of women within this carceral system was numerically significant and socially consequential, as Odetta—like Vera Hall— would surely have known. Black women’s “disproportionate presence in spheres of domestic carceral servitude did not place them closer to normative femininity,” explains historian Sarah Haley, since the relation of servant to employer also served to expose black women’s difference from the white women for whom they worked. Moreover, as part of their prison sentences black women were constantly positioned in proximity to masculinity, forced to perform hard labor that was rarely mandated for white women, even those few white women who were in convict camps alongside black women. The flexibility of the black female subject, the ability of white patriarchs to relegate her into the

26

M I D N IG H T SP E C IA L : T H E A R C H I V I ST

harshest labor spheres both in and outside the home but always under the condition of violence, helped define modern social relations under Jim Crow.18 As she sang the prison, work, and field repertoire for mixedrace coffeehouse audiences in the early Civil Rights era, Odetta articulated two very different historical syllabi, so to say—one for black listeners and one for white. Working the black side of the color line, as she explained, “One of the things I would like to do is make the American Negro take pride in the history of the American Negro.” Ideas like this were not yet common coin. “Slavery was not a happy thing,” she said. “It was a negative, evil kind of thing, but the most oppressive kind of conditions can create something beautiful.”19 So part of Odetta’s project was to evoke a repressed history of slavery and oppression through field hollers, prison songs, and work songs, and thus to retrieve and highlight certain dimensions of black creativity, black fortitude, and black strength more than a decade before we had phrases like “Black Power” and movements like Black Arts. The work songs, for Odetta, were “liberation songs.” You’re walking down life’s road, society’s foot is on your throat, every which way you turn you can’t get from under that foot. And you reach a fork in the road and you can either lie down and die, or insist upon your life, your own individual life. Those people who made up the songs were the ones who insisted upon life and living; who reaffirmed themselves. They didn’t just fall into the cracks of a hole. And I think that was an incredible example for me.20

27

O ne G rain of S and

Paul Robeson had once told Harry Belafonte, “Get them to sing your song, and they’ll want to know who you are.” This was one facet of Odetta’s black history project—indeed, Belafonte credits her with releasing his own creativity in this regard, as her cries and shouts helped him to see “the place I belonged.” By her own account, these were the songs that had initially helped Odetta to see herself for who she was and for who she might yet be, too, rather than through the hideous, distorting lens of America’s Jim Crow culture.21 Playing the Apollo Theater in Harlem in 1961, “I was singing and this woman up in the balcony says, ‘Go, Momma! We know what you’re talkin’ about!’ ”22 For her white audience members, meanwhile, Odetta served up in these songs an expression of rage that was equally evocative of a political present worth pausing over and a history worth remembering. “It was in those songs I could get my fury and anger and hate out. . . . When I was that furious and singing, it was overpowering.” “There was no way I could say the things I was thinking, but I could sing them.”23 While Odetta is more often remembered for “I’m on My Way” at the 1963 March on Washington, her prison song performances at the Blue Angel or the Ash Grove represent the more striking, and likely the more significant political contribution. For many among her audience, black and white, a song like “Midnight Special” or “Another Man Done Gone” represented a first introduction to black history at a time when there was as yet no academic discipline going by this name, and when school books—in as much as they treated black life at all—were still peddling some version of either the “fortunate” slave who had been rescued from the darkness of Africa, or the literally “happy” slave working the 28

M I D N IG H T SP E C IA L : T H E A R C H I V I ST

plantation. And for many among her audience, black and white, this young woman’s pride in black artistry and resolve, and her open rage and her challenge to whites to recognize who they were and who they had been, too, represented an embodiment of the very honesty and courage that the movement now called for. This may be why, as he steeled himself for SNCC’s battles in the deep South, a young Bob Moses used to sit up nights listening to Odetta’s “I’m Going Back to the Red Clay Country.”24 Odetta’s was important historical work, and she understood it this way. Folk music is our history as people in this country. In school we learn about the heroes—the bankers, the generals, and the politicians who’ve caused the most havoc, rapings and maimings of places and people in the world. . . . Folk music is the people part of what our lives are. It is music that came out of regular, everyday people. It is past politics. It is past religion. It is us as glowing lights, which on the whole is quite religious, but not the way we’re taught religion.25 The proper context for “Midnight Special,” then, is not necessarily the full discography of that song’s recording history, but rather Odetta’s full folk repertoire in all its gravity and dimension, in its archival capacity to document the extensions of slavery into the period of “emancipation” and to document the thoroughgoing criminalization of black life in the United States. As Odetta recognized, the “folk” repertoire carried historical truths that had otherwise been forgotten or actively suppressed. To self-proclaimed “ballad hunters” like the Lomaxes, these songs might be fetishized 29

O ne G rain of S and

and valued, like musicological little bugs in amber, “as close as twentieth-century people were going to get to the sound of slavery.” Worse, the aesthetic gold standard of the “plain and unadulterated folk song” might cause a folklorist or fan to be glibly dismissive of the social conditions that the song was responding to. “No fancy-pants stuff like Oklahoma!,” said the younger Lomax. “Miserable people make the most exciting music I ever heard.”26 But Odetta was drawn to such songs for their unique truth-telling power. There was, in fact, a twentieth-century “sound of slavery.” In her willingness to part ways with Leadbelly on a matter of tempo, tone, or verse order, and then once again in her vexed cross-purpose with a folk “purist” like Alan Lomax, we encounter two very different but related signs of the complex relationship Odetta forged between archival truth on the one hand and musical fidelity on the other. She was a truth-teller, to be sure, and this is something that many critics and colleagues remarked on over the years, including Harry Belafonte and Odetta’s long-time manager Douglas Yeager. But if telling the truth required understanding and inhabiting each song in a very particular way and with an unusual burden of responsibility, “truth” did not necessarily require an absolute, phonographic, faithful conformity to extant historical versions of the song. Sometimes the deeper truth called for surface innovations, such as Odetta’s transformation of “Midnight Special” into a lament. “Odetta would never lie in her private life or to an audience in her professional life,” Yeager later recalled. Honesty, integrity and a moral compass that would smell injustice wherever it may fester were the cornerstones

30

M I D N IG H T SP E C IA L : T H E A R C H I V I ST

of her character. Her goal every day of her life was to be “Useful” to society. When writing a song, she had to be honest with the audience and tell them a story to help them in their lives. When choosing to sing a song by another songwriter, she would read the lyrics before listening to music, for the lyrical story was the “heart” of the song. If she couldn’t believe what she sang, she wouldn't sing it. For the first 45 years of her career, she sang many songs that came out of the African American slave experience. When she would sing such a song, such as “Water Boy” or “Take this Hammer” or “No More Auction Block,” she was determined that the audience never knew where the singer stopped being the singer and where Odetta became the suffering slave she was singing about. She embodied the story of the person she sang about. . . . But whatever the subject of the song was about, she was always honest.27 In plumbing this archive as artfully as she did—in altering the song so as to “become the suffering slave,” in Yeager’s formulation—Odetta rescued black artistry from the often disparaging—if romantic—world of American folklorists themselves, whose own problematic practices she was clearly alert to. If the county farm was continuous with the regime of slavery, the practices of American folklore—John Lomax’s “ballad hunting”—were often continuous with the coercions of the county farm. It was not lost on the Lomaxes, for instance, that the most important thing required to secure a cache of prison songs in a given locale was a good working relationship with the warden. The power of the institution

31

O ne G rain of S and

took care of the rest. The literally coercive aspects of ballad hunting occasionally appeared on the recordings themselves, as when, pushed by Lomax to sing a “sinful” song, a pious inmate named Samson sought the Lord’s forgiveness as he stepped up to the microphone: “Oh Lord, I knows I’se doin’ wrong. I cain’t help myself. I’se down here in the worl’, an’ I’se gotter do what dis white man tell me. I hopes You unnerstan’s the situation an’ won’t blame me for what I gotter do. Amen!” Lomax recounts this fairly unself-consciously in Adventures of a Ballad Hunter, dialect and all. He later referred to Samson’s recording as his “prize record.”28 Aside from such overtly coercive practices, even in the best of circumstances the ballad hunter’s craft was one of subtle (and sometimes not so subtle) racial disparagement and of theft. “As I sat in the car and listened to the steady, monotonous beat of the guitars,” wrote John Lomax, “accented by handclaps and the shuffle of feet . . . I felt carried across to Africa, and I felt as if I were listening to the tom-toms of savage blacks.”29 The ballad hunter mined African Americans’ “emotionalism” and “natural,” “primitive” musical gifts as African resources—like diamonds—there for the plunder. Not all that much had changed since the very first ballad hunters, in their 1867 anthology of Slave Songs of the United States, wrote of “the musical genius of the race” and “the rich vein of music that existed in these half barbarous people.”30 This was also a world, conveniently, where the very definition of “folk culture”—that pure, uncontaminated voice of “a people”—set the singer wholly outside both the critical categories of artistry and the modern commercial relations of exchange: as a representative of an entire people 32

M I D N IG H T SP E C IA L : T H E A R C H I V I ST

or even a continent rather than as an artist in his or her own right, the true “folk specimen” was not to be paid; and by definition, any singer demanding payment could not be truly of the “folk” in the purest sense. Even a champion of the left like Pete Seeger could sound pretty cavalier when it came to the appropriation of black “folk” culture. In 1867 Charles Pickard Ware grabbed his pencil and paper and said, “I must get this down.” And he wrote down as much as he could and then afterward he went around to the singers and said, “What verse was that you were singing?” They said, “You mean you’re writing this down? Wow, well here’s what I was singing.” So then his book Slave Songs of the United States comes out and sits on that shelf. Ninety years later Tony Saletan goes through the book page by page. He shrewdly selects three verses out of fifteen or twenty. He teaches the song to me, and I teach it to the Weavers. We went to Carnegie Hall singing it.31 The aftershocks of this exploitive history ripple through 1950s’ and 1960s’ folk revival culture; and Odetta’s aesthetic choices should be seen in many ways as a response—a reclaiming of authorship even while speaking for “the folk,” and as a feminist statement, too, as against the relentless masculinism of folk revival valuations and conceptions of “authenticity.” She was playing along and with the dividing line that Amiri Baraka delineated in diverse conventions of listening: “In the West, only the artifact can be beautiful, mere expression cannot be thought to be. It is only in the twentieth century that Western art has moved away from this 33

O ne G rain of S and

concept and toward the non-Western modes of art-making, but the principle of the beautiful thing as opposed to the natural thing still makes itself felt.”32 Though folklorists’ worst coercions lay in the past by the time she took the stage at the Tin Angel in 1953, the folk scene in these years and on into the 1960s was still vexed by a politics of “authenticity”— purists versus pop folk singers, the “natural” versus the “beautiful”—which did take on thick, racialized layers in the case of Odetta. “Odetta is no barefooted primitive. . .,” noted the Christian Science Monitor in 1957. This Negro girl has had operatic training. . . . But purists will forgive her this degree of sophistication when they hear her sing blues like “Easy Rider,” Calypso-like “Shame and Scandal,” prison songs like “Another Man Done Gone,” and spirituals like “Joshua” and “Glory, Glory.” She is the real thing, all right. . . . She is a folk artist of major interpretive powers as well as unusual authenticity.33 “Authenticity,” then, was not easy to parse in polite company, given the license Odetta took in many of her musical interpretations. By “authentic” the Christian Science Monitor seemed to mean simply that Odetta was black—“blackness” being in opposition to “sophistication.” (The Los Angeles Sentinel described her as “once removed from a Watusi princess.”34) But ultimately what was most “authentic” about her work—about her historiography, if you will—had neither to do with her race nor with her literal fidelity to the archive, but with musical choices that rendered most powerfully the psychological economy of that archive. She sang from the moral center of a song, and this more than anything is what listeners 34

M I D N IG H T SP E C IA L : T H E A R C H I V I ST

responded to as “educational.” Perhaps the most readily accessible example of this is not a prison or work song, but her rendering of Woody Guthrie’s “Ramblin’ Round your City,” which captures the history of dispossession more powerfully than Guthrie’s own rendition that the song narrates. Whereas Guthrie’s version is composed of a gently swinging rhythm and mostly “bright” notes—and hence conveys more or less a kind of romance of the hobo—by its tautness of voice, its darker, more haunting melodic line, and the agitated quality of Odetta’s guitar and Bill Lee’s bass arrangement, her version takes the listener with much more immediacy into the social realm of dispossession, hunger, uncertainty, and bitterness. Sometimes the fruit gets rotten And falls upon the ground. There’s a hungry mouth for every peach As I go ramblin’ round. (Taking nothing away from Guthrie, whom Odetta loved. “When I become dictator,” she once said—and you have to love the when here, “[‘This Land Is Your Land’] will become the anthem.”35) But this was Odetta’s method and her forte—departure from a literal fidelity to the musical archive in the service of a more powerful, deeply seated psychological fidelity to the history that that archive spoke from and evoked. “There are people in the world who are at their best when they are following direction,” she once explained. There are people who are at their best when they are inventing. And there are people who are idea people,

35

O ne G rain of S and

interpretive. I can follow direction. I am not inventive. My category, I would think, would be embellishing invention. The interpreter.36 This is what Belafonte was referring to, when he noted Odetta’s ability to reach such a “fine understanding of a song’s meaning” that it “transform[s] it from a melody into a dramatic experience.”37 It is what one Washington Post critic was referring to when he remarked, “with a virtuosity that ranges from a gentle whisper to a hammer-on shout, . . . [Odetta] goes to the heart of the sometimes joyous, sometimes tragic American story, and pours it out as a truth that cannot be contradicted.”38 * * * Odetta discovered a cathartic, healing quality in the performance of these songs—ironically, a brand of performance and of catharsis itself that eventually caused her to drop some of the most rageful songs from her repertoire. “Early on in my career,” she later reflected (1991), as I would sing the prison songs, I would jump feet first into it, and I would be the prisoner, and I would get my hate out. At one point it was affecting my throat, and anything that affects my throat has to get out of my life. So I made a decision. I had to become the actress. I could not be the prisoner.39 Later still (2005) she offered a different explanation of this change in her repertoire, though this, too, rooted in the emotional power of the songs themselves: “In singing

36

M I D N IG H T SP E C IA L : T H E A R C H I V I ST

through those emotions, it really did heal me. [Then] I found that I couldn’t act it. I couldn’t get anywhere near that emotion, and I started feeling like I was cheating somebody. Many of those songs I just don’t do anymore.”40 Which is not to suggest that the politics of her performances had been fully coeval with expressions of rage. She would venture an entire set from the blues women’s canon at the Monterey Jazz Festival, for example, arguing that “Rock n’ Roll and Rhythm and Blues  .  .  . are nothing but watered-down corruptions of genuine blues as they were sung by Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey thirty-five years ago. At Monterey, I’ve hope to reacquaint the people with the real thing”—not as an endorsement of essentialized authenticity, but rather as a protest against outright theft.41 Or again, she would introduce a song “about inter-racial romance” a year before Loving v. Virginia, and then mischievously play 1930s’ standard, “Froggie Went a Courtin’,” a song about a frog and a mouse.42 But Odetta’s decision to drop certain elements of the repertoire—whether out of self-preservation or out of cathartic “recovery”—indicates the profound ways in which the songs spoke to the historical record and to its legacy in the present. In that first decade of performance, in black folksongs from the prisons, the work camps, and the fields Odetta found a very special register of expression. Like Dick Gregory, who in the early 1960s began to refashion stand-up comedy as a new kind of political oratory for the mixed-race audiences he found on The Jack Parr Show, at the Playboy Club, or on college campuses, Odetta saw the mixed and multivocal audiences of the coffeehouse or campus as a unique field of political opportunity; she refashioned the 37

O ne G rain of S and

musical archive as a uniquely powerful political education. To define these performances as political or historical pedagogy is not to detract from their artistry, nor is it to displace with “culture” the heroic and often harrowing political work of the many Kings and Hamers and unnamed marchers and SNCC workers upon whom the movement depended. Rather, it is to note and to ponder in its full complexity the miraculous creation of a mixed-race, inter-generational, trans-regional Civil Rights “public” at a Cold War moment when inherited Civil Rights traditions—and progressive politics in general— were so imperiled. Not every aspect of this political work is fully elaborated in Odetta’s 1963 rendition of “Midnight Special,” but this is part of what is reflected there, in tempo, tone, timbre, and grain of voice.

38

Cool Water: The Coffeehouse

Few hearing Odetta perform “Cool Water” would readily recognize this as the same cowboy song written by Bob Nolans in 1936 and originally performed by Roy Rogers and friends. Nor would they easily peg it as the same song performed by the Sons of the Pioneers and introduced on network TV by Dale Evans only a year or so before One Grain of Sand. Evans introduced the song by talking about the experience of riding a horse across the desert: I’m sure you’ve all heard about a mirage in the desert. You look off, and there shimmering across the sand is a beautiful pool of cool, clear water. Your horse can see it, too. He moves forward, and it disappears. Tonight the sons of the Pioneers are going to tell us more about this, in a wonderful song that they have made famous throughout this world.1 Years later (1976), at a club called the Best of Harlem in Stockholm, Sweden, Odetta would introduce “Cool Water” quite differently, noting its cowboy genealogy, to be sure, but quickly moving to her own terrain: We go . . . to a classic of a cowboy song I learned when I was growing up. . . . These were the days when Gene Autry

O ne G rain of S and

was a romantic figure, cardboard though he is. The song was sung by the Sons of the Pioneers. The name of it is “Cool Water,” and I take “water” or “cool water” to mean what I want it to mean. And what I want it to mean is what I need, and what I want, and what I’m willing to stand up and fight for.2 Her introduction articulates an interpretation of the song that had evidently been on Odetta’s mind for some time. So does the performance that follows—the Best of Harlem version is sharply accented in black musical idioms, including gospel melismas and glissandos, and guttural blues moans, perhaps suggesting some historical specificity to that phrase “what I’m willing to stand up and fight for.” But even by the time of One Grain of Sand, Odetta’s “Cool Water” was a fascinating study in genre, as she had stripped the song of virtually all the trappings of “western” or “cowboy” folk that were so heavily pronounced in popular versions by the Sons of the Pioneers, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans, Marty Robins, Teresa Brewer, or Hank Williams. None of that loping, “happy trails” guitar line; no whistling or yodeling. No harmonica. No mariachi trumpeter. The opening instrumental bars do not say “western,” nor even do they really say “folk.” The darting guitar runs and rolling bass initially sound blues-driven, though when Odetta’s crystalline, gentle, upper-register vocals come in, the song becomes a genre wholly unto itself. She also shed some of the lyrics that would most prompt a literal, cowpoke’s reading of the song as a chronicle of the prairie: “But with the dawn 40

C O O L WAT E R : T H E C O F F E E HO U SE

I’ll wake and yawn.” There is nothing in mood, arrangement, or lyric to mark this as that familiar cowboy tune that the Sons of the Pioneers had made famous. And in addition to these stylistic elements, of course, the song accrues thick meaning from its context. In their 1956 album, Great Songs of the Old West, Roy Rogers and Dale Evans surrounded “Cool Water” with titles like “Happy Trails,” “A Cowboy Needs a Horse,” “Whoopie Ty-Yi-Yo,” “I Ride an Old Paint,” “Hoofbeat Serenade,” “The Old Chisholm Trail,” “The Chuck Wagon Song,” “Cowman’s Prayer,” and “Home on the Range.” Situated here, “Cool Water” could be nothing but a literally rendered treatment of a man and a horse, dying of thirst on the “barren waste” of a Southwestern desert, probably in Texas or Arizona. But it is bound to strike the listener completely differently when set side by side with “Midnight Special,” “Cotton Fields,” “Moses, Moses,” and “Ramblin’ Round Your City.” There is much to be said about the complicated relationship between “folk” on the one hand and “cowboy,” “hillbilly,” or “country” on the other, and about the whitewashing of these latter genres despite a robust and generative black presence over time.3 But what interests me here is the way in which, untethered from its moorings in the cowboy tradition— unhitched from the horse, shall we say—Odetta’s rendition of the song opens outward toward a metaphorical reading that has nothing to do with physical desert sands and earthly thirsts. Odetta’s intonation of the opening lines conjures not a literal desert scene, but a biblical one, like the “howling wilderness” of the sorrow songs4—not the cowpoke’s dusty and parched crossing from Sierra Vista to Tombstone, but 41

O ne G rain of S and

exile and wandering, and a thirst for the purifying waters of righteousness. All day I face this barren waste Without the taste of water Cool water. In this reconstituted context, the mention of “Dan” by name (formerly the singer’s horse) is something of a puzzling presence, but perhaps creditably taken as a reference to the biblical Daniel, whose interpretation of “visions” foretold God’s deliverance of the Israelites from Babylonian captivity. By the time Odetta gets to the chorus, she has already made this very much a song about “what I’m willing to stand up and fight for”—indeed, about a quenching vision of the beloved community that brave activists from southern churches and colleges had already been fighting for. Dan, can’t you see that big green tree Where the water’s runnin’ free And it’s waiting there for you and me? Cool, clear water. Here the water metaphor taps biblical passages that had already become staples in Civil Rights oratory, as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference ascended: But let judgment run down like waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream. (Amos 5:24) Several elements of Odetta’s rendition work to establish and enforce this kind of association—the song is rendered with an unspeakable solemnity, first of all, its aspirations embodied 42

C O O L WAT E R : T H E C O F F E E HO U SE

in the soaring, operatic high notes attained as she describes the waiting oasis. And not least, if this Old Testament water motif sounds familiar, it might be because Martin Luther King, Jr. had been citing chapter and verse of the Book of Amos in speeches ever since the Montgomery Bus Boycott, as he would in his famous “I Have a Dream” speech: There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, “When will you be satisfied?” We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro’s basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating: “For Whites Only.” We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until “justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” By this time King had been thinking about the Book of Amos for a decade—long enough to switch the sourcing in his political oratory from the King James translation, employing the word “judgment,” to translations employing the word “justice” instead (“justice rolls down like waters.  .  .”). In a set of notes he penned on Old Testament themes as a recent Divinity School grad in 1953, a young MLK reflected on 43

O ne G rain of S and

the significance of this passage. Under the heading “God (Amos)” he wrote: 5:21-24—This passage might be called the key passage of the entire book. It reveals the deep ethical nature of God. God is a God that demands justice rather than sacrifice; righteousness rather than ritual. The most elaborate worship is but an insult to God when offered by those who have no mind to conform to his ethical demands. Certainly this is one of the most noble idea [sic] ever uttered by the human mind. It seems to me that Amos’ concern is the ever-present tendency to make ritual and sacrifice a substitute for ethical living. Unless a man’s heart is right, Amos seems to be saying, the external forms of worship mean nothing. God is a God that demands justice and sacrifice fo [sic] can never be a substitute for it. Who can disagree with such a notion?5 Whether one takes Odetta’s “Cool Water” in the register of the secular or the sacred—a blurred line in Civil Rights sensibilities, which we will be returning to—her “what I need, what I want, and what I am willing to stand up and fight for” does seem to converge with King’s conception of “deep ethical nature,” “a God that demands justice.” In the Sons of the Pioneers’ rendition of “Cool Water,” it is a desert mirage that takes the form of “a devil, not a man  /  who spreads the burning sands with water.” In Odetta’s version, that devil is less the visual betrayal of a mirage than a poetic symbol for human hypocrisy and cruelty—the foolishly 44

C O O L WAT E R : T H E C O F F E E HO U SE

uncharitable, who deny neighbors in need; the spiteful, who squander precious resources while others go wanting; the pious sinners, who “spread the burning sand” with the waters of liberty and justice while forbidding succor for their brethren. The violator of God’s ethical principles. The kind of person who might post a “For Whites Only” sign on a drinking fountain, subject neighbors to the unspeakable horrors of police brutality, deny lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. I linger over Odetta’s work in bringing this song from the cowpoke’s trail in 1936 to the beloved community in 1963 because it embodies some critical cultural and political work that the “folk” idiom was accomplishing during the early Civil Rights years. For progressives at the height of the Cold War, the folk music subculture was very much like the coolwater oasis that Odetta was singing about. This was a matter not only of repertoire or style but also of the folk institutions that were fostering an emergent political public. “Folk music is leaving the imprint of its big country boots on the night life of New York,” the Times reported in 1960.6 But significantly, this was not an artistic and political ferment that was limited to Greenwich Village, nor was it fully contained by the coffeehouse alone.7 In the institutional circuitry of this political public-in-the-making, sites like the Cafe Wha?, the Blue Angel, the Bitter End, or the East Village bar called Gerde’s Folk City were conjoined and supplemented by radio programs like The Almanac Show, I Come For to Sing, and At Home with Theodore Bikel; festival venues like Newport, Monterey, Mariposa, Berkeley, and Sun Valley; magazines like Broadside and Sing Out!; record labels like Folkways, Electra, 45

O ne G rain of S and

and Vanguard; reference volumes like Citadel Books’ Folk Music USA; youth hang-outs like Bucks County Folk Shop (Philadelphia), the Folklore Center (Denver), Lundberg’s Music Store (Berkeley), or the Folklore Center and Allan Block’s Sandal Shop (New York); educational facilities like Chicago’s Old Town School of Folk Music or the University of Pennsylvania’s Folklore program; and campus surrounds like Washington Square Park. (Pete Seeger once called the colleges his “home base,” the “one sector of society which refused most courageously to knuckle under to the witch hunters.” Critic Nat Hentoff was less charitable: lamenting the decline of folk into “hoarse self-righteousness,” he observed that “the schools and students that support ‘causes’ support folk music. Find a campus that breeds Freedom Riders, antiBirch demonstrators, and anti-bomb societies, and you’ll find a folk group.”8) Prime station stops for performers along the folk itinerary included Chicago’s Gate of Horn, the Fickle Pickle, Poor Richard’s, Somebody Else’s Troubles, Mother Blues, and Holstein’s; the Bay Area’s Purple Onion, the Hungry i, Fox and Hounds, the Drinking Gourd, the Blind Lemon, and the Tin Angel (where Odetta recorded her first record, with Larry Mohr); LA’s Ash Grove, the Mecca, the Paradox, the Troubadour, the Unicorn, and Cosmo Alley; Philadelphia’s Gilded Cage, the Second Fret, and the Tarot; Cambridge’s Club 47 (where Joan Baez made her name), and Boston’s Golden Vanity, Club Passim, Café Yana,  and Tulla’s Coffee Grinder; Denver’s Exodus, the Spider, and the Satire Bar and Restaurant, a low-end club and Mexican restaurant owned by African American singer Walt Conley; Boulder’s Tulagi’s 46

C O O L WAT E R : T H E C O F F E E HO U SE

(launching point for Judy Collins); Seattle’s White House and the Door; and Dallas’s House of Seven Sorrows. More important historically than the extent and density of this network of folk institutions was the traffic—and the cross-traffic—that it generated. “It was enough to make a sociologist’s head spin,” according to Joan Barthel in the Times.9 Describing the scene he found in Greenwich Village when he arrived there around 1960, singer (and erstwhile portrait painter) Richie Havens wrote, There were hundreds of painters, writers, poets, singers, comedians and songwriters developing ideas and perfecting their work. There were all-day conversations about new books and experimental plays and there were all-night conversations about what was happening in our lives. Those of us who migrated there and stayed for more than a few days seemed more inclined than the people we left behind to share openly what we thought about things; what we wanted to embrace. We traded songs and poems and political arguments. We had no plan, no road map to follow. We didn’t know where we were going, but a lot of us seemed to be looking around, taking stock of things. We learned not to be afraid.10 Aspects of the folk scene had been undeniably “political” from the outset. Earl Robinson (remembered for his song about the martyred radical, “Joe Hill”) recalls Pete Seeger’s “guerrilla singing” at folk venues while under the blacklist: “Certain places, if they found out about [Seeger] in advance, they would picket and maybe manage to cancel him out. So he really got into this habit of getting in and out fast.”11 But a new politics 47

O ne G rain of S and

was emerging in this cultural formation, as the Civil Rights movement progressed and as the New Left emerged. What was novel was the unaccustomed mix of people that crossed paths at these sites, and, as Richie Havens intimates, the powerful influence of their exchanges there. “The air [at Washington Square Park] rings with the sound of guitars and bongo drums,” announced the Christian Science Monitor with some perplexity in 1958. “The folk singers are there, and their audiences, too. Washington stands on either side of his arch. . . . Surely he is astonished at the strange human parade that passes him.”12 Beards, beads, bongos, and sandals might have struck some as strange in 1958 conventional America, but first and foremost the “strangeness” of this human parade had to do with race, as the cultural mores around de facto segregation began to shift among the beats, students, and folkies who frequented the Village. As Harold Cruse noted around the same time that Havens arrived, “Members of the ‘beat generation’ are for the most part youthful escapists seeking refuge in ‘art,’ jazz, poetry, esoteric literature, Zen Buddhism, and marijuana. To them the Negro is both a culture bearer and a guilt symbol.”13 Though the Village may have reflected in part a white youth culture that was rife with problematic cultural appropriations, as Cruse notes, nonetheless the rising counterculture did translate into an unaccustomed racial fluidity on the street and unusual patterns of integration for a country so segregated, even in the “liberal” North. This was the cause of some serious friction. Under the title “Greenwich Village, Where Races Mix—And Make Trouble,” a piece in US News and World Report described how “the Village, particularly on Friday and Saturday nights, harbors a sinister quality of hatred just under the carnival 48

C O O L WAT E R : T H E C O F F E E HO U SE

atmosphere created by blinking neon signs, jazz music, writers reading their poems and crowds of young people.” Much of this conflict was rooted in broader urban tensions between white ethnics and African Americans over urban housing and turf; pejoratively called “A-trainers” (for the subway they rode in on), African Americans found themselves a prime target for harassment. But some was also attributed to questions of sexuality—resistance to the queer culture of the beat/ hipster enclave, or to the frank “provocations” of inter-racial dating.14 “We are all immigrants that work or live or play in the village,” wrote Reverend Howard Moody, a vocal defender of the community, whether we or our father came on a boat from Naples, or a bus out of Birmingham, or a flight from Dublin, or an A train on the IND. There is an equality that underlies all our differences. Whether you are “in” or “out,” black or white, rich or poor, “square” or “beat,” we are children of God created to live together in the neighborhood of his world.15 The tension itself—“Where Races Mix”—signals the depth of the sociology, as it were, of the cultural forms and institutions that were taking shape. By 1963, the Pittsburgh Courier, among the nation’s premiere African American papers, would be touting the Village as “the art cradle of America”; a young Cassius Clay would turn up there to read his poetry at the Bitter End: My secret is self-confidence, a champion at birth, I’m lyrical, I’m fresh, I’m smart, My fists have proved my worth.16 49

O ne G rain of S and

When controversy flashed later that year, as city officials threatened expensive licensing fees for coffeehouses as “cabarets,” according to the Times, “Liberals, Civil Rights protagonists, and devotees of the arts . . . resisted in stormy fashion, with sit-downs on MacDougal Street and picketing of City Hall.”17 The nature of the resistance and the tactics themselves reveal the extent to which the coffeehouse had become a hub of Civil Rights consciousness. But this extraordinary fluidity and ferment—Richie Havens’ trading of “poems and songs and political arguments”—was not limited to Greenwich Village, even if that was this public’s capital. An analysis of the “Current Bills” pages of Variety in these years suggests the rich and protean crossing of paths in this period, as a wildly diverse range of figures succeeded one another or shared the stage at venues like the Tin Angel, the Purple Onion, the Hungry i, the Ash Grove, and the Gate of Horn. Week after week, these small clubs and coffeehouses hosted artists across an astonishing array of performance genres, each act voicing in its own way idioms of progressivism, anti-conformism, anti-modernism, a thirst for social justice, anti-authoritarianism, and a healthy skepticism toward the claims of authority in general. These bills routinely included African American blues artists like Lightnin’ Hopkins, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, Memphis Slim, Willie Dixon, and Mance Lipscom. They included (white) New Orleans jazz acts like Turk Murphy and Kid Ory, alongside contemporary (black) jazz performers like Buddy Colette, Wellman Braud, Oscar Brown, Jr., and vocalist Ada Moore, who had played “Gladiola” in “House of Flowers,” with Pearl Bailey, Carmen de Lavellade, and Alvin  Ailey. 50

C O O L WAT E R : T H E C O F F E E HO U SE

These venues welcomed black artists whose careers stretched back to the Harlem Renaissance and beyond—Mabelle Mercer had replaced Florence Mills in Blackbirds in 1922; Mae Barnes had introduced the Charleston to Broadway in 1924; Brownie McGhee’s career stretched back to an act called the Rabbit Foot Minstrels. And it also included unknown African American artists whose fame would strike only many years later, like a young calypso singer and dancer named Maya Angelou. These bills included edgy, irreverent, sometimes Brechtian, frankly political comedy acts, like Mort Sahl, Lenny Bruce, Dick Gregory, the Smothers Brothers, Holt and Jonah, Will Jordan, Bob Newhart, George Carlin, Stiller and Meara, “Beatnik” Ronnie Schell, and Allen and Grier (a comedy team whose third member, Joan Rivers, had recently struck out on her own). Bill Dana, famous for his broken English “Jose Jimenez” character, went on to write the “Sammy’s Visit” episode of All in the Family; stand-up comedian John Barbour anticipated a later brand of racial politics in his 1965 satire, It’s Tough to Be White. These shows featured many veterans of the blacklist, including Leon Bibb, Josh White, the Weavers, and Professor Irwin Corey, and an eclectic roster of “folk” performers that ranged from the Lomaxes’ “authentic discoveries” (the Georgia Sea Island Singers) to new revivalists (the Kingston Trio, the Limeliters, the Coachmen), to the hip and sardonic, young folkies (the Gold Coast Singers, best known for their parodic “Plastic Jesus”), to the folk “cowboys” (Ramblin’ Jack Eliot, who received his nickname from Odetta’s mother on a visit to their house18), to the rising generation that would ultimately bridge the beats and the hippies (Peter, Paul and Mary, Judy Collins, 51

O ne G rain of S and

Simon and Garfunkel—as “Art  &  Paul”—and Judy Henske, “Queen of the Beatniks,” who later teamed up with Jerry Yester of the Lovin’ Spoonful and cut an album for Frank Zappa). Prefiguring “multiculturalism” by decades, these venues regularly welcomed international acts like Miriam Makeba (South Africa), Cruz Luna (Spain), Ran Eliran (Israel), the An Albannachd Highland Pipers (Scotland), and Martha Schlamme (a refugee from Nazi occupied Europe who would later star in Fiddler on the Roof), as well as a number of American acts presenting a range of Irish, Balkan, Israeli, Russian, or Caribbean musics. Every now and then a stray would appear to burst all existing paradigms—the Robert Clements Pro Musica Consort, an orchestral baroque “act.” There are several ways of thinking about this kaleidoscopic coffeehouse scene. Odetta called them the last of the bohemians. Some called themselves “beats.” Some were “hipsters,” “hip,” “hep,” or “hips”—the word “hippie” with its current (very white) counterculture connotation would not cross over from black slang into broad usage until a bit later in the 1960s. Some were former communists or fellow travelers; some were folkies; some were offbeat individualists or merely counted themselves misfits. Some were queer. And there were some who were sui generis: Phyllis Diller, the proto-feminist stand-up comedian who delivered absurdist comment on gender conventions in satirical “advice columns”; Hugh Romney, who as “Wavy Gravy” would later become “the official clown of the Grateful Dead”; or Tom O’Horgan, a Second City music-and-jokes man who went on to direct the Broadway productions of Hair, Lenny, and Jesus Christ Superstar. But all of these diverse acts were united by an 52

C O O L WAT E R : T H E C O F F E E HO U SE

undergirding progressivism on the day’s political and racial issues. They were characterized by a cerebral, sometimes subversive, but always earnest quality as well. (The “i” of the Hungry i stood for either “intellectual” or “id,” depending who you asked.) It was no doubt in spoof of these community hallmarks that a young Woody Allen, performing at the Bitter End in 1962, did a stand-up routine involving “an authentic, ethnic folk singer who still had a leg shackle on.”19 This was a cultural zone of vast political significance, and it was one that had been in the making throughout the postwar years. “I can’t think of a coffeehouse where a right wing singer would perform,” Odetta’s later manager, Doug Yeager, reflected.20 Odetta described her own entry to the folk scene as falling at “the end of the ‘bohemian’ period. You know, later they became known as the ‘beatniks’; this was the same community.”21 Beatniks did not necessarily dig folk music, nor did everyone in the folk crowd love beat poetry. But interest in the blues roots of jazz had carved out a little niche for folk music in bohemian culture, as Robert Cantwell puts it, and so it was that beatniks and folkies frequently shared these communal spaces.22 There are two things worth underscoring about this highly significant cultural formation. First, to overlay performance genres with their corresponding historical or sociological categories, these sites were bringing into proximity and conversation the various “taste” publics associated with the Old Left, the beats, older African Americans from the blues world, and the youth soon to be associated with the New Left. As her star rose, Odetta stood at the center of this multivocal world; her unusual and courageous aesthetic choices 53

O ne G rain of S and

and her unremitting clarity of voice at once enacting and engendering a brand of political commitment that cut across the many generational and ideological lines that segmented the coffeehouse audience. And second, over time this was a bona fide community in a sense that is difficult to imagine from the vantage point of the twenty-first century, our age of relentless mass mediation, market segmentation, and atomization. These venues and the acts that frequented them all tended to win a kind of devotion that lent this emergent public a face-toface sociality, a ritual regularity, even a paradoxical stability. As a cultural formation, it was perhaps as cohesive, robust, tightly knit, and mutually engaged as the cultural front of the 1930s, though it lacked that community’s rooting in political economy through the unions, the CIO, and the Communist Party. (After SNCC, The Port Huron Statement, and the Berkeley Free Speech movement, the American university might in time become something like that.) The Tin Angel, where Odetta got her start, was known as much for the communal sense of engagement created by owner Peggy TolkWatkins as it was for the eclectic, museum-like assemblage of objects that filled the space. North Beach historian Dick Boyd describes how Tolk-Watkins, “With a cigarette in one hand and a drink in the other . . . loved to discuss (read: debate) issues with customers and friends. She left an indelible mark with anyone who met her.”23 Obviously a queer space like the Tin Angel might command an allegiance among the clientele that another venue would not, but versions of this ongoing, unbroken sociality characterize collective memory of many of these coffeehouses and clubs. Dominic Chianese, 54

C O O L WAT E R : T H E C O F F E E HO U SE

the emcee at Gerde’s Folk City, recalls that performers “could expect a rapt audience. Music was paramount. Drinking and eating were important, but the most important things were what people were singing about.” After reeling off a long list of the “finest musicians, instrumentalists, songwriters, and singers” that he met in these years—from Jose Feliciano to Sonny Terry to Buffy Sainte-Marie to Odetta—he concludes, “Everyone learned from everyone else. I could feel it in the conversations, and at the end of the night. . . . I went home singing the songs we had heard.”24 Singer Dave Von Ronk, “the Mayor of MacDougal Street,” later wrote of Izzy Young’s Folklore Center in Greenwich Village as both “clubhouse” and “switchboard” in a way that conveys the connectedness of this protean community: It was a place where you could buy folk music records, books and accessories. People would leave guitars or banjos to be sold on consignment, and he had strings, picks, capos, odds and ends. But more than anything else what it almost immediately became was a sort of clubhouse for the folk scene. Izzy was the switchboard: if anything was happening to anyone on the scene, Izzy would find out about it and broadcast it to the world—whether you wanted him to or not. If you came to New York and needed to know how to get in touch with somebody or to leave a message, you would go into the Folklore Center and ask Izzy, and he would probably know all about it, or failing that, he would let you leave a note on his bulletin board. If you had no fixed address, you would have your mail sent care of the Folklore Center.25 55

O ne G rain of S and

This is the cultural zone, then, where Odetta learned and plied her craft; it was in this distinctively politicized and fertile environment, these spaces of queer, unconventional, irreverent, and dissident sociality, that she learned to coax and urge the political meanings in her music, whether a prison song like “Midnight Special” or a cowboy folk tune like “Cool Water.” It was here that she honed, not her singing voice alone, but her political and pedagogical voice; it was here that, after her classical period and Finian’s Rainbow, she perfected her performance as an historian, an archivist, and—as Richie Havens put it—“an educator.”26 *** It is striking how readily and how thoroughly both Odetta and her coffeehouse listeners understood her folk singing in a political light. “I’m not a turn-the-other-cheeker,” she remarked in 1965, Reading some of the background of these [slave and work] songs, it points up how absolutely vicious man can be—crushing someone under his feet in order to stand higher—a ladder of human beings—but there is a strength in not allowing oneself to be crushed—bouncing back in spite of a pair of boots standing on top of you. . . . When you’re using an instrument like folk music, you are somewhat more in control of directing what you want to happen when people are in contact with you. To soothe, to egg on, to bring about a decision to be involved in trying to improve the society we’re in. Not just to entertain, but to educate.27 56

C O O L WAT E R : T H E C O F F E E HO U SE

Odetta’s early career was coeval with the deepening of the Cold War on the one hand and the rise of the modern Civil Rights movement on the other. She was a young music student when Winston Churchill made his famous “iron curtain” speech; she was performing in Finian’s Rainbow when the Soviet Union tested its first atom bomb; she was embarking on a folk career as the Brown case was working its way through the courts and Senator McCarthy’s hearings were in most infamous session; she recorded her first album at the Tin Angel the year the Brown decision came down, which was also the year that the Viet Minh’s victory over France at Dien Ben Phu laid the first stone for the Vietnam War. The strangely twinned histories of the Cold War and Civil Rights form a crucial backdrop to the cultural work that Odetta was accomplishing, and that she and others needed to accomplish. The Cold War gave the generations-long black freedom struggle new life and new purchase: it created a singular political fulcrum for activists fighting for justice, able now to leverage the “leader of the free world’s” international reputation. What is “modern” about the modern Civil Rights era, indeed, is the rising strategy of mounting street-level agitation in order to provoke a favorable intervention on the part of a federal government that was newly attuned to what “democracy” needed to look like in the eyes of the world. This was the strategy behind A. Philip Randolph’s threatened March on Washington at the start of the war; it was the strategy of desegregation campaigns from Montgomery to Little Rock to Greensboro; it was at the heart of King’s media campaign in Birmingham and later in Selma. Black leaders had never before enjoyed such a claim on the nation’s 57

O ne G rain of S and

conscience; this was the kind of gift that only geopolitics could bestow. And yet at the same time, the “red scare” aspect of the Cold War’s domestic politics rendered all Civil Rights activity inherently suspect, and in fact anti-communism finally decimated the hearty Civil Rights public that had thrived before the war. “Of course the fact that a person believes in racial equality doesn’t prove that he’s a Communist,” said one loyalty board officer in the 1950s, “but it certainly does make you look twice, doesn’t it?”28 The Communist Party and the Popular Front had indeed been central to racial justice struggles in the United States in the prewar decade. Now vulnerable to rising Cold War regimes of “loyalty,” to McCarthyite hysteria, and to the massive security apparatus in the hands of J. Edgar Hoover, racial progressivism was retroactively denounced for its “premature anti-fascism” in the prewar years, and Civil Rights leaders and sympathizers alike were persecuted as a communist fifth column. The NAACP and the Civil Rights mainstream was defanged (or defanged itself, joining Cold War liberals in shunning suspected communists); leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson had their passports revoked, and found themselves fingered by Red Channels or HUAC along with scores of prominent African American intellectual leaders and cultural workers, including Langston Hughes, Hazel Scott, Fredi Washington, Josh White, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and Canada Lee, as well as white allies like Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger, Oscar Brand, and Burl Ives. All of which is to say, if the movement for racial justice was going to make good use of the pro-democracy leverage that 58

C O O L WAT E R : T H E C O F F E E HO U SE

world affairs afforded after the war, it was first going to have to create a viable Civil Rights public amid the smoldering wreckage of the Old Left. The black church accomplished an important piece of this work, a development enshrined in the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in the wake of the Montgomery Bus Boycott. The college campus accomplished another important piece of this work, a development enshrined in SNCC in the wake of the lunch-counter sit-ins in Greensboro. But a robust “public” does not rise up out of nothing without the work that culture does, and this is where forms like folk music and institutions like the coffeehouse are so significant. To render a cowboy song like “Cool Water” as a song about “what I need, and what I want, and what I’m willing to stand up and fight for,” and to perform that song before a reverent, mixed crowd of CPUSA and CIO veterans, beatniks, white liberals, black and white aficionados of the Lomax folk archive, and the black and white students of an emergent youth culture—that is straight up political work.

59

60

Moses, Moses: Spiritual Geographies

“Moses, Moses” and “Ain’t No Grave” are the only religiously themed songs to appear on One Grain of Sand, although by this time gospel songs and spirituals had become a prominent presence in the Odetta repertoire. By 1963 her recordings and coffeehouse sets included “Run, Come See Jerusalem,” “Buked and Scorned,” “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands,” “Wade in the Water,” “Children Go Where I Send Thee,” “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” “Poor Little Jesus,” “Joshua,” “God’s Gonna Cut You Down,” and the spiritual trilogy “Oh, Freedom / Come and Go with Me / I’m on My Way,” among others. Indeed, in 1956 Odetta had made an appearance with Langston Hughes on the ecumenical CBS program Lamp unto My Feet, and as a result Hughes briefly considered her for the role of Essie, “the good gospel singing woman who eventually cleanses the temple of evil” in his play, Tambourines to Glory.1 Like the work and prison songs that she culled from the Library of Congress archive, the spirituals were to her part of a record

O ne G rain of S and

of earthly conditions, of black history—artifacts of slavery, of slaves’ hopes, and of freedmen’s hopes after them.2 Let us return, for a moment, to Amos 5:24: “Let justice run down like waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream.” There are two quite distinct arguments to be made about the relationship between religion on the one hand and the politics of racial justice on the other. The first is that the Bible had long carried narratives of deliverance and hope in African American culture. In many public settings both before and after emancipation, it had laundered such narratives, we might say—the logic of the Exodus story was pure dynamite in the context of a slaveholding society. The Gospels, too. As Mahalia Jackson explained in an interview with Studs Terkel, “The spiritual wasn’t simply about Heaven over there, ‘A City Called Heaven.’ No the city is here, on Earth. And so, as we know, slave songs were code songs. It was not a question of getting to Heaven, but rather to the free state of Canada or a safe city in the North—liberation here on Earth!”3 The second, opposing argument is that, no, in fact, history had forged a much more complicated and vexed relationship between Christianity and racial justice. As theologian Willie Jennings argues, throughout the centuries of European exploration, religion did not simply—did not even primarily—serve as an idiom of global fellowship, but as one of imperialism’s harshest instruments of judgment, division, and hierarchy. As Christianity accompanied slavers and conquistadores around the globe, theology not only imbibed that project’s Eurocentric assumptions but fully participated in crafting the logic of colonial domination. European acquisitiveness and will to domination “distorted 62

M O SE S , M O SE S : SP I R I T UA L G E O G R A P H I E S

[Christianity’s] vision of creation,” according to Jennings, transforming the New World into mere landed property, and commodifying the non-white bodies found there. “The inner coherence of traditioned Christian inquiry was grafted onto the inner coherence of colonialism.”4 Religion supplied a logic of enslavement just as surely as it did the narratives of liberation. Odetta herself might have adhered to either argument— and in a sense she did, at once drawing liberationist power from theology’s hallowed narratives, but also distrusting, critiquing, and resisting the hierarchal impulse that might lead one human being to pronounce upon God’s will for another. First, the liberationist conception—which is deep, even if it is troubled. Many slaves had come to believe that theirs was a God who had intervened in human history on behalf of the oppressed in epochs past, and who would do so again.5 Lawrence Levine observed in Black Culture and Black Consciousness that many slaves worshipped “a Jesus transformed into an Old Testament warrior whose victories were temporal as well as spiritual: ‘Mass Jesus’ who engaged in personal combat with the Devil; ‘King Jesus’ seated on a milk-white horse with sword and shield in hand. . . . ‘The God I serve is a man of war,’ the slaves sang.”6 One Union Army chaplain, who had worked among the freedmen in Alabama, bemoaned the distinctly earthly, liberationist tendencies in African American worship: There is no part of the Bible with which they are so familiar as the story of the deliverance of the children of Israel. 63

O ne G rain of S and

Moses is their ideal of all that is high, noble, and perfect, in man. I think they have become accustomed to regard Christ not so much in the light of a spiritual Deliverer, as that of a second Moses who would eventually lead them out of their prison-house of bondage.7 Religion had long spoken with a “double voice” in African American culture, one for the oppressed and one for the oppressor; “the stories themselves made the points that [black preachers] could not express.”8 In his sermon “Without a Song” three generations after Emancipation, the Reverend C. L Franklin, Detroit minister and father to Aretha, would intone, “Some things you can’t say, you can sing. Isn’t it so?”9 Which is why, when Odetta speaks of things she could sing but could not say as the Jim Crow system began to creak and collapse, we ought to be thinking of the liberationist tones of a song like “Moses, Moses” right alongside the pure secular rage of “Water Boy” or “Another Man Done Gone.” Moses, Moses, don’t let King Pharaoh overtake you In some lonesome graveyard. Audiences in 1963 knew exactly what was being said in such a song. Like the generations under slavery before them, the Civil Rights generation could interpret biblical “freedom” not as a purely theological idea about deliverance from sin, but rather, James Cone writes, as a historical reality that had transcendent implications. Freedom meant the end of the “driber’s dribin,’” Massa’s hollerin’,” and “missus’ scoldin’,”—“Roll, Jordan, roll.” It meant that there would be “no more peck o’ corn,” 64

M O SE S , M O SE S : SP I R I T UA L G E O G R A P H I E S

“no more driver’s lash,” “no more pint o’ salt,” “no more hundred lash,” and “no more mistress’s call for me, many thousands gone.” The most important element of black religious doctrine, he writes, “was its historicity.”10 The figure of Moses held a very special place in this liberationist canon, for obvious reasons. White Americans from the Puritans on down might have fancied themselves as Israelites in Canaan, but African Americans saw themselves as Israelites in Egypt.11 This was a deep tradition, at once theological and political, descending from nameless slaves, down through orators and leaders like Richard Allen, Denmark Vesey, David Walker, Nat Turner, and Harriet Tubman. Allen described God as the “first pleader of the cause of slaves.”12 Frances Harper’s “Moses: A Story of the Nile” (1869) introduced the liberatory biblical narrative into post-bellum African American literary culture; and Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Joggin’ Erlong (1906) carried this Old Testament torch into the twentieth century: Dey kin fo’ge yo chains an’ shackles F’om de mountain to de sea; But de Lawd will sen’ some Moses Fu’ to set his chillum free.13 James Weldon Johnson gave Exodus the earthy flourish of a Harlem Renaissance folklorist in God’s Trombones (1927): And God said to Moses: I’ve seen the awful suffering Of my people down in Egypt. 65

O ne G rain of S and

I’ve watched their hard oppressors, Their overseers and drivers; The groans of my people have filled my ears And I can’t stand it no longer; So I’m come down to deliver them Out of the land of Egypt.14 Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939) delivered the narrative to readers at the dawn of the modern Civil Rights era, a dark moment when the social condition of black people in the United States aligned them not only with the biblical Hebrews but with modern-day Jews in Nazi Germany as well. Hurston’s Pharaoh seems to presage Saidiya Hartman’s analysis of the mechanics of slavery (“He had hunted around in his own heart for something to measure one’s feelings by and the things that would hurt us the most”), just as her Moses at moments seems an A. Philip Randolph or C. L. R. James figure (“He was wishing for a country he had never seen. He was seeing visions of a nation he had never heard of where there would be more equality and opportunity and less difference between top and bottom”).15 As Moses gathers the Hebrews for the crossing of the Red Sea, some among them cry out—in phrases that the twenty-first-century reader can only hear in a very particular voice—“Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty I’m free at last!” They go on to celebrate, “No more toting sand and mixing mortar! No more taking rocks and building things for Pharaoh! No more whipping and bloody backs! No more slaving from can’t see in the morning to can’t see at night! Free! Free! So free till I’m foolish!”16 66

M O SE S , M O SE S : SP I R I T UA L G E O G R A P H I E S

This is the impressive folkloric and artistic tradition that performers like Marian Anderson and Paul Robeson were standing on by the time they sang “Go Down, Moses” before postwar audiences. When Israel was in Egypt land, Let my people go! It is also the theological foundation that a mid-century generation of preachers was standing on as the world began to shift. A generation of postwar religious leaders wove a new political fabric from these strands of theology, as well as from the institutional and social relations represented by the black church. This was not the consensus reading of black Christianity, certainly. Frederick Douglass had regretted the “many good, religious colored people who were under the delusion that God required them to submit to slavery and to wear their chains with meekness and humility.”17 They of course had their counterparts in the Civil Rights era, too. During the highly galvanized Birmingham campaign in 1963, Wyatt Tee Walker estimated that only 20 of the city’s 250 black ministers backed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. Indeed, it was no doubt on account of a certain caution among many church leaders that secular groups like SNCC and the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) had begun to challenge the SCLC in the days of the sit-in movement and the Freedom Rides in 1960 and 1961. But there is no doubting that the postwar church became for a time the central crucible for that complicated compound of modern Civil Rights sensibilities—Second World War veterans’ disenchantment at their return to 67

O ne G rain of S and

Jim Crow America; the inroads of secular agitation on the part of the NAACP, Ella Baker, James Farmer, or labor leaders like A. Philip Randolph; expectations piqued by the federal government’s shifting stance, as signaled by the Fair Employment Practices Commission (1941), Truman’s federal Civil Rights proclamation in To Secure These Rights (1947), and the Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954); outright bitterness over racially tilted federal policies like the GI Bill and fully exclusive ones like home financing programs at a time when unprecedented national prosperity was being trumpeted in every quarter. The institutional contours and the institutional capital of the African American church were crucial to the early Civil Rights struggle, to be sure—the Movement did not simply spring from the power of theology and symbolism, from narratives of Exodus or icons of a warrior Jesus. As local resistance to segregation took shape in places like Baton Rouge, Montgomery, and Tallahassee in the mid-1950s, and as black and white northerners of a secular bent like Bayard Rustin and Stanley Levison gravitated toward these struggles to lend their tactical thinking, black ministers—T. J. Jemison in Baton Rouge, C. K. Steele in Tallahassee, Fred Shuttlesworth in Birmingham, and most famously Martin Luther King, Jr. in Montgomery—found their churches at the epicenter, whether they had willed it or not. “The movement made Martin,” as Ella Baker put it, not the other way around.18 Black preachers were often among the few people in the entire community who were not beholden to a white employer or landlord, for one thing, and so their speech was less vulnerable to influence or retribution than other local 68

M O SE S , M O SE S : SP I R I T UA L G E O G R A P H I E S

leaders. The church was positioned to serve as both radio network and popular press in towns whose black side of the tracks had none; they possessed a means of spreading news and mobilizing masses that was unmatched in the segregated south. The church also provided a ready-made meeting place, fundraising network, and communication tree for disseminating movement decisions. Not least, the church was less likely than any secular organization to be either tarred as “communist” on the one hand or coopted to the vision of a paternalistic white leadership on the other.19 It is true that Rustin had a deep love of the spirituals—and a well-known talent for singing them, too—but as an organizer he instinctively understood the robust and deployable social relations that the church, as an institution, represented. Other local establishments, like the beauty parlor or barbershop, may have shared some of this capital, and these, too, were important sites of grassroots organizing. But few institutions shared the total economic independence and the impressive reach of the church. “The Baptists had the masses of the people and what we needed at the time were the masses,” said SCLC minister S. S. Seay.20 But in addition to the church’s structural features, what preachers north and south said—and what they were sanctioned to say in a country that was at once dangerously racist and yet still putatively “Christian”—did matter deeply. “Daddy had been preaching black pride for decades,” Aretha later reflected.21 From his pulpit C. L. Franklin would rail against those in the biblical Israel who lacked faith, who “were willing to satisfy themselves with a second or third class citizenship in Egypt,” or he would hold out hope to his 69

O ne G rain of S and

flock that “in every crisis God raises up a Moses. . . . His name may be Moses or his name may be Joshua or his name may be David, or his name, you understand, may be Abraham Lincoln or Frederick Douglass or George Washington Carver, but in every crisis God raises up a Moses, especially where the destiny of his people is concerned.”22 King himself inherited a black Social Gospel tradition from his Baptist preacher grandfather and father, a theology that had forged ties to W. E. B. Du Bois and the nascent NAACP in the early 1900s, and to voter registration drives in the 1930s. By the 1940s King Sr. would describe “the true mission of the church” in these terms: Quite often we say the church has no place in politics, forgetting the words of the Lord, “The spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he hath [anointed] me to preach the Gospel to the poor; he hath sent me to heal the brokenhearted, to preach deliverance to the captives, and the recovering of sight to the blind, to set at liberty them that are bruised.” God hasten the time when every minister will become a registered voter and a part of every movement for the betterment of our people.23 In “The Birth of a New Nation,” following upon the convulsions and triumph of the Montgomery bus boycott, King the younger would describe Egypt not as a place, but as a condition. It is hard to say which is the more striking here, the extent to which his theology is cast in political terms, or his political aspiration in religious ones. Said Doctor King, “We find ourselves breakin’ a-loose from an evil Egypt, trying 70

M O SE S , M O SE S : SP I R I T UA L G E O G R A P H I E S

to move through the wilderness towards the promised land of cultural integration.”24 King would continue to emphasize such connections in his oratory on into the later phases of the Movement: The Bible tells the thrilling story of how Moses stood in Pharaoh’s court centuries ago and cried, ‘Let my people go.’ This was an opening chapter in a continuing story. The present struggle in the United States is a later chapter in the same story. Something within has reminded the Negro of his birthright of freedom, and something without has reminded him that it can be gained.25 This through line indeed runs from the activist preaching in the early SCLC period all the way through to Black Power a decade and more later. In 1969 Black Liberation Theologian James Cone would describe God’s righteousness not as an “abstract quality related to His Being in the realm of thought—as commonly found in the Greek philosophy— but to his activity in human history.” Cone underscored Yahweh’s saying to the Israelites, “You have seen what I did to the Egyptians,” and he concluded, “Righteousness means God is doing justice, that he is putting right what men made wrong.” Which is why, in his estimation, “Christianity is Black Power.”26 The liberation of this theology textured the politics and culture of the period, and was nearly ubiquitous equipment for living among those who would hear Odetta sing “Moses, Moses,” “Ain’t No Grave,” or “Come and Go With Me.” The SCLC’s first annual convention in Montgomery had adopted a theme that articulated this seamlessness between 71

O ne G rain of S and

the religious and the political: “To Redeem the Soul of America.” A few years later, when King determined to be jailed in Birmingham, followers would describe his act of willful disobedience as a “faith act.” And King’s most famous, thundering proclamation at the National Mall in August, 1963—“Free at last, free at last  /  Great God almighty, I’m free at last”—was drawn from a Negro spiritual. The line had been a staple in his oratory since 1957.27 Odetta’s connection to this tradition was deep, but it was not simple. She had been raised Baptist in Alabama, although once resettled in LA the family started going to a Congregationalist church instead, because the short walk there was safer for the children than the streetcar ride to the Baptist church across town. In either case, as an adult Odetta claimed spirituality over denominationalism, or even over organized religion itself. “I am suspicious of those who call themselves the keepers of religion,” she told an interviewer in 1999, “and I am suspicious if someone says, ‘God told me to tell you . . . .’ That means they’re trying to control me. And since we’re both children of God, why does He have your number and not mine? How come He don’t just call me up? . . . Or She, thank you very much.” The fused populism and feminism of her dissenting voice here is typical of Odetta’s iconoclasm on a whole range of questions. But, she continued, “I’m highly spiritual. . . . And I think I couldn’t help but be, because of the magic and the healing that I’ve experienced in the music.”28 “We were Southern Baptist,” she said elsewhere. “As I look back on it, I didn’t believe anything that the sisters, brothers, and ministers said. But when the music started, I trusted that.”29 72

M O SE S , M O SE S : SP I R I T UA L G E O G R A P H I E S

How come He don’t just call me up? I didn’t believe anything the ministers said. When the music started, I trusted that. There is an entire dissertation in the theology expressed here, and in the sociology, too. Both Odetta’s politics and her religion were conjoined in a body of ethical principles that found its purest expression in the exhortations of music. Fittingly, she credited another activist/singer with her education in putting these pieces together: Paul Robeson, whom she had met at a rally back in 1951. It was from Robeson that she “learned that it was not only possible, but necessary, to be responsible to our brothers and sisters on the face of this earth. So he politicized me.”30 Odetta’s religion was not at all the received orthodoxy of Christianity, then, but a Christianity that had been appropriated and repurposed, and that was now being redeployed. Which is why, as Michelle Esrick puts it, Odetta “could sing about Jesus, but no one would ever feel excluded—[even] if you were Jewish or Muslim.” Whether or not one calls Odetta a “universalist,” as Esrick phrases it, she did insist on a brand of justice and a pure egalitarianism that the Bible might articulate but that the history of Christianity and the Church itself had never yet achieved.31 Let us recall for a moment Frederick Douglass’s condemnation of that “delusion that God required [blacks] to submit to slavery and to wear their chains with meekness and humility.” Biblical tales of liberation notwithstanding, this was a tradition that also ran centuries deep. Theologian Willie Jennings describes the “scale of existence” that early modern Christianity had constructed in the context of European exploration and conquest, “with white at one end and black at the other.” As Europeans marauded the globe, 73

O ne G rain of S and

conquering some peoples, annihilating others, and enslaving others still, theology itself became one of colonialism’s chief “evaluative modes,” and Christian “morality” became bound up with the colonial project. A sixteenth-century Jesuit theologian said of Africans, They are a very untalented race . . . incapable of grasping our holy religion or practicing it; because of their naturally low intelligence they cannot rise above the level of the senses. .  .  . In fine, they are a race born to serve, with no natural aptitude for governing. . . . But through a just though hidden judgment of God, they are left in that state of impotence and regarded as a sterile reprobate land which gives no hope of yielding fruit for a long time to come.32 A race born to serve. Jennings cites the catechism from a nineteenth-century manual of slave instruction: Who gave you a master and a mistress? God gave them to me. Who says that you must obey them? God says that I must. What book tells you these things? The Bible. In a world where salvation was possible without emancipation, writes Jennings, “the judgment of good and evil tied to black obedience and disobedience overrode considerations of the immorality of black murder and enslavement.”33 There was thus an inherent doubleness in the narratives of black Christianity—the Good Book will set you free, 74

M O SE S , M O SE S : SP I R I T UA L G E O G R A P H I E S

the Good Book will enslave you—a doubleness that was always playing around the margins in some form, whenever collective destiny was articulated in the language of the Old or New Testament. Theology spoke a liberationist truth to the oppressed, and it consecrated a hope, too. But unless it was also made to speak with a knowing self-critique of Christianity’s own history, it could be nothing more than “master’s tools.” And whether or not Odetta shared Jennings’ explicit critique of a Christianity that had been warped by imperialism and that had in turn disfigured God’s creation, the objections she did raise pointed in the same direction: her distrust of clerics (I didn’t believe anything the ministers said) and of anyone who presumed to speak for God (How come He don’t just call me up?) goes right to the “missionary mandate” and “mission reflexes” that Jennings attributes to the age of empire. It was self-ordination that Odetta objected to above all else and that was at the core of her radical universalism; and the quality of Christian self-ordination traced its origins to the imperialist project, when European Christians began to see themselves as “ordained to enact a providential transition. In doing so they positioned themselves as those first conditioning their world rather than being conditioned by it.” “Christianity in the Western world lives and moves within a diseased social imagination,” says Willie Jennings. “I am suspicious of those who call themselves the keepers of religion,” says Odetta, “and I am suspicious if someone says, ‘God told me to tell you . . . .’ That means they’re trying to control me.”34 Many biblical narratives may have been about “liberation” on their face, in other words, but to render them as inclusive, egalitarian, and radically democratic was something else 75

O ne G rain of S and

again—to restore that sense of emancipation to the concept of salvation, and vice versa. One of the most striking things about Odetta’s rendition of “Moses, Moses” in this context, then, is its urgency and the palpable sense of jeopardy it evokes. As Lawrence Levine observed, “for all their inevitable sadness” and seemingly against all odds, Negro spirituals “were characterized by a feeling of confidence rather than despair”: There was confidence that contemporary power relationships were not immutable: “Did not old Pharaoh get lost, get lost . . . get lost in the Red Sea?”; confidence in the possibilities of instantaneous change: “Jesus make de dumb to speak .  .  .”; confidence in the rewards of persistence: “Keep a’ inching along like a poor inchworm / ­Jesus will come by ‘nd by”; confidence that nothing could stand in the way of the justice they would receive: “You kin hender me here, but you can’t do it dah,” “O no man, no man, no man can hinder me”; confidence in the prospects of the future: “We’ll walk de golden streets / Of de New Jerusalem.”35 But here Odetta instead takes us to the edge of the Red Sea, with the rattling of the Pharaoh’s chariot approaching, and the overall tenor, if not of despair or even doubt, exactly, is at least of uncertainty: “Moses, Moses, I hear the chariot comin’”; “Moses, Moses, I hear the horses runnin’”; “Jordan, Jordan, let those children over.” This aura of danger begins with tempo. Odetta was almost certainly working in part from Alan Lomax’s 1935 field recordings of the Georgia Sea Island Singers, which is 76

M O SE S , M O SE S : SP I R I T UA L G E O G R A P H I E S

practically rendered in the tempo of a dirge. Odetta speeds the song up by nearly half (taking 50 beats per minute up to 70), but in this instance the heightened tempo does not “brighten” the song, but adds a hastening, pressured quality that is evocative of anxiety and worry. The very spare arrangement, too, conveys a vulnerability that adds a layer of urgency to the lyric. There is no guitar—this is the only cut on One Grain of Sand on which Odetta does not play an accompaniment, and indeed it is among the few in her entire repertoire. What we get instead is another of Bill Lee’s highly agitated bass lines (as in the song of dispossession, “Ramblin’ Round Your City”)—busy cascades of notes in the bass’s upper registers that communicate restlessness, ferment, and disquiet. Odetta’s voice, meanwhile, is recorded in an unusual, accentuated reverb, whose echo evokes the singer’s aloneness before a stark void. Each repeated line reaches higher and higher into her own upper range, so that by the final repeated line of each verse, she is enunciating the words with a tautness of voice that contrasts sharply with her usual husky contralto. She is singing not from her diaphragm, but from her throat. Moses, Moses, don’t let King Pharaoh overtake you, Moses, Moses, don’t let King Pharaoh overtake you, Moses, Moses, don’t let King Pharaoh overtake you, In some lonesome graveyard. These climbing scales, too, contrast with the Georgia Sea Island Singers’ rendition, whose ensemble verses are not only sung in a lower octave, but whose third repetitions do not climb upward, but after an elevated second line settle 77

O ne G rain of S and

downward, back into the same lower notes of the first. Though singing the song incredibly slowly, too, the Georgia Sea Island Singers deliver the downbeat with a percussive stomp, which they ride heavily with their vocals. There is a powerful sense of grounding in these formal choices. In Odetta’s version, there is no percussive force at all—no toetapping, hand-clapping, or rapping on the sitka spruce of her guitar. Lee’s base line seems to flit and scurry rather than thump and boom—creating, along with Odetta’s elevating pitch, a distinct feeling of ungroundedness. The overall effect of Odetta’s “don’t let King Pharaoh overtake you” might not be a full-blown, despairing sense of overtakenness, but it is nonetheless a song of flight rather than deliverance, of the temporal rather than the miraculous. It is not that expression of confidence, in other words, that Pharaoh would “get lost, get lost .  .  . get lost in the Red Sea,” but rather an expression—and a relived experience—of peril. The emotional tone of “Moses, Moses” accomplishes some very complex work, connecting faith, biblical legend, and the here-and-now. While Mahalia Jackson asserted, “the gospel is strong, like a two-headed sword is strong,” here Odetta’s Exodus gathers a kind of emotive power that relies less on confidence and certainty than on mutual worry and concern.36 This is not an instance of “God told me to tell you,” in other words, but of collectivity and courage in the face of peril. That we all know how the story ends—Pharaoh will “get lost, get lost, get lost” at the hand of a mighty God—might texture the way an audience hears the words, but it does not seem to influence the way Odetta sings them, a vivid reliving 78

M O SE S , M O SE S : SP I R I T UA L G E O G R A P H I E S

of just how harrowing was this escape from Egypt and how deep the cause for dread. Odetta’s sonic method encapsulates what analyst of homiletics Richard Lischer calls “enrollment,” a mutual collapse of lived experience and the biblical world into one another, an African American religious tradition in which congregants—here, listeners—do not “step back but step into the Book and its storied world of God’s personal relations with those in trouble.” Through the Bible, Lischer argues, African Americans “adopted a new history”: Their leaders were Moses, Joshua, Samson, and Jesus. . . . Their only hope was to recognize their own suffering and captivity in the Bible stories. . . . [The preacher] understood that Old Testament history and the events of his own day were not identical; yet his sermon is not content to draw applications or lessons from one to the other. The world that he (and the African American tradition) experiences does not merely correspond to the Bible; it is enrolled in the world of the Bible. It reprises the ancient story in a different costume while at the same time honoring the propriety of the Bible’s personages and events.37 This “ancient story in a different costume”—blacks’ earthly, 1960s’ experience of travail on a biblical scale, expressed here through the “reprised” vocal cues of peril and anxiety as the Pharaoh’s chariot and horses approach—was the warp and woof of Odetta’s ethical concerns at the intersection of justice, politics, spirituality, and above all community. (“Mothers, don’t let your daughters condemn you  /  In some lonesome graveyard,” she sings, in an inserted verse that breaks with the 79

O ne G rain of S and

Exodus motif.) The nature of the peril is not far to seek—the Emmett Till murder, Klan attacks on the Freedom Riders outside Birmingham, the Ole Miss riot against desegregation, a thousand daily slights and dangers. In this roiling and perilous social context, “Moses, Moses” represents Robeson’s exhortation, translated in musical method, to “be responsible to our brothers and sisters on the face of this earth.” The album’s other gospel song, “Ain’t No Grave,” wraps Odetta’s religious and political commitments in a very different affective package. As performed by Odetta, this is one of those New Testament songs that Mahalia Jackson was talking about when she said, “gospel songs are the songs of hope. When you sing them, you are delivered of your burden.”38 The song had traveled a fascinating path, however, before winding up a kind of saucy hymn of black resilience on One Grain of Sand. “Ain’t No Grave” was written in 1934 by a white Virginian, later a Pentecostal Holiness preacher known as Brother Claude Ely. Story is, he composed the song spontaneously in response to family prayers when he was a twelve-year-old boy suffering from tuberculosis. “Ain’t No Grave” made its way into the black repertoire by way of Bozie Sturdivant’s “church-rocking” rendition recorded by Alan Lomax in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1941, and then Sister Rosetta Tharp’s barrelhouse version in 1946.39 We can assume that Odetta started with these; her rolling guitar honors the Sister Rosetta version, in its way, while her vocals borrow their bluing and their extraordinary range from Sturdivant. According to one gospel scholar, his performance featured “a combination of slurs, falsetto, and portamento that remain the wonder of folklorists and blues collectors.”40 80

M O SE S , M O SE S : SP I R I T UA L G E O G R A P H I E S

But Odetta does perhaps even more with her voice, and she accomplishes something with the song that neither of these earlier versions does. Ain’t no grave can hold my body down, Ain’t no grave can hold my body down, When the first trumpet sounds I be gettin’ up, walkin’ ’round, Ain’t no grave can hold my body down. A song’s meaning is conveyed in the grain of the voice, in part, and although “Ain’t No Grave” is clearly a song of religious passion and faith, Odetta is not exactly singing with the angels. None of that crystalline, bell-like clarity, though we know what she is capable along these lines from her rendering of songs like “Oh Freedom,” “Amazing Grace,” and “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” Rather, here Odetta belts the lyrics in a range of guttural tones reminiscent of Ma Rainey or even Muddy Waters, along with spirited, reveling changes of interval and timbre. Rolling Rs. Ad-libbed repetitions, her own solo call and response. A virtuosic voice at play, indicative of an undaunted spirit in the world. Even the soaring falsetto of the closing line comes off as a little bit mischievous or sly. Her “Ain’t No Grave” is brassy—in fact, sort of devilish—in the resilient joy it at once expresses and promises. (The resurrection of the body and life everlasting is not “I’ll rise out of the ground,” as written, but “I be gettin’ up, walkin’ ’round.” Sassy.) Within Odetta’s own canon, strikingly, the vocal quality here most closely matches her Civil Rights retrospective on black history, “Suite: Ancestors,” a twenty-eight-minute secular epic that 81

O ne G rain of S and

includes “900 Miles,” “Red Clay Country,” “Another Man Done Gone,” “Poor Wayfarin’ Stranger,” “Can’t Keep from Cryin’,” and “Trouble,” among others. The overall effect of this particular voice enunciating the indomitable spirit of “Ain’t No Grave” is to evoke that “City Called Heaven” that Jackson had insisted “is here, on Earth.” “Ain’t No Grave” thus represents a second brand of “enrollment,” then—in this instance an earthly deployment of the New Testament’s promise of eternal life, rather than “Moses, Moses’s” earthly reliving of Old Testament peril and flight. But in both cases, by the stylistic elements of sound, sacred texts are made to speak to contemporary struggles, just as temporal conditions—whether the condition of terror, or the condition of confidence and ascendant power—give contemporary flesh to biblical narratives and themes, and to theology itself. The impatient, youthful radicals in the Albany, Georgia, campaign famously derided Doctor King as “De Lawd”; and Amiri Baraka would later dissent, “we’ll worship jesus when  /  he get bad enough to at least scare / somebody . . . .”41 But both religiously and politically, Odetta was aligned with activists like Fanny Lou Hamer, who averred that “Christ was a revolutionary person .  .  . , that’s where I get my strength,” or Diane Nash, who said of the movement as a whole, “This is religion. This is applied religion.”42 Far from being “songs of passive resignation,” James Cone would comment, “the spirituals are black freedom songs that emphasize black liberation as consistent with divine revelation.”43 Both “Moses, Moses” and “Ain’t No Grave” do this work, though in very different ways. *** 82

M O SE S , M O SE S : SP I R I T UA L G E O G R A P H I E S

By way of coda, it is worth reflecting on two moments later in 1963, both of which speak to these blended textures of politics and religion in Odetta’s life and career. First, both the statement and the method of “Moses, Moses” and “Ain’t No Grave” point us to the steps of the Lincoln Memorial on August 28, nine months after One Grain of Sand was released. The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was organized by A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin and gathered over 200,000 participants from across the country. The day is now remembered almost exclusively for King’s “I Have a Dream” speech—one actually sees this calcifying as the memory of the day in the immediate news coverage on the 29th—although many other leaders did take the microphone, including Randolph, Rustin, Roy Wilkins, and John Lewis. Significantly, it was a day of joyous and determined singing, too. “There was no violence to mar the demonstration,” The New York Times reported. “In fact, at times there was an air of hootenanny about it as groups of schoolchildren clapped hands and swung into the familiar freedom songs.”44 Use of the term “hootenanny” here almost certainly referenced the brand new ABC music/variety program whose talent coordinator was Fred Weintraub, owner of the Greenwich Village folk club, The Bitter End. (Hootenanny had premiered in April.) “The March on Washington on television was my introduction to folk music,” recalls singer John McCutcheon. “That was the beginning of my musical education. Here was this old music that was dynamic, that had roots, that was deep. Deep not only historically, but spiritually. It moved people.”45 The March on Washington song book included a few secular tunes—Bob Dylan performed “Only a Pawn in Their 83

O ne G rain of S and

Game” and Peter, Paul, and Mary sang “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “If I Had a Hammer”—but for the most part it reflected exactly the kind of religious exhortation signaled in King’s gospel-derived “free at last, free at last.” Mahalia Jackson, who had been the one urging King, “Tell them about your dream,” sang “How I Got Over” and “I’ve been ‘Buked and Scorned”; Marian Anderson sang “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands”; Joan Baez sang “We Shall Overcome” and “Oh Freedom,” a post-Civil War song that by 1963 was famous as Part I of Odetta’s “Freedom Trilogy.” Oh freedom, oh freedom, oh freedom over me And before I’d be a slave I’ll be buried in my grave And go home to my Lord and be free. When Odetta herself took the stage, according to the Times, her “great, full-throated voice carried almost to Capitol Hill: ‘If they ask you who you are, tell them you are a child of God.’ ”46 She passed over Part II of the Trilogy (“Oh Come and Go with Me”—“there’s no kneelin’ in that land where I’m bound”), but took up Part III, “I’m on My Way.” I’ll ask my cap’n, won’t he let me go, I’ll ask my cap’n, won’t he let me go, I’m on my way, great God I’m on my way. If he says no, I’m gonna go anyhow. Odetta’s “mountainous voice,” by Taylor Branch’s account, “prompted Josh White to jump up [on stage] beside her out of turn.”47 84

M O SE S , M O SE S : SP I R I T UA L G E O G R A P H I E S

Reflecting on the day Odetta later described herself as “the shy kid” who had been called upon by intellectuals and politicians (like Rustin and Wilkins), because what she was doing in folk music fit with what they were doing in the movement. Asked by NPR interviewer David Dye how she chose what to sing that day, she replied, If we go back into the spirituals, if we go back into what our—what my history was, it’s a given. It’s there already. The song is “Oh Freedom,” okay? It’s from a long time ago. And we’re still looking for it. “I’m On My Way,” another spiritual. There was never a whole lot of decision about, “Oh my God, what am I going to play for that program?” It was, “Which one?”48 Between the Jackson, Anderson, and Baez gospel performances, then, along with Odetta’s thundering “tell them you are a child of God,” and especially King’s dream “that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together,” the March on Washington was, for many, biblical “enrollment” enacted. The second moment came a few months still further down the road of 1963. In September a white supremacist’s bomb ripped through the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, killing Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Carol Denise McNair, four little girls who were changing into their choir robes in the basement at the time of the blast. The year closed with a poignant 85

O ne G rain of S and

protest led by Odetta, along with fellow cultural workers James Baldwin, John Killens, and Louis Lomax (writers), and Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee (actors). Calling themselves the Association of Artists for Freedom, the group led a “Christmas Boycott” whose terms and logic amplified King’s “I have a dream that .  .  . the glory of the Lord shall be revealed,” Fanny Lou Hamer’s determination “to work for Jesus” in Civil Rights, and, for that matter, Odetta’s “tell them you are children of God.”49 “We believe in Christmas,” the group wrote, because it is the birthday of the Prince of Peace and Brotherhood; the birthday of the Christ who said, “Love thy neighbor as thyself.” Thousands of atrocities committed against humanity and the Negro people from slavery to the present time have gone unpunished. And now we are mocking the Prince of Peace; throwing bombs in the Holy Place of God; blasting the brains of His children against the high walls of His Tabernacle in Birmingham; turning His day of days into a ritual of blood and destruction. We are guilty. Not only those who planted the bomb, but those who condone injustice and segregation and thereby give it sanction; those who profit from it and those who do not work to eradicate it. We are all guilty. And who among us can participate in life as usual, in business as usual, or even Christmas as usual.50 The authors went on to call for a boycott against Christmas spending in the upcoming holiday season, urging compatriots instead to “give our children the profoundest gift of all; the gift 86

M O SE S , M O SE S : SP I R I T UA L G E O G R A P H I E S

of truth, which is the gift of love. And we will have the duty to tell them that Santa will not come this year because he is mourning for the children of Birmingham.” This Christmas, they urged, “shall come from our hearts and minds, not from our pocketbooks.”51 It is important neither to overstate nor to oversimplify the religiosity of this protest. Odetta by her own account was not a “turn the other cheeker,” and John Killens had argued that “the Birmingham tragedies raised doubts about the efficacy of non-violence in the black freedom movement: Negroes must be prepared to protect themselves with guns.” The very idea for the boycott had derived from a Christmas action during the Montgomery bus boycott eight years earlier.52 Still, the Christmas boycott was a mode of protest more reliably predicted by Odetta’s spirituals than by her prison or work songs. It was also predicted by her personal critiques of Christianity’s exclusions and hierarchies: where salvation and emancipation are both possible, “Christmas as usual” amid endless atrocity is impossible. Aretha Franklin once explained her crossover from gospel music to blues, saying, “because true democracy hasn’t overtaken us here . . . we as a people find the original blues songs still have meaning for us.”53 Because true democracy hasn’t overtaken us here. Odetta added gospel songs and spirituals to her blues and folk repertoire for precisely the same reason.

87

88

Cotton Fields: Social Geographies

The “promised land” might have denoted a social condition rather than a plot of ground in Civil Rights discourse, but as the Birmingham church bombing and Bull Connor’s gnashing dogs remind, the American south was nonetheless a place. The legacies of slavery and of the crushing of Reconstruction still hung heavily in the air, one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation. “The North may have won the war,” Samuel Eliot Morrison wrote, “but the white South won the peace.”1 That dubious “peace” actually became more hazardous for African Americans, not less, when the Civil Rights movement began to promise a second Reconstruction (as the Birmingham bombing and Bull Connor’s dogs also remind). “All white men in every walk of life must be mustered out,” one white supremacist suggested in the days after the Brown v. Board of Education decision came down, pointedly employing military language. “It must be made their fight. If the Southern states do not unify in thought and action, the NAACP will emerge victorious.” In ensuing months an influential pamphlet circulated throughout the white South, Black Monday: Segregation or Amalgamation—America Has Its Choice. Historian Tim Tyson calls it “the founding

O ne G rain of S and

handbook and doctrinal scripture of the Citizens’ Council movement,” the white resistance.2 It was with purpose that the Confederate battle flag now reappeared, flapping in the Southern breeze over Capitol buildings in Georgia and South Carolina or on the campus of Ole Miss. The figure of the South entered Odetta’s art—as it did US culture in general—in a number of forms: as the perceived seat of the nation’s slave past (“the scene of the crime,” as Baraka wrote, notwithstanding the history of Northern slavery3); as a therefore distinctive region that was ripe for mythologizing of all sorts; as the site of enormous and increasingly conspicuous contemporary struggle and violence; and as “back home” for millions of African Americans, Odetta included, whose Great Migration aspirations had carried them in hopeful streams to New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, or Los Angeles. When I was a little bitty baby My mama would rock me in the cradle, In them old cotton fields back home. “I’m not a real folk singer,” Odetta once said. “I’m a musical historian. I’m a city kid who has admired an area and who got into it. I’ve been fortunate with folk music. I can do my teaching and preaching, my propagandizing.”4 The “historian,” “teacher,” “preacher,” and “propagandist” we have already discussed. The label “city kid” is also crucial, however, not only for what it implies about “real folk” but also for what it represents in the rural/urban and the lasting slave-state/free-state dynamics in African American culture since the 1910s and the 1920s. Odetta was a product of the 90

C O T T O N F I E L D S : S O C IA L G E O G R A P H I E S

Great Migration. In her case the journey led from Alabama to California, rather than strictly South to North, but her diasporic relationship to the South was significant to both her art and her politics. Ironically, perhaps, her earliest memory of a firsthand experience with racism was during the migration itself, when “a conductor came back and said that all the colored people had to move out of this car and into another one. That was my first big wound, my big, big wound.”5 And there would surely be more. Odetta identified her “second wound” as the day the trucks came to take her Japanese-American neighbors—her little girlfriend included—away to concentration camps. Race was no bargain, even post-Migration. “My sister and I grew up in Los Angeles, and they didn’t have any [‘white’ and ‘colored’] signs,” she recalled, “but we knew where we shouldn’t go.”6 One thinks of Chester Himes’ remark on life in Los Angeles in If He Hollers Let Him Go, “The white folks had sure brought their white to work with them that morning.”7 It is perhaps one of the tendencies of the culture at large to overstate the social distance between the Jim Crow South and the rest of the country. As Walter White observed, when African Americans fled the segregation and terror of the South to resettle in the North, “Mississippi and the South [followed] them there.”8 The Migration-era violence in northern cities like Chicago and Detroit proved as much, as did the enduring, aggregate data on northern housing, hiring practices, wages, education, mobility, misdemeanor arrests, medical access, and vital statistics like infant mortality and life expectancy. Blues and blues-derived forms flourished in the North for cause, in other words. During the Civil Rights 91

O ne G rain of S and

era, cities in the North would reliably begin to explode one after the other soon after the Civil Rights Act addressed the old Confederacy’s de jure segregation but left conditions in the former Union untouched. But migration did mean something, and it was as both a child of the migration and an heir to its altered social geography that Odetta took up her work as historian and bard. If “Midnight Special,” “Another Man Done Gone,” “No More Cane on the Brazos,” and “Water Boy” called out the Thirteenth Amendment’s disfigurement of criminal justice and the reimposition of slavery in the form of the convict labor regime, then songs like “Cotton Fields” and “Boll Weevil”—like her earlier “Suite: Ancestors”—took on the more quotidian aspects of black life in the Jim Crow South. These songs address the political economy of what had remained a planting society even after slavery had been swept away, and also the totalizing racial mores of the caste system that took shape after slave labor had become “free.” “During slavery the master wanted to protect his investment,” said farmer and Tenants’ Union organizer John Handcox. “So he would give his slaves a place to sleep, a house, and food. When we was [sic] freed, they just let us loose, and didn’t care what happened to us. Whites started hangin’ and shootin’ blacks. The way I see it, under slavery we used to be the master’s slave, but after slavery we became everybody’s slave.”9 The forty acres and a mule that William Tecumseh Sherman had promised slaves as the Civil War wound down never did materialize, first of all, nor did significant agrarian reform of any kind. Planters were stripped of their “property” in slaves, but not their property in land, for the 92

C O T T O N F I E L D S : S O C IA L G E O G R A P H I E S

most part. And so the economy that took shape in many parts of the rural South in the generations after the war was based on low-waged plantation labor or tenancy systems that had merely replaced racial slavery with racial peonage. Since white planters still controlled every aspect of the capital required for farming—land, implements, seed, credit, the means of distribution—as historian Michael Honey writes, “The nearly feudal arrangements that made cotton ‘King’ also made the South a cash poor, technologically backward region marked by illiteracy, monoculture, hunger, disease, and poverty.”10 Lee Wilson and Company, to take one case, whose 65,000-acre cotton plantation was located on cleared and drained swamp lands in Mississippi County, Arkansas, employed twenty-nine riding bosses to oversee the labor of over 2000 workers and 500 tenants and sharecroppers. Holding monopolies on land, credit, capital, as well as on the market for cotton, planters like Wilson were able to fix prices to their own advantage in every which direction—the cost of tenants’ seed artificially high, the return on tenants’ cotton yield artificially low. Since Wilson paid laborers in company scrip, meager earnings rolled back to the company in any case. The result was an unbreakable cycle of indebtedness for the tenant or sharecropper, and a “free,” waged system of labor that nonetheless rested upon a “plantation mentality.” “Every day seems like murder here,” is how blues singer Charlie Patton summed it up.11 These conditions were at once productive of, and buttressed by, a regime of racial separation and hierarchy that lent order through tyranny to every aspect of daily life and that threatened violence at every moment. In addition to 93

O ne G rain of S and

their backbreaking work and crushing poverty, black people endured capricious and highly localized rituals of inferiority at every turn: they could not look white people directly in the eye, in some towns; they had to step off the sidewalk to make way for their white neighbors; they had to address whites as “Sir” and “Madam” while themselves being treated and addressed as children; they could not share most social and civic spaces with whites, including restaurants, taverns, railroad cars, ball parks, swimming pools, and of course jury rooms, judges’ chambers, polling places, and government offices. A relentless history of terroristic violence across the South announced the costs of perceived transgression— “blood on the leaves  /  blood at the root.” The murder of Emmett Till in 1955 for one such alleged infraction was meant precisely as a kind of white supremacist promissory note for the post-Brown period. Segregated southern life was lived out on what the white progressive Lillian Smith recalled as “trembling earth.” I learned it is possible to be a Christian and a white southerner simultaneously; to be a gentlewoman and an arrogant callous creature in the same moment; to pray at night and ride a Jim Crow car the next morning and to feel comfortable in doing both. I learned to believe in freedom, to glow when the word democracy was used, and to practice slavery from morning to night.12 Though in many ways the United States had reconciled on the basis of a white supremacist bargain between North and South in the decades after the Civil War, American culture hived the South off from the rest of the country, continually 94

C O T T O N F I E L D S : S O C IA L G E O G R A P H I E S

positing, ruminating upon, contesting, and revising the region’s distinct place in the national imaginary. The South was glorified in monuments to the Lost Cause like The Clansman (1905) and Birth of a Nation (1915); its slaveholding past was cleansed and romanticized in Gone with the Wind (1939); its racial and sexual pathologies were plumbed in The Sound and the Fury (1929) and Absalom! Absalom! (1936); its terrorism and violence were decried in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) and “Strange Fruit” (1939); its hierarchical social codes were rendered as storybook saccharine in Disney’s Song of the South (1946); its modes of narration became the stuff of a subtle tug o’ war between white producers and black performers in Showboat (1927), Porgy and Bess (1935), and Stormy Weather (1942); its escape by African Americans was honored in Langston Hughes’s One-Way Ticket (1949) and rendered as epic in Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series (1940– 41); and its Jim Crow humiliations were immortalized in Invisible Man (1952). As Odetta recorded One Grain of Sand, the South was the object of a weird national reverie called The Andy Griffith Show (1960–68), a popular sitcom set in a sleepy, mildly dopey, all white, and definitively benign small town in North Carolina, where all was bucolic and peaceful and above all race-free. (A brilliant satire by Drew and Josh Alan Friedman later depicted an unlucky African American traveler passing through Mayberry, only to be lynched by cousin Goober and Floyd the barber.13) During the Civil Rights era proper, the Southern anthem to end all anthems was Nina Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam”—a “showtune,” as Simone called it, “but the show hasn’t been written for it yet.”14 “Alabama’s got me so 95

O ne G rain of S and

upset,” she sings in a rolling cabaret style, “Tennessee made me lose my rest / And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam.” In a haunting epic in the minor key, she goes on to catalogue the “hound dogs,” the jailed school children, undercurrents of southern violence, the picket lines and school boycotts, and—throughout—the mounting African American frustration with the nation’s moving “too slow” on Civil Rights, before concluding, “All I want is equality.” This is the terrain, then, that Odetta was venturing onto in her southern folk songs; these were the hotly contested conventions by which the culture at large was metabolizing the South’s violent history. In contrast to Simone’s “Mississippi Goddam,” there is little to mark Odetta’s “Cotton Fields” as a protest song, on first hearing. It seems a straightforward reminiscence of time and place, and at moments a very sweet reminiscence at that. There are no jeering crackers or their snarling hound dogs in this one. “When I was a little bitty baby . . . .” In fact, in her rendition of the song Odetta dispenses with the most pointed lines from Leadbelly’s 1940 version, “you didn’t ‘spect very much money / in them old cotton fields at home.” Leadbelly’s version is gruffer than hers, a wee bit faster, perhaps more matter of fact where Odetta’s has some emotional depth—his evokes something of the all ’round hard times of a song like Woody Guthrie’s “Ramblin’ Round Your City,” where Odetta cultivates something more complicated. The song’s structure is exceedingly simple: the first four verses each consist of one repeated line, followed by the refrain, “In them old cotton fields back home”; later verses follow the same alternating structure but cut out 96

C O T T O N F I E L D S : S O C IA L G E O G R A P H I E S

the repetitions. There are only four different lines in all, in addition to the reprise: “When I was a little bitty baby my mama would rock me in the cradle”; “When them cotton balls get rotten you can’t pick very much cotton”; “It was down in Louisiana just a mile from Texarkana”; and “I was over in Arkansas, the people did ask me, ‘Whatya come here for?’” Odetta’s opening verse commences, rocking gently, as sweet as Mama’s embrace itself. The song makes its way through the ensuing verses with only slight changes along the way. It is hard to say whether the faintly growled delivery of the line “Whatya come here for?” is meant to signify hostility or incredulity on the part of the narrator’s Arkansas questioners (just who were these “people” doing the asking?); but in some sense this line does signal a quiet shift in the overall affect of the piece. After this point the song accelerates, and the strum of the guitar becomes more driving, resolute. Added seventh and ninth notes dispel the sweetness of the opening bars, too. All of this is awfully subtle—it constitutes no more (but also no less) than the background feeling-tone of the song, and a listener might actually be hard pressed to articulate precisely what it is that he or she has heard. But God bless the MP3. Clicking back to the opening of the song from the 3:18 mark of its closing note, one is immediately and quite forcefully struck by the affective distance that the song has travelled, however stealthily, across its seven verses. The closing bars sound almost nothing like the opening in their force, their pace, and their urgency. The overall effect, once one is keen to it, is one of agitation—in this instance not the nervous, skittering agitation of Bill Lee’s bass line in “Ramblin’ Round Your City” or the anxiety of “Moses, Moses,” but an overwhelming sense 97

O ne G rain of S and

of insistence amid stasis. All that repetition, both within and across verses, underscores a sameness of conditions, from Louisiana to Arkansas and back again (and again), while the increasingly driven guitar chords give voice to disquiet and critique. By the end “Cotton Fields” seems less a sentimental reminiscence of “back home” than a precursor, in folk idiom, to Langston Hughes’s more overtly damning, I pick up my life And take it away On a one-way ticket— Gone up North, Gone out West, Gone!15 The second song in One Grain of Sand’s southern diptych is “Boll Weevil.” “All God’s dangers aint a white man,” said sharecropper Nate Shaw. “When the boll weevil starts in your cotton and go to depositin his eggs in them squares, that’s when he’ll kill you.”16 The weevil made a hard life into an utterly untenable one for many thousands; but the “dangers” of the white man and of the weevil were ultimately inseparable, as the tenants and laborers on the Lee Wilson and Company plantation could have told you. It was the white man’s disposition of lands that left so many people so incredibly vulnerable once the weevil came. Varying renditions of “Boll Weevil” probably started making the rounds as a collective, vernacular song in the 1910s, as the weevil itself began to infest the cotton fields of North America. It entered the recorded folk repertoire with Gid Tanner’s 78 rpm for Columbia in 1924, and by the time Odetta picked it up for 98

C O T T O N F I E L D S : S O C IA L G E O G R A P H I E S

One Grain of Sand it had traced a peculiar path across styles and genres that included Carl Sandburg’s Negro Spirituals (1926), Leadbelly’s famous recording for Alan Lomax (1934), a vaguely minstrelized Hollywood rendition by Tex Ritter and Mantan Moreland in Riders of the Frontier (1939), the Old Left rendition of The Weavers on Tour (1957), Vera Hall’s a capella “Boll Weevil Holler” for Lomax’s Southern Journey (1959), a swinging rockabilly version by teen idol Eddie Cochran (1959), and a country talking blues version by Brook Benton that charted #2 on the Billboard Top 100 (1961). Odetta worked from Vera Hall’s holler, mostly, borrowing some of the layered sensibilities of the Leadbelly recording. She also drew on elements from the chorus of Blind Willie McTell’s 1940 rendering of a different song of the same title (also recorded by Alan Lomax for the Library of Congress). But before examining the Vera Hall version that Odetta adopted and embellished, it is worth pausing over Leadbelly, since her 1963 rendering of the song carries a number of simultaneous and contending meanings that Leadbelly himself had helped to establish. The lyrics of Leadbelly’s “Boll Weevil” (which partially overlap with the Hall/Odetta recordings) couch a deceptively complex, layered comment on pariah status, dispossession, adaptability, and wandering— “lookin’ for a home”—in the cotton South. It is at once a song of the miseries that the boll weevil could visit upon the black sharecropper (“all God’s dangers”), and an admiring ode to the weevil’s own indomitable spirit as a quality to aspire to or to identify with. Across seven very spare verses (a bare three minutes), Leadbelly interlaces three distinct stories: verses one, two, and five describe the fate of a family being 99

O ne G rain of S and

brought to ruin by a plague of boll weevils. In the first verse the narrator warns that “these boll weevils gonna rob you of a home”; in the second, he relates the infestation, from the first sighting of the weevil “on the square” (the budding flower) of the cotton. This is the one verse that turns up in nearly every variation of the song: First time I seen the boll weevil, he was sitting on the square, Next time I seen the boll weevil, he had his whole family there; He was lookin’ for a home, he was lookin’ for a home. In the fifth verse, the farmer’s wife complains, “I been tryin’ my level best / To keep these boll weevils outta my brand new cotton dress / now it’s full of holes, it’s full of holes.’” Verses three and six relate the farmer’s failed attempts to get rid of the weevil—first by putting him on hot sand, and then by putting him on ice. In each case the weevil thwarts the farmer’s design—and wins his begrudging respect—by proving exceptionally adaptable: on the sand, “Boll weevil said to the farmer, ‘You’re treating me just like a man / And I’ll have a home’”; and on the ice, “Boll weevil said to the farmer, ‘You treat me mighty nice / And I’ll have a home.’) The fourth verse represents a kind of narrative interchapter, where the imperiled farmer has an exchange with the local merchant, who presumably holds the right to his crop through the obligations of debt. The farmer he said to the merchant, I never made but one bale,

100

C O T T O N F I E L D S : S O C IA L G E O G R A P H I E S

Before I let you have that last one, I’ll suffer and die in jail; And I’ll have a home, I’ll have a home. Here the farmer comments on the harsh realities of the sharecropper’s life by expressing his preference for suffering and dying in jail; in echoing the earlier choruses, that in jail “I’ll have a home,” he also aligns himself with the weevil as a despised creature of the region, and as an indomitable one, too. Perhaps the image of the dark bug on the white cotton was evocative of the black presence in the South to begin with (like the “fly in the buttermilk” of another song), but here the equation is made explicit. In the lyrical and melodic repetition of his insistence that he’ll “have a home,” the narrator in this chorus identifies himself with the weevil. This thread is picked up yet again in the seventh and final verse, the song’s kicker, when the downtrodden singer breaks the fourth wall, throwing his lot in with both the farmer and the weevil of the tale: If anyone should come along and ask you people, who composed this song, Tell ‘em Huddie Ledbetter, he done been here and gone; He’s lookin for a home, he’s lookin’ for a home. “Though black people were the [boll weevil’s] chief victims,” comments James Cone in The Spirituals and the Blues, “they also admired it for its power of endurance. Like Brer Rabbit in black folklore, the weevil was the symbol of the small defeating the rich and mighty.”17 By this closing verse of Leadbelly’s “Boll Weevil,” he has established every dimension of both the

101

O ne G rain of S and

literal history and the social metaphor of the weevil across the cotton belt. The singer who “done been here and gone” may have been ruined or dispossessed by the onset of the weevil, as so many thousands were; but so is he just like the weevil in his humble, obstinate search for a home in hostile lands. The simple brilliance of the song lies in its anti-linear layering and its accrual of meanings as the verses pile atop one another, even while the structure deceptively mimics the linearity of a ballad. It bears emphasizing what a complex structure this little composition has, and how productive of meaning it is as a result. Because of the way Leadbelly parses his three stories out across the seven verses—the dispossession story (verses one, two, and five), the highly adaptable weevil story (verses three and six), and the I’m-just-like-the-weevil story, looking for a home (verses four and seven)—he generates not a progression of meanings, but a simultaneity of meanings that is all the more powerful for its rich contradictions and resonances. For listeners in 1934—especially black listeners— there was almost certainly a recognizable echo here of a popular First World War–era folk song that had circulated, explaining the Great Migration itself: De boll-weevil’s in de cotton, De cut-worm’s in de corn, De Devil’s in de white man; An’ de wah’s a-gwine on. Poor Nigger hain’t got no home! Poor Nigger hain’t got no home!18 Ultimately it was not strictly the words and music, but the song’s layered meanings—its multi-leveled sociology, so to speak—that 102

C O T T O N F I E L D S : S O C IA L G E O G R A P H I E S

Odetta chose to adapt from Leadbelly. Intermediate versions tended to lose the complexity of Leadbelly’s concurrent story lines. Though the Weavers’ rendering has much in common with Leadbelly’s, for instance, Seeger had added verses that augmented the farmer’s dispossession story, at the expense of Leadbelly’s multiple perspectives. The boll weevil got half the cotton and the merchant got the rest, Didn’t leave the farmer’s wife but one old cotton dress, And it was full of holes. By the final verse (“if anyone should ask you, who was it made this song”), the multiple meanings of the Leadbelly version have been collapsed into one, perhaps befitting Seeger’s Depression-era, Young Communist League pedigree: the singer here is “a poor old farmer” who “ain’t got no home, ain’t got no home.” The switching out of “lookin’ for a home” for “ain’t got no home”—like the restructuring of the verses— erases the narrator’s self-identification with the weevil and makes something of a melodrama out of Leadbelly’s far more nuanced and layered story-telling. In 1961 Brook Benton (later famous for “Midnight Train to Georgia”) charted with a country version of “Boll Weevil” (a rendition oddly reminiscent of Frank De Vol’s theme song for the then-popular sitcom, My Three Sons, which also charted that year.) Like Seeger, Benton dwelt upon the farmer as the victim, and cast the weevil simply as an unwanted pest. Boll weevil called the farmer, and said, “You better sell your old machines, 103

O ne G rain of S and

‘Cause when I’m through with your cotton, heh, you can’t even buy gasoline. I’m gonna take me a home, gotta have a home.” (This version ends with the farmer telling the weevil to go to hell—“You’d have a home . . . a real hot home.”) Benton’s version remains important here because, first, as it climbed the charts in 1962, it might have been what got Odetta thinking about the song in the first place; there is no evidence that “Boll Weevil” was in her repertoire before the Benton single. And if so, second, she was probably quite consciously performing against this version. Although an African American singer himself, Benton—like the white rockabilly idol Eddie Cochran—bleached the song of both the folk idioms and the complex perspectives of the Leadbelly version. Benton’s “Boll Weevil” was to the black sharecroppers’ story what The Andy Griffith Show was to southern life in general. Odetta, it seems to me, was actively taking that on. These, then, were the materials that Odetta had at hand. Her version of “The Boll Weevil” mixes elements from different sources, most notably Blind Willie McTell and Vera Hall’s direct address and dialogue with the weevil (calling “Boll weevil, boll weevil” in McTell’s version, “Hey boll weevil .  .  .” in Hall’s), and the standard third-person narration of the farmer’s weevil-derived demise before the local merchant. Of all the versions extant, however, Odetta’s comes closest to the Leadbelly recording in its rich and suggestive multiplicity of perspectives and in its fidelity to both the literal and the metaphoric. The song consists of six two-line verses, three of which narrate the farmer’s demise, 104

C O T T O N F I E L D S : S O C IA L G E O G R A P H I E S

and three of which (repeated) represent an exchange with the weevil himself. Along the first thread, the song opens with Leadbelly’s standard first verse, “First time I seen the boll weevil, he was sitting on the square / Second time I seen him, he had his whole family there.” The next installment along this thread (the third verse overall) constitutes the heart of the song: the farmer tries to get some food, but the merchant turns him away because the weevil has rendered him a highrisk debtor (more on this in the following paragraphs). These lines are delivered with a realism that is atypical of the song’s history: the pleading of the farmer and the harshness of the response—the contemptuous and almost spitting delivery of the merchant’s lines, and the finality of his answer, “Nothin’ doin.’” This scene pops quite suddenly into three dimensions, coming across as more a documentarian’s print than the legend of a balladeer. This is Odetta the historian, in other words. The third and final verse in this thread (the fifth verse overall) repeats the original “first time I seen him.” The second thread of verses, meanwhile (verses two, four, and six), consists of a thrice-repeated exchange between the narrator and the weevil, reminiscent of McTell’s “Boll weevil, boll weevil, where you get your grand, long bill?” Here Odetta turns both McTell’s tale of migration (“I got it from Texas, I got it from the western hills”) and Leadbelly’s saga of rootlessness (“He was lookin’ for a home”) into a question of nativity: “Hey boll weevil, where’s your native home?” Odetta recoups the multiple layers of Leadbelly’s version not through the verses themselves, but through the indeterminate 105

O ne G rain of S and

method of her singing. Like “Midnight Special,” where the line “you wake up in the morn’” sounds rather like “you wake up and moan”—and comfortably carries both meanings— her “Boll Weevil” thrives on competing meanings half heard. The proper term for this phenomenon is “mondegreen,” defined as a word or phrase resulting from mishearing. (The term was coined by writer Sylvia Wright, based on her own humorous misunderstanding of the line “They have slain the Earl Amurray and laid him on the green,” misheard as “Earl Amurray and Lady Mondegreen.”19) The difference here is twofold: “mondegreen” is rarely discussed as an intentional effect, and it is therefore typically regarded as a piece of trickery on the part of the listener’s ear, not the speaker/ singer’s tongue. But comparing her “Boll Weevil” to the crystalline clarity of Vera Hall’s holler for Lomax, it is hard to escape the conclusion that Odetta was purposely playing with the shapes of her words in an effort to achieve a certain effect. This was a quality frequently commented on—often negatively—by critics and concert reviewers. It might be okay for a country singer “to become fuzzy about the lyrics,” commented the Toronto Daily Star early in Odetta’s career, “but a folk singer must have the utmost clarity of words,” because he or she is “telling a tale or painting a simple picture and mood.”20 Many later critics chimed in: “If we had one complaint, it was that in some instances the words did not come through with sufficient clarity”; “[her] diction is not especially clear”; “Odetta’s enunciation is not the best.” All this even though, as we know (and as the Atlanta Constitution commented), Odetta was capable of turning out her lines

106

C O T T O N F I E L D S : S O C IA L G E O G R A P H I E S

“perfectly formed, every word etched and delineated, as starchy and clean as a little girl’s pinafore.”21 One example of Odetta’s intentional use of mondegreen in “Boll Weevil,” then, is that pivotal verse in which the merchant turns away the farmer. Vera Hall sings, plain as day, Farmer asked the merchant, “Give me a little meat, a little meal.” “Ain’t nothin’ doin’, old man. Boll weevil in your field.” This might very well be what Odetta is singing, too, but my modest sample of listeners (myself included) all hear it this way: Farmer asked the merchant, “Give me a little meat, a little meat.” “Ain’t nothin’ doin’, old man. Boll weevil in your feet.” It may be that the dramatic emphasis that Odetta lays on the words “meal” and “field” just make them harder to hear than Hall’s version. The merchant’s reply, in particular, is spit back at the farmer with a contempt that calls for a certain abruptness of articulation. The stakes of these two competing versions are not terribly high in this instance; I would only submit that the latter—“boll weevil in your feet”—adds to the power of the scene by implying that in real time (as we now say) the merchant is observing weevils on the supplicant’s shoes, and is therefore judging him on the spot as a bad risk for payment. If we hear it this way, then the verse is not merely about political economy, class, and power, but also about stigma.

107

O ne G rain of S and

But this indeterminate method of singing becomes far more important and powerful in the chorus. Vera Hall renders it—again, as plain as day— Hey, hey boll weevil, where’s your nated [native] home? Way down in the bottom, among the cotton and corn. Odetta switches out the word “among” in favor of “leave” or “leaves,” so upon cursory reflection her line would seem to be, Hey boll weevil, where’s your native home? Way down in the bottom—leaves o’ cotton and corn. But in contrast to “among,” the word “leaves” opens up all sorts of other possibilities, which seems to be its purpose. One possibility might be, Way down in the bottom. Leave the cotton and corn. Or, since her enunciation of the word “corn” is also indeterminate, Way down in the bottom. Leave the cotton and come. Meaning, the weevil says to the narrator, “join me” (even, “join me—it’s better here than where you are”), thus reestablishing Leadbelly’s alignment between weevil and dispossessed farmer. Since the words “Hey boll weevil” are also indeterminately stretched out over four beats, sung at the top end of Odetta’s range, and enunciated very pliably or spongily, these, too, invite varied interpretation: Hey bo-weee [boy], where’s your native home? Way down in the bottom. Leave the cotton and come. 108

C O T T O N F I E L D S : S O C IA L G E O G R A P H I E S

In this reading/hearing/rendering the song restores not only Leadbelly’s alignment between weevil and farmer but also the Migration-era concern with homelessness and flight that gave rise to songs like this in the first place—that set of historical conditions involving both “de boll-weevil in de cotton” and “de Devil in de white man,” such that “Poor Nigger hain’t got no home.” This rendering revives and echoes an entire genre of Migration-era writings in the Chicago Defender and elsewhere that did indeed entreat southern blacks to “leave the cotton and come.” Carried in bundles to Memphis, Birmingham, and New Orleans by black railroad porters, the Defender had advertised the Migration as the “Second Emancipation.” Under the title “Farewell Dixie-Land,” one 1916 Defender editorial urged that “Every black man for the sake of his wife and daughters especially should leave even at financial sacrifice.”22 In this reading, the song’s lyric “way down at the bottom” evokes the southern “mud sill,” that lowest of classes, “fatally fixed” in their station, whose menial labor was thought by white planters to enable the nobler, more refined advances of “civilization.” First named in the infamous “Cotton is King” speech by James Henry Hammond in 1858, the southern mud sill had scarcely vanished in imagination or in fact by Leadbelly’s day, or by Odetta’s either.23 Leave the cotton and come. What is important here is not which reading is “correct.” What is important is that all readings are in play and that the song’s meanings are therefore multiple and prolific. The result—much like Leadbelly’s rendering, but by different means—is a textured, dimensional record of African Americans’ travails after emancipation—the sharecropper’s 109

O ne G rain of S and

enforced overdependence on cotton, the onslaught and destruction of the weevil, humiliations before the local creditor, rootlessness and dispossession, the search for a home. Deceptive in its simplicity, the song in Odetta’s virtuosic rendering becomes nothing less than a chronicle of that interminable one-hundred year period that, in James Baldwin’s formulation, gave the lie to US celebrations of emancipation’s centenary “one hundred years too soon.” It is significant how much work Odetta’s guitar is accomplishing in both “Boll Weevil” and “Cotton Fields.” Bob Dylan famously said he took up folk guitar only after hearing Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues. “Right then and there,” he told a Playboy interviewer in 1966, “I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson.”24 But many acres of liner notes and concert reviews would roll off the presses without mention of her playing. Odetta herself recalls picking up the guitar only as a necessary accouterment, once she had been turned on to folk music one night at the Vesuvio Café in North Beach. “I went back to Los Angeles and got a guitar, a terrible old guitar, a heavy, hard-to-move thing, and I learned the key of C progression and started singing.”25 But she became quite expert, and here she plays quite expertly. We have already seen her powerful guitar work on “Cotton Fields,” climbing imperceptibly all the way from cradlerocking and sweet in the first verse to agitated and driving in the last. “Boll Weevil” is laid atop a boogie woogie, walking bass line played on the lower strings while the fingers of the right hand deliver a quick, delicate, but intricate strum for the chords on the higher strings. The walking bass hits some 110

C O T T O N F I E L D S : S O C IA L G E O G R A P H I E S

unaccustomed flatted notes, just as the chords shift to dark minors, creating an overall sound that is never discordant, but is unsettled, unsettling, and unmistakably but strangely (and also beautifully, in its way) amiss. The boogie woogie line—which comes out of nowhere, if you had only listened to Vera Hall and Leadbelly—might have been inspired by the clean, rockabilly instrumentation of Eddie Cochran or Brook Benton. But hers is an enormous improvement in its very darkness. It is true to the world that gave birth to the song. That standard boogie woogie bass line, too, having originated in Texas and Louisiana and traveled upriver, is a product of the very migrations that “all God’s dangers”— including the weevil—caused, and that in turn produced artists like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainy, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and Odetta. In both atmospherics and embedded historical  memory, then, the muted musings of her guitar work to amplify the textured, multiple meanings conveyed in Odetta’s words and voice. There is a sense in which Odetta’s Southern exposures, like “Cotton Fields,” “Boll Weevil,” and “Midnight Special,” belong to the vast, cross-genre canon of post-Migration black narratives, alongside Jacob Lawrence’s Migration Series, Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices, Langston Hughes’s One Way Ticket, or Bessie Smith’s “Gulf Coast Blues.” Of the four components that scholar Farah Jasmine Griffin has identified as integral to the migration narrative— wretched southern conditions and the protagonist’s propulsion northward, the confrontation with the urban North, the migrant’s negotiation of this new landscape, and an accounting of both the possibilities and limitations in this 111

O ne G rain of S and

new setting—it is true that Odetta’s southern songs tend to treat only the first directly.26 But although she never produced a piercing requiem on the order of “Strange Fruit” or a Brechtian, dissenting “show tune” like “Mississippi Goddam,” the songbook Odetta drew from did paint a picture of the Jim Crow south that was both condemnatory and evocative of the impetus for that “propulsion northward.” Leave the cotton and come. Many in the Popular Front left had shunned Leadbelly as an Uncle Tom, as composer Earl Robinson remembered, “because he would pass the hat after he sang, and do a little buck and wing.”27 But Odetta redeemed Leadbelly for the left, finding in his repertoire a trove of African American stories that were as yet too little known and even less appreciated for the history and the sheer human force they revealed. The “migration” part of this migration narrative—aside from that brief movement between Louisiana and Texarkana in “Cotton Fields”—is typically delivered not in the poetry and images of the songs themselves, but in Odetta’s implicit viewpoint in retrospection from the vantage of her peripatetic life in the West and the North. Hers were regional memories without sentimentalism, documents held up for contemplation by a public that, for the most part, had quite decidedly arrived elsewhere. *** Some interesting data emerge from a close analysis of Odetta’s itinerary between her first Tin Angel performances and the March on Washington a decade later.28 First are the various metrics of her rise: in her first few years as a folk singer, for instance, she scarcely played a venue outside 112

C O T T O N F I E L D S : S O C IA L G E O G R A P H I E S

of California, where her promoter Mary Ann Pollar was based—Los Angeles, Sausalito, Berkeley, San Francisco, Santa Rosa, Kentfield, Mill Valley. On her first eastern swing she describes being met at the train station in Chicago by Josh White and Big Bill Broonzy (“they were there to pick up their little sister”); and on that same trip she met Alan Lomax for the first time in New York. On New Year’s Eve, as 1957 dawned, she played the Gate of Horn in Chicago; and over the next year she played New York, Ann Arbor, Indianapolis, Princeton, New Haven, and Toronto. During the next four years, as Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues and At the Gate of Horn made her a name, she touched down for bookings in twenty-nine different states, plus Lagos, Stockholm, London, Rome, and Paris. In terms of her audience and her reach, meanwhile, in those early years she was mostly playing smaller coffeehouses like the Tin Angel and Opus One, as well as community art centers, YWCAs, restaurants, the occasional church, and a few old venues left behind by the Little Theater Movement of the 1920s and the 1930s. But by 1957 she was performing on college campuses with some regularity—Michigan, Yale, Illinois, Hunter, Purdue, Vermont, Princeton, Wisconsin, Berkeley, Vassar, UNC, Swarthmore, Morehouse—and after her Carnegie Hall debut in 1958, she began to turn up fairly frequently in grander venues like Orchestra Hall in Chicago, Town Hall in New York, the Hollywood Bowl, the Newport Folk Festival, the Apollo, the Monterey Jazz Festival, the Denver Auditorium Arena, the American Theater in St. Louis, the Baltimore Civic Center, or the Memorial Coliseum in Portland, even while continuing along the coffeehouse circuit from the Gate 113

O ne G rain of S and

of Horn to the Ash Grove to the Village Gate to Storyville to the Blue Angel. She also made increasing media appearances, including Ella Jenkins’s Totem Club in Chicago and the CBS radio show Sounds of Freedom, as well as network television appearances on Lamp unto My Feet, Tonight with Belafonte, The Ed Sullivan Show, and Dinner with the President. These metrics speak to Odetta’s rising notoriety, to be sure, but they also measure the growth and influence of that coffeehouse public, as Civil Rights became an ever more thoroughly nationalized concern. Like the performances at the March on Washington itself, Dinner with the President (a televised fundraiser at the White House for the AntiDefamation League in early 1963, featuring Odetta, Josh White, Judy Collins, and the Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem) demonstrated how fertile was the field of cultural politics at the intersection of race and folk.29 Dinner with the President was, in fact, a kind of cultural prelude to the Civil Rights Act. But there is another important aspect to her itinerary. Odetta sang of the South very much as a creature herself of the Great Migration, and she did not often return. We do know that she went to Selma in 1965, where only a fluke of history saved her and Harry Belafonte from being murdered along with Viola Liuzzo. But of the literally hundreds of performance dates she logged between 1954 and 1963, Odetta played only ten sites in the old confederacy—Austin, Memphis, Chapel Hill, Atlanta, Lubbock, Charlotte, Miami, Nashville, Greensboro, and Lexington (Virginia). Of these performances, seven were on college campuses; and of these seven, three were at historically black colleges (Morehouse, 114

C O T T O N F I E L D S : S O C IA L G E O G R A P H I E S

Lemoyne College, and Johnson C. Smith College, formerly the Freedmen’s College of North Carolina). She may have sung of the South, that is, but only rarely in the South. Writing of the folk scene in New York, Robert Cantwell described Washington Square as the place “that Peekskill met Montgomery”—Peekskill denoting a notorious site in Old Left history, up the Hudson from Manhattan, where Paul Robeson clashed with the local KKK in 1949. Washington Square’s folk-revival meeting of Old Left and emergent Civil Rights values, according to Cantwell, forged “a new synthesis in American politics . . . in which ordinary citizens turned to the civil-rights movement both as a model for effective political action and as a metaphor for their sense of powerlessness in postwar American society.”30 And this is just the thing: there was too little “Peekskill” in the south to sustain the institutions of the folk revival— and there may have been way too much “Montgomery,” too, come to think of it. Who needed metaphors, in a town like this? The music itself was terribly important to the movement down south, from Montgomery to Albany to Jackson to Birmingham. Bernice Johnson (Reagon) and the formation of SNCC’s “Freedom Singers” announced as much. But a coffeehouse public? At a stop in Alabama in 1963, one Hootenanny tour was greeted with chants of “nig-ger, nig-ger” at the mention of Josh White; when they refused to play in Jackson, Mississippi because of the city auditorium’s segregationist codes, according to “Papa” John Phillips, “the city’s rednecks went crazy, smashing hotel windows, baiting us with chants of ‘Nigger lovers,’ and surrounding the hotel.” The Hootenanny group beat a 115

O ne G rain of S and

retreat to Tougaloo College, an HBC, where they performed Freedom Songs.31 “The crushing conclusion that comes out of Greenwood, Miss.,” reported a young Howard Zinn, “—and Selma, Ala., and Danville, Va., and Americus, Ga.—is that the federal government is but a shadow in the hard-rock places of the Deep South.”32 The audience that might have existed for folk institutions in the South—one imagines legions of “battlescarred youngsters,” as Zinn called them—was out marching in the streets, picketing, sitting-in, gathering at political rallies, in jail, or either too cowed or too smart to risk the violence that would inevitably attend the importation of the Gate of Horn or Blue Angel’s brand of integrated and frankly political sociality. If many of Odetta’s songs themselves were archival objects of Jim Crow from the bitter decades of incomplete emancipation, her performance calendar seems an archival object in its own right—an artifact of both the diaspora that these calamites created and the extent to which the South remained—as Amiri Baraka put it—“the scene of the crime.” The pre-migration South may have represented danger, injustice, and violence in the memory of many transplanted migrants up North—leave the cotton and come. The vast geographical holes in Odetta’s itinerary perhaps flagged the contemporary South as a hazard still. Which was all the more reason to keep singing.

116

Conclusion: Ain’t No Grave

There is, of course, a secular reading of “Ain’t No Grave.” That indomitability, that refusal to stay down, all that “I be gettin’ up and walkin’ around” referred to plenty of things besides Heaven. Odetta has been immortalized in thirty-nine albums, in films like Sanctuary (1961) and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974), and in recorded performances like her searing rendition of “Water Boy” on Tonight with Belafonte (1959). Her influence lives in the work of contemporaries like Harry Belafonte, Peter, Paul and Mary, Janis Joplin, and Joan Baez, as well as artists of later generations like Tracy Chapman and Rhiannon Giddens. “Nobody came after her and tried to sound like Odetta,” Baez said, “because it wasn’t worth it. They couldn’t.”1 But her tone, her touch, and her seriousness of purpose did educate and change every artist who heard her. The day she died, Time magazine online posted an extraordinary obituary by cultural critic Richard Corliss. Setting aside his problematic gender formulation that Odetta was “the female Paul Robeson,” it is a remarkably astute rendering of her

O ne G rain of S and

work at the crossroads of history and art. The equivalence of Odetta and Robeson holds: Rosa Parks was her No. 1 fan, and Martin Luther King Jr., called her the queen of American folk music. Odetta’s stage presence was regal enough: planted on stage like an oak tree no one would dare cut down, wearing a guitar high on her chest, she could envelop Carnegie Hall with her powerful contralto as other vocalists might fill a phone booth. .  .  . She used that amazing instrument to bear witness to the pain and perseverance of her ancestors. Some folks sing songs. Odetta testified. For a handful of black singers, their discography is an aural history, centuries deep, of abduction, enslavement, social and sexual abuse by the whites in power—and of the determination first to outlive the ignominy branded on the race, then to overcome it. In her commanding presence, charismatic delivery and determination to sing black truth to white power, Odetta was the female Paul Robeson. During the folk boom, each Odetta gig, in coffeehouse or concert hall, was a master class of work songs, folk songs, church songs, and an eloquent tutorial in raw American history. Identifiable from the first syllable, her voice fused the thrill of gospel, the techniques of art song—the wisdom that subtlety sometimes trumps volume—and the desperate wail of blues. If a line could be drawn from Bessie Smith to Janis Joplin, from Mahalia Jackson to Maria Callas, it would have to go through Odetta.2

118

C O N C LU SIO N : A I N ’ T N O G R AV E

She also lives on in many unexpected places. Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues prompted Bob Dylan to pick up an acoustic guitar; his every subsequent song is a tacit ode to her. Bassist Bill Lee’s son Shelton—we know him as Spike— recalls that “my father would take us up to the Newport Jazz Festival. .  .  . Or, if he was playing at the Village Vanguard or the Bitter End, sometimes we could stay up late and go with him.”3 Spike Lee paid forward these coffeehouse “master classes” on politics and art in Do the Right Thing (1989), Malcolm X (1992), 4 Little Girls (on the 16th Street Church bombing, 1997), and the music video for Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Care about Us” (1996). Ava Duvernay chose Odetta’s haunting cover of Dylan’s “Masters of War” to establish the dramatic confrontation at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma (2014), rendering the singer literally (as she has been called so many times) the soundtrack of the Civil Rights movement. But most importantly—Rosa Parks was her No. 1 fan— Odetta endures as an exemplar in courage and creativity, who forged art to meet the challenges of an exacting and dangerous political moment. In this respect, every singer in her wake who ever ventured a statement—every Bob Dylan or Country Joe, every Bruce Springsteen, Rhiannon Giddens, Beyoncé, or Solange—owes a debt to Odetta’s clarity of voice, her social vision, and her artistic method—and many of them have said so. Odetta herself articulated the politics of her work most urgently and best: “We’re living in such a fantastic, marvelous, scary sort of age that we’ve got to use every ounce of ourselves spiritually and mentally. We’re too near instant destruction to be fooling around.”4 As one critic 119

O ne G rain of S and

discovered in her interview with Odetta in 1961, the singer “believes that history books are not as meaningful as folk songs—or even as truthful.”5 Her clear-eyed refusal to “fool around” in her work is what transformed Odetta’s art into the instrument it was—an archive, a record, a communal resource, a bid for justice, a pedagogy.

120

Acknowledgments

This work began as one chapter of a big fat book that now I will probably never write. But no regrets; spending the time with Odetta’s life and work has been an inspiration and a piece of good luck, as has spending time with the many people who have helped me to think this project through. I am grateful to my many interlocutors, advisors, critics, and fellow travelers. These here are the responsible parties: Judy Smith was my very first mentor in graduate school, but by now enough years have passed that we are practically life-long friends. Judy continues to be a model, not only in her scholarly work, but in her just, ethical, generous, and politically alive way of being in the world. Her mark on this book in important ways dates all the way back to those first conversations in the 1980s, I have no doubt. More recently her own Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical cut a path for me by its elegance and example; she also read an early draft of this manuscript and gave me great encouragement and advice. I wish to extend a very special word of gratitude to Odette Pollar, Michelle Esrick, and Doug Yeager for consenting to

Acknowledgments

spend some time with me and for sharing their thoughts, knowledge, and remembrances of Odetta. Their faith in this project has meant a great deal; the book is better because of our conversations. I hope it meets the high bar of their judgment. Judith Weisenfeld invited me to speak at an event honoring Odetta at Princeton in the spring of 2009. That event sent me down the path that eventually became this book. Thanks to Judith for our conversations around that occasion, and for the inspiration of her own scholarship. A small piece of this work received its first hearing at the ASA later that same year; in addition to Judy Smith, I am grateful to fellow panelists Ruth Feldstein and Daphne Brooks (more on her in a minute), and to Werner Sollors and other members of that audience for their generative questions and advice. Even though I have never presented work at the EMP (Experience Music Project) conference, I have attended several times in recent years, and my own work has very much developed in conversation with people I met in that setting—many of them friends, now—or others whose work on music and US culture I was first exposed to there. Thanks to Greil Marcus, Michelle Habell-Pallán, Karl Hagstrom Miller, Kandia Krazyhorse, Josh Kun, Lauren Onckey, Ann Powers, Sonnet Retman, Barry Shank, Sherrie Tucker, Alexandra Vazquez, Gayle Wald, Oliver Wang, Eric Weisbard, and Carl Wilson. Special thanks to Daphne Brooks, too, for introducing me to this world (but more on her in a minute). In addition to our many illuminating conversations over the years, Gayle Wald has also served as my editor for the 33 1/3 series. Many thanks for her keen eye, helpful 122

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

suggestions, many bibliographic leads, and sound advice. The book is far better for her interventions. Thanks, too, to Leah Babb-Rosenfeld of Bloomsbury Publishing for her help in getting this done, and to Rennie Alphonsa for help and expertise in finalizing the manuscript. Odetta has been on my mind for so long that some of my early research assistants at Yale have by now advanced pretty far along in their own careers. My gratitude to Professors Mike Amezcua and Megan Glick for their terrific work on this as graduate students many years ago; and thanks to Lucy Caplan (professor soon-to-be) for her more recent research help with the Odetta performance itinerary in the 1950s. As ever, I am grateful every single day for the students and colleagues that surround me at Yale. This work is much better for their comradeship. My colleagues in American Studies and African American Studies have framed this book from top to bottom by their inspiring work, their sage scholarly advice, their political and intellectual commitments, and their intelligent commentary on a regular basis: Jean-Christophe Agnew, Hazel Carby, Alicia Schmidt Camacho, Michael Denning, Kate Dudley, Crystal Feimster, Glenda Gilmore, Jackie Goldsby, Emily Greenwood, Inderpal Grewal, Zareena Grewal, Jonathan Holloway, Albert Laguna, Mary Lui, Joanne Meyerowitz, Steve Pitti, Dixa Ramirez, Joe Roach, Marc Robinson, Karin Roffman, Michael Veal, and Laura Wexler. Christine Hayes and Nancy Levene helped me with some very specific questions I had about a Biblical text; Katie Lofton answered many questions, too, and she also read and commented on portions of the manuscript (in addition to lighting the 123

Acknowledgments

way by her own incandescent work at the intersection of religion and popular culture). Melissa Barton and the staff at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library were an enormous help with some of the archival research. Students in “The Politics and Culture of the US Color Line,” “Race and Races in American Studies,” and “Methods and Practices in US Cultural History” have contributed more to this work than they know. Special thanks to Eshe Shirley, Micah Jones, and the activists of Next Yale in 2015–16. Lyrics reprinted from the Vanguard Records album: “One Grain of Sand” (VRS-9137, 1963). Artist: Odetta. Courtesy of Concord Music. The quote from “Odetta Was Born With a Voice Like a Weapon – Switches It from Blunt Cudgel to Thistledown” by Doris Lockerman is from The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 1962-03-01, ©1962 The Atlanta JournalConstitution. All rights reserved. Used by permission and protected by the Copyright Laws of the United States. The printing, copying, redistribution, or retransmission of this Content without express written permission is prohibited. The following song copyrights for this publication were used by permission: “One Grain of Sand” Written by Pete Seeger Copyright Ludlow Music Inc. “Cool Water” Written by Bob Nolan Copyright Songwriters Guild of America o/b/o Music of the West

124

AC K N OW L E D G M E N T S

“Ain’t No Grave” Written by Claude Ely Copyright Fort Knox Music, Inc. and Trio Music Company, Inc. “Cotton Fields” Written by Huddie Ledbetter Copyright 1940, Folkways Music Publishing Inc. Many thanks to Aaron Green at Easy Song Licensing for his help in securing these permissions. Because my father is a liberal New York Jew, naturally I grew up listening to Mahalia Jackson every Christmas. (True.) Thanks to Jerry Jacobson for his model, for his love of American musicking, and for the continually outraged but nonetheless idealistic outlook on the world he engendered. And thanks in memory to Sarah Frye Jacobson, whose quiet but powerful sense of justice was something I think Odetta would have appreciated. My life is a joy and one big, wondrous master class with Daphne Brooks. Each day a gift, every exchange an education. There are no words powerful enough—no font beautiful enough—to express my good fortune in Daphne’s partnership or my debt to her for the depth of knowledge, ingenuity, sheer brilliance of insight, political commitment, and in the midst of it all, good humor that she shares with me every single day. How lucky am I? (Don’t jinx it.)

125

Notes

Introduction: One Grain of Sand 1. Harry Belafonte at the Memorial Service and Tribute to Odetta, Riverside Baptist Church, New York, February 27, 2009. 2. Doug Yeager, interview with the author, March 19, 2018. 3. “Odetta: the Last Word,” [2007 interview with Tim Weiner, The New York Times], at http:​//www​.nyti​mes.c​om/20​08/12​/03/a​rts/ m​usic/​03ode​tta.h​tml?_​r=2&pa​gewan​ted=2&​​hp (accessed July 2, 2017). Jacqueline Trescott, “Up from the ‘60s, Odetta Finds a Song,” Washington Post, January 16, 1980, at https​://ww​w.was​ hingt​onpos​t.com​/arch​ive/l​ifest​yle/1​980/0​1/16/​up-fr​om-th​e-60s​ -odet​ta-fi​nds-a​-song​/3baf​2abe-​b252-​4fdb-​84bb-​e0c6c​bf3f6​ dc/?u​tm_te​rm=.5​2d462​49d8c​3 (accessed July 1, 2017). Doug Yeager, interview with the author, March 19, 2018; Michelle Esrick, interview with the author, March 19, 2018. 4. Doug Yeager, interview with the author, March 19, 2018. 5. “Odetta: the Last Word,” [2007 interview with Tim Weiner, The New York Times], at http:​//www​.nyti​mes.c​om/20​08/12​/03/ a​rts/m​usic/​03ode​tta.h​tml?_​r=2&pa​gewan​ted=2&​​hp (accessed July 2, 2017). 6. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time [1963] (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 81.

N O T E S

7. “Odetta: the Last Word,” [2007 interview with Tim Weiner, The New York Times], at http:​//www​.nyti​mes.c​om/20​08/12​/03/ a​rts/m​usic/​03ode​tta.h​tml?_​r=2&pa​gewan​ted=2​&​hp (accessed July 2, 2017). 8. New York Herald Tribune, April 25, 1959. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Clippings file of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, JWJ MSS 89, Box 136. 9. LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Blues People: Negro Music in White America [1963] (New York: Perennial, 2002), pp. 235–36. 10. Toronto Daily Star, August 28, 1957, p. 26. 11. Richie Havens with Steve Davidowitz, They Can’t Hide Us Anymore (New York: Avon, 1999), p. 39. 12. World Café, “Odetta: Remembering Her Legacy,” December 4, 2008, at http:​//www​.npr.​org/a​rtist​s/977​39742​/odet​ta (accessed May 24, 2017). 13. Chicago Tribune, December 2, 1956, p. 325; Godfrey John, “Negro Ethos—Joy and Pathos,” The Christian Science Monitor, March 7, 1964, p. 8; Collins George, “Odetta Gives Life to Negro Spirituals,” Detroit Free Press, March 19, 1960, p. 5. 14. Scott Barretta, ed., The Conscience of the Folk Revival: The Writings of Israel “Izzy” Young (Lanham, UK: Scarecrow Press, 2013), p. 73. 15. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from Birmingham City Jail” [1963], in James Washington, ed., Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. (New York: Harper, 1986), pp. 291–92. 16. King, “Letter from Birmingham City Jail,” p. 292. 17. Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, p. 10. 18. Alexandra Vazquez, Listening in Detail: Performances of Cuban Music (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). 127

N otes

19. Pete Seeger, One Grain of Sand: A Lullaby (Boston: Little, Brown, 2000). 20. Judith Smith, Becoming Belafonte: Black Artist, Public Radical (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014); Farah Jasmine Griffin, Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists and Progressive Politics during World War Two (New York: Civitas, 2013); Mary Helen Washington, The Other Black List: The African American Literary and Cultural Left of the 1950s (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014); Scott Saul, Freedom Is, Freedom Ain’t: Jazz and the Making of the ‘Sixties (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); Brian Ward, Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness, and Race Relations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); Peter Guralnick, Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm and Blues and the Southern Dream of Freedom (Boston: Back Bay, 1999); Herman Gray, Cultural Moves: African Americans and the Politics of Representation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005); Christine Acham, Revolution Televised: Prime Time and the Struggle for Black Power (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 21. World Café, “Odetta: Remembering Her Legacy,” December 4, 2008, at http:​//www​.npr.​org/a​rtist​s/977​39742​/odet​ta (accessed May 24, 2017).

Midnight Special: The Archivist 1. Stephen Wade, The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), pp. 322–23. 2. Carl Sandburg, The American Songbook [1927] (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1990), p. 26. 128

N O T E S

3. B.A. Botkin, The American People: Stories, Legends, Tales, Traditions, and Songs [1946] (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1998), p. 375. 4. Quoted in Wade, The Beautiful Music All Around Us, pp. 155, 169. 5. John Szwed, Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World (New York: Penguin, 2010), p. 38. 6. Sara Marcus, “Against Musicians’ Biographies,” New Republic, August 31, 2015, at https​://ne​wrepu​blic.​com/a​rticl​e/122​ 674/w​hats-​behin​d-mus​ic-is​nt-ne​arly-​impor​tant-​song-​itsel​f (accessed March 16, 2017). 7. “Odetta: Black folk singer who cut across the race divide to popularize the genre in America,” The Guardian, at www. g​uardi​an.co​.uk/m​usic/​2008/​dec/0​4/ode​tta-f​i lm-f​olk-m​usic-​ bitua​ry (accessed October 28, 2009); “Odetta,” World Music Central, at www.w​orldm​usicc​entra​l.org​/arti​sts/a​rtist​_page​ .php?​id=95​0 (accessed May 24, 2005); Frank Dexter Brown, “Odetta: Giving Voice to Lives and Struggles,” SeeingBlack. com at www.seeingblack.com/x082902/odetta.shtml (accessed May 24, 2005). Doug Yeager, interview with the author, March 19, 2018. 8. “Icons: Doc Watson and Odetta,” at www.t​hirst​yearf​estiv​al.co​ m/ode​tta_w​atson​.html​(accessed May 24, 2005). See also Bill Carpenter, “Odetta, American Folk Singer,” Goldmine, at www. g​eocit​ies.c​om/Ho​llywo​od/Pa​rk/86​72/ht​mls/i​nfo/?​20052​4 (accessed May 24, 2005). 9. David Oshinsky, “Worse than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Free Press, 1996), p. 11. 10. Douglas Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to 129

N otes

World War II (New York: Anchor, 2008), pp. 53–56; Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2010), p. 31. 11. Wade, The Beautiful Music All Around Us, p. 306. 12. Oshinsky, “Worse than Slavery,” pp. 139, 147. 13. Szwed, Alan Lomax, p. 48. 14. Blackmon, Slavery by Another Name, p. 356. 15. Oshinsky, “Worse than Slavery,” p. 180. 16. Oshinsky, “Worse than Slavery,” p. 46. 17. Catherine Stewart, Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), p. 115. 18. Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016), p. 9. 19. William McPherson, “She Sings in Key of Love,” Washington Post, Times Herald, August 3, 1961, p. C17. 20. “Odetta: the Last Word,” [2007 interview with Tim Weiner, The New York Times], at http:​//www​.nyti​mes.c​om/20​08/12​/03/ a​rts/m​usic/​03ode​tta.h​tml?_​r=2&pa​gewan​ted=2&​​hp (accessed July 2, 2017). 21. Harry Belafonte at the Memorial Service and Tribute to Odetta, Riverside Baptist Church, New York, February 27, 2009; “Odetta: the Last Word,” [2007 interview with Tim Weiner, The New York Times], at http:​//www​.nyti​mes.c​om/20​ 08/12​/03/a​rts/m​usic/​03ode​tta.h​tml?_​r=2&pa​gewan​ted=2​&hp (accessed July 2, 2017). 22. Ralph Gleason, “Odetta’s Blues a Link to Bessie, Ma Rainy,” Los Angeles Times-Mirror, circa April 1961. Beinecke

130

N O T E S

Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Clippings file of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, JWJ MSS 89, Box 136. 23. “Odetta makes a Rare S.D. Stop at Adams Avenue Fest; Expect ‘Songs that Have Some Kind of Significance,’” SIGNOnSanDiego.com by the Union-Tribune, April 28, 2005, at www.s​ignon​sandi​ego.c​om/ne​ws/fe​ature​s2005​0428-​9999l​ zlw28​odett​a.htm​l (accessed May 24, 2005); Lea Gilmore, “It’s a Girl Thang,” at http://bluesland.net/thang/Odetta.html (accessed May 24, 2005). 24. William Heath, The Children Bob Moses Led (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 1996), pp. 6, 12. 25. Singing Out: The Folksong Magazine, 36:2 (August/September/ October 1991), p. 4. 26. Szwed, Alan Lomax, p. 49; “Miserable but Exciting Songs,” Time, November 26, 1945, p. 52. 27. Michalis Limnios, “Douglas A. Yeager: Harmony of Culture,” Blues @ Greece, at http:​//blu​es.gr​/prof​i les/​blogs​/inte​rview​-with​ -doug​las-a​-yeag​er-ta​lks-a​bout-​odett​a-dav​id-am​ram (accessed March 16, 2017). 28. Stewart, Long Past Slavery, p. 107. 29. Stewart, Long Past Slavery, p. 109. 30. William Francis Allen and Charles Pickard Ware, Slave Songs of the United States [1867] (New York: Dover Publications, 1995), “Introduction.” 31. David King Dunaway and Molly Beer, Singing Out: An Oral History of America’s Folk Music Revivals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. x. 32. Jones, Blues People, p. 30. 131

N otes

33. “Duke Ellington’s Orchstra at a High Point,” Christian Science Monitor, January 22, 1957, p. 11. Emphasis added. On “authenticity” and the “folk,” see Karl Hagstrom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), esp. Chapter 3, “Isolating Folk, Isolating Songs: Reimagining Southern Music as Folklore,” pp. 85–120. 34. “Chestyn Everett, “Odetta, Wavers Triumph in Hollywood Bowl Debut,” Los Angeles Sentinel, September 14, 1961, p. C2. 35. “Odetta in Her Element at Shadows,” Washington Post, Times Herald, April 12, 1963, p. B13. 36. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 24, 1960, p. D4. 37. Harry Belafonte, “Forward,” Mine Eyes Have Seen, cited on the Vanguard Records website page for Odetta’s One Grain of Sand, at www.vanguardrecords.com/odetta/sand.html (accessed May 24, 2005). 38. “Folk Stars Prove Fresher than Ever,” Washington Post, Times Herald, September 1, 1966, p. D19. 39. Singing Out: The Folksong Magazine, 36:2 (August/September/ October 1991), p. 5. 40. “Odetta makes a Rare S.D. Stop at Adams Avenue Fest; Expect ‘Songs that Have Some Kind of Significance,’” SIGNOnSanDiego.com by the Union-Tribune, April 28, 2005, at www.s​ignon​sandi​ego.c​om/ne​ws/fe​ature​s2005​0428-​9999l​ zlw28​odett​a.htm​l (accessed May 24, 2005). 41. “Odetta Sings Bessie Smith Hits at Monterey Festival,” Chicago Defender, August 26, 1961, p. 10. 42. “Odetta Brings Songs of Many Moods and Smiles to Concert,” Chicago Tribune, April 2, 1966, p. B1.

132

N O T E S

Cool Water: The Coffeehouse 1. The Young Pioneers, “Cool Water” (performed in 1961 and introduced by Dale Evans), at https​://ww​w.you​tube.​com/ w​atch?​v=rnt​30ICs​o_c (accessed March 26, 2017). 2. Odetta, It’s Impossible—At the Best of Harlem, Four Leaf Clover, 1976. Emphasis added. 3. See for example, Diane Pecknold, ed., Hidden in the Mix: The African American Presence in Country Music (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013); Charles L. Hughes, Country Soul: Making Music and Making Race in the American South (Chapel Hill: UNC Press, 2015); Miller, Segregating Sound. 4. Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: AfroAmerican Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 39. 5. Martin Luther King, Jr., “Notecards on Books of the Old Testament,” Stanford University, Martin Luther King, Jr. Papers Project, January 28, 1953, at https​://su​l-swa​p-pro​d.sta​nford​ .edu/​20141​21822​3353/​http:​//mlk​-kpp0​1.sta​nford​.edu/​prima​ rydoc​ument​s/Vol​2/530​128OT​Notec​ards.​pdf (accessed March 31, 2017). 6. The New York Times, November 17, 1960, p. 43. 7. This cultural, institutional, and geographical mapping of the folk revival derives primarily from Dick Weissman, Which Side Are You On? An Inside History of the Folk Music Revival in America (New York: Continuum, 2006), esp. chapters 4, 5, and 6, pp. 72–135. See also Ronald Cohen, Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940-1970 (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002).

133

N otes

8. Seeger quoted in Robert Cantwell, When We Were Good: The Folk Revival (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 272; Hentoff, in Cohen, Rainbow Quest, p. 179. 9. Stephen Petrus and Ronald Cohen, Folk City: New York and the American Folk Music Revival (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 179. 10. Havens and Davidowitz, They Can’t Hide Us Anymore, p. 30. 11. Dunaway and Beer, Singing Out, p. 98. 12. Christian Science Monitor, June 28, 1958, p. 17. 13. Harold Cruse, “Race and Bohemianism in Greenwich Village,” The Crisis, January, 1960, p. 9. 14. Robert Alden, “Greenwich Village, Where Races Mix—and Make Trouble,” US New and World Report, October 12, 1959, p. 106; Petrus and Cohen, Folk City, p. 116. 15. Petrus and Cohen, Folk City, p. 143. 16. Pittsburgh Courier, February 9, 1963, p. 24; March 23, 1963, p. 21. 17. The New York Times, August 4, 1963, p. 1. 18. “Ramblin’ Jack Elliot: All Things Good and All Things Bad,” L.A. Record, April 17, 2009, at http:​//lar​ecord​.com/​inter​views​ /2009​/04/1​7/ram​blin-​jack-​ellio​tt-al​l-thi​ngs-g​ood-a​nd-al​l-thi​ ngs-b​ad (accessed July 25, 2017). 19. The New York Times, November 21, 1962, p. 26. 20. Doug Yeager, interview with the author, March 19, 2018. 21. Lea Gilmore, “It’s a Girl Thang,” at http://bluesland.net/thang/ Odetta.html (accessed May 24, 2005). 22. Cantwell, When We Were Good, pp. 283–84.

134

N O T E S

23. “Before the Castro: North Beach, a Gay Mecca,” Found SF, at http:​//www​.foun​dsf.o​rg/in​dex.p​hp?ti​tle=B​efore​_the_​Castr​o:_ No​rth_B​each,​_a_Ga​y_Mec​ca (accessed July 3, 2017). Craig Konnoth, “Before the Castro: Comemorating the Embarcadero, North Beach, and the Polk Gulch” (unpublished manuscript in the author’s possession), p. 24. Gratitude to Joseph Plaster. 24. Petrus and Cohen, Folk City, p. 175. 25. Dave Von Ronk with Elijah Wald, The Mayor of MacDougal Street: A Memoir (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2005), p. 62. 26. Havens and Davidowitz, They Can’t Hide Us Anymore, p. 39. 27. “Odetta Speaks Through Her Songs,” The New York Times, March 7, 1965, p. X11. 28. Christina Klein, Cold War Orientalism: Asia in the Middlebrow Imagination, 1945-1961 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), p. 41.

Moses, Moses: Spiritual Geographies 1. Letter from Odetta to Hughes, October 9, 1959; letter from Hughes to Odetta, November 6, 1959. Langston Hughes Papers, JWJ MSS 26, Box 68; Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 2. Doug Yeager, Michelle Esrick, interviews by the author, March 19, 2018. 3. Jules Schwerin, Got to Tell It: Mahalia Jackson Queen of Gospel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 65. 4. Willie James Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), pp. 43, 83.

135

N otes

5. Albert J. Raboteau, Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South [1978] (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 318. 6. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, p. 43; Jones, Blues People, p. 39; James Cone, Black Theology and Black Power [1969] (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1997), p. 33. 7. Raboteau, Slave Religion, pp. 311–12. 8. Richard Lischer, The Preacher King: Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Word That Moved America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 31. 9. Nick Salvatore, Singing in a Strange Land: C.L. Franklin, the Black Church, and the Transformation of America (Boston: Little, Brown, 2005), p. 71. 10. James Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues [1972] (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1991), pp. 42, 95; emphasis in original. 11. Albert Raboteau, “The Black Experience in American Evangelicalism,” in Timothy Fulop and Albert Raboteau, eds., African-American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 101. 12. Lischer, The Preacher King, p. 211. 13. Paul Laurence Dunbar, “An Ante-Bellum Sermon,” The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012), p. 25. 14. James Weldon Johnson, God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse [1927] (New York: Penguin, 2008), pp. 47–48. 15. Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain [1939] (New York: Harper, 2009), pp. 18, 75. See Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 136

N O T E S

16. Hurston, Moses, p. 180. 17. Frederick Douglass, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (New York: Dover, 2003), p. 54. 18. Barbara Harris, “Ella Baker: Backbone of the Civil Rights Movement,” Jackson Advocate, at http:​//www​.jack​sonad​vocat​ eonli​ne.co​m/ell​a-bak​er-ba​ckbon​e-of-​the-c​ivil%​E2%80​%88ri​ ghts%​E2%80​%88mo​vemen​t/ (accessed October 3, 2017). 19. Adam Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America: The Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987), pp. 5, 16–17. 20. Fairclough, To Redeem the Soul of America, p. 34. 21. Aaron Cohen, Amazing Grace (New York: Continuum, 2011), p. 42. 22. Salvatore, Singing in a Strange Land, pp. 133, 149. 23. Clayborne Carson, “Martin Luther King, Jr., and the AfricanAmerican Social Gospel,” in Fulop and Raboteau, AfricanAmerican Religion, p. 347. 24. Lischer, The Preacher King, p. 203. 25. Martin Luther King, Jr. and James M. Washington (ed.), A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches (New York: HarperOne, 2003). 26. Cone, Black Theology, pp. ix, 44. 27. Lischer, The Preacher King, p. 84. 28. Toby Bielawski, “Folk Diva: The Music and Wisdom of Odetta,” Radiance Online (1999), at http:​//www​.radi​ancem​ agazi​ne.co​m/iss​ues/1​999/w​inter​_99/o​detta​.html​ (accessed June 22, 2016). 29. Sing Out! The Folk Song Magazine, 36:2 (August/September/ October, 1991), p. 3. 137

N otes

30. Tom Nelligan, “Odetta: An American Voice,” Dirty Linen, #87, April–May, 2000, p. 49. Doug Yeager, interview with the author, March 19, 2018. 31. Michelle Esrick, interview with the author, March 19, 2018. 32. Jennings, The Christian Imagination, pp. 23, 34–35. 33. Jennings, The Christian Imagination, pp. 105, 184, 239. 34. Jennings, The Christian Imagination, pp. 6, 60, 112. 35. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, pp. 40–41. 36. Schwerin, Got to Tell It, p. 26. 37. Lischer, The Preacher King, pp. 200–1; emphasis in original. 38. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, p. 174. 39. “Library of Congress Archive of Folk Culture,” Reviews of Rounder Records, at http:​//www​.root​sworl​d.com​/rw/f​eatur​e/ loc​.html​(accessed August 4, 2017). 40. Anthony Heilbut, Gospel Sound (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), p. 84. 41. William Harris, ed., The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader (New York: Basic, 1999), p. 251. 42. Rosetta Ross, Witnessing and Testifying: Black Women, Religion, and Civil Rights (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2003), pp. 114, 189. 43. James Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues: An Interpretation (New York: Orbis, 1992), p. 35. 44. The New York Times, August 28, 1963, p. 1. 45. Dunaway and Beer, Singing Out, p. 112. 46. The New York Times, August 28, 1963, p. 1. 47. Taylor Branch, Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954-1963 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), p. 877. 138

N O T E S

48. NPR World Café, “Odetta: Remembering Her Legacy,” December 4, 2008, at http:​//www​.npr.​org/a​rtist​s/977​39742​/ odet​ta (accessed May 24, 2017). 49. Charles Marsh, The Beloved Community: How Faith Shapes Social Justice, from the Civil Rights Movement to Today (New York: Basic, 2005), p. 91. 50. “Support Christmas Boycott,” Illustrated News, November 25, 1963, p. 2, at https​://ww​w.fac​ebook​.com/​james​baldw​in/ ph​otos/​a.214​62693​52213​06.66​886.1​77825​83890​1416/​12304​ 77873​63620​2/ 51. “Support Christmas Boycott,” Illustrated News, November 25, 1963, p. 2, at https​://ww​w.fac​ebook​.com/​james​baldw​in/ ph​otos/​a.214​62693​52213​06.66​886.1​77825​83890​1416/​12304​ 77873​63620​2/ 52. Judith Smith, “‘It Is Time for Artists to Be Heard’: Artists and Writers for Freedom, 1963-1964,” unpublished manuscript in the author’s possession, pp. 10, 12. Forthcoming in Kalfou: A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies. 53. Cohen, Amazing Grace, p. 29.

Cotton Fields: Social Geographies 1. Samuel Eliot Morison, The Oxford History of the American People (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 707. 2. Timothy Tyson, The Blood of Emmett Till (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017), pp. 91–92. 3. Jones and Baraka, Blues People, p. 95. 4. “Odetta, inspirational singer of American folk music who lent her voice to the civil-rights movement,” Independent, December 4, 2008 at http:​//www​.inde​pende​nt.co​.uk/n​ews/o​ 139

N otes

bitua​ries/​odett​a-ins​pirat​ional​-sing​er-of​-amer​ican-​folk-​music​ -who-​lent-​her-v​oice-​to-th​e-civ​il-ri​ghts-​movem​ent-1​05061​ 7.htm​l (accessed April 30, 2016). 5. NPR, The Long View, December 30, 2005, at http:​//www​.npr.​ org/a​rtist​s/977​39742​/odet​ta (accessed August 12, 2017). 6. NPR, World Café, “Odetta: Remembering Her Legacy,” December 4, 2008, at http:​//www​.npr.​org/a​rtist​s/977​39742​ /odet​ta (accessed May 24, 2017). On Japanese-American internment, Doug Yeager, interview with the author, March 19, 2018. 7. Chester Himes, If He Hollers Let Him Go [1947] (New York: Da Capo, 2002), p. 15. 8. Adam Green, Selling the Race: Culture, Community, and Black Chicago, 1940-1955 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 181. 9. Michael Honey, Sharecroppers’ Troubadour: John L. Hancox, the Southern Tenant Farmers’ Union, and the African American Song Tradition (New York: Palgrave, 2013), p. 11. 10. Honey, Sharecroppers’ Troubadour, pp. 36–37. 11. Honey, Sharecroppers’ Troubadour, pp. 34, 43. 12. Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream [1949] (New York: Norton, 1978), pp. 22, 29. 13. Drew Friedman and Josh Alan Friedman, Any Similarity to Persons Living or Dead Is Purely Coincidental (Two) (New York: Fantagraphics, 2012), p. 18. 14. Nina Simone, Nina Simone in Concert (New York: Philips, 1964),. Daphne Brooks, “Nina Simone’s Triple Play,” Callaloo, 34:1 (Winter, 2011) pp. 176–97. 15. Langston Hughes, One-Way Ticket (New York: Knopf, 1949), p. 62. 140

N O T E S

16. Theodore Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers: The Life of Nate Shaw (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), p. 223 17. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues, pp. 108–09. 18. Daryl Cumber Dance, From My People: 400 Years of African American Folklore (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), p. 501. 19. Sylvia Wright, “The Death of Lady Mondegreen,” Harper’s Magazine, November, 1954, pp. 48–51. See Kevin Dettmar, Gang of Four’s Entertainment (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). 20. Toronto Daily Star, November 21, 1955, p. 10. 21. “Music in Toronto,” The Globe and Mail, November 21, 1958, p. 23; Variety, February 24, 1960, p. 100; John Kraglund, “Folk Singer Shows Varied Style,” The Globe and Mail, April 17, 1961, p. 9; Doris Lockerman, “Odetta Was Born with a Voice Like a Weapon,” The Atlanta Constitution, March 1, 1962, p. 26. 22. “Farewell Dixie Land,” Chicago Defender, October 7, 1916, p. 12. 23. “Speech of Hon. James H. Hammond of South Carolina, On the Admission of Kansas, Under the Lecompton Constitution: Delivered in the Senate of the United States, March 4, 1858,” at http:​//www​.amer​icana​ntiqu​arian​.org/​Freed​men/M​anusc​ripts​/ cott​onisk​ing.h​tml (accessed August 17, 2017). 24. “Playboy Interview: Bob Dylan,” at http:​//www​.inte​rfere​nza.c​ om/bc​s/int​erw/p​lay78​.htm (accessed April 25, 2016). 25. Ralph Gleason, “Odetta—Where It All Began,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 29, 1963. Clippings of the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection, JWJ MSS 89, Box 136. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Archive, Yale University.

141

N otes

26. Farah Jasmine Griffin, “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The African American Migration Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 27. Dunaway and Beer, Singing Out, p. 26. 28. The following discussion was culled from “Current Bills” announcements in Variety; black press outlets like the Chicago Defender, the Amsterdam News, and the Pittsburgh Courier; campus papers like the Daily Tar Heel and the Michigan Daily; and scores of metropolitan dailies and smaller local outlets, from the New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Sentinel, and Cleveland Call and Post, to the Bloomington Pantagraph and the Wausau Daily Herald. Doug Yeager, interview with the author, March 19, 2018; Michelle Esrick, interview with the author, March 19, 2018. 29. Elijah Wald, Josh White: Society Blues (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 277. 30. Cantwell, When We Were Good, p. 288. 31. Cohen, Rainbow Quest, p. 205. 32. Howard Zinn, “The Battle-Scarred Youngsters” [August 1962–October 1963], in Reporting Civil Rights: Volume Two, American Journalism 1963-1973 (New York: Library of America, 2003), p. 56.

Conclusion: Ain’t No Grave 1. “Odetta: Legendary Folk Singer Dies at 77,” NPR Music, December 3, 2008, at http:​//www​.npr.​org/t​empla​tes/s​tory/​story​ .php?​story​Id=97​77048​9 (accessed June 19, 2016).

142

N O T E S

2. Quoted at https​://ww​w.nix​onfou​ndati​on.or​g/200​8/12/​odett​ a-193​0-200​8/ (accessed August 12, 2017). 3. The Observer, January 3, 2009, at https​://ww​w.the​guard​ian. c​om/fi​lm/20​09/ja​n/04/​spike​-lee-​inter​view-​john-​colap​into (accessed July 22, 2016). 4. McPherson, “She Sings in Key of Love,” p. C17. 5. Mary Pangalos, “Odetta Says Folk Music Changes Historians’ Tune,” Newsday, June 22, 1961, p. 3C.

143

Also available in the series

1. Dusty Springfield’s Dusty in Memphis by Warren Zanes 2. Love’s Forever Changes by Andrew Hultkrans 3. Neil Young’s Harvest by Sam Inglis 4. The Kinks’ The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society by Andy Miller 5. The Smiths’ Meat Is Murder by Joe Pernice 6. Pink Floyd’s The Piper at the Gates of Dawn by John Cavanagh 7. ABBA’s ABBA Gold: Greatest Hits by Elisabeth Vincentelli 8. The Jimi Hendrix Experience’s Electric Ladyland by John Perry 9. Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures by Chris Ott 10. Prince’s Sign “☮” the Times by Michaelangelo Matos 11. The Velvet Underground’s The Velvet Underground & Nico by Joe Harvard

12. The Beatles’ Let It Be by Steve Matteo 13. James Brown’s Live at the Apollo by Douglas Wolk 14. Jethro Tull’s Aqualung by Allan Moore 15. Radiohead’s OK Computer by Dai Griffiths 16. The Replacements’ Let It Be by Colin Meloy 17. Led Zeppelin’s Led Zeppelin IV by Erik Davis 18. The Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main St. by Bill Janovitz 19. The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds by Jim Fusilli 20. Ramones’ Ramones by Nicholas Rombes 21. Elvis Costello’s Armed Forces by Franklin Bruno 22. R.E.M.’s Murmur by J. Niimi 23. Jeff Buckley’s Grace by Daphne Brooks 24. DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing… by Eliot Wilder

A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

25. MC5’s Kick Out the Jams by Don McLeese 26. David Bowie’s Low by Hugo Wilcken 27. Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the U.S.A. by Geoffrey Himes 28. The Band’s Music from Big Pink by John Niven 29. Neutral Milk Hotel’s in the Aeroplane over the Sea by Kim Cooper 30. Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique by Dan Le Roy 31. Pixies’ Doolittle by Ben Sisario 32. Sly and the Family Stone’s There’s a Riot Goin’ On by Miles Marshall Lewis 33. The Stone Roses’ The Stone Roses by Alex Green 34. Nirvana’s in Utero by Gillian G. Gaar 35. Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti 36. My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless by Mike McGonigal 37. The Who’s The Who Sell Out by John Dougan 38. Guided by Voices’ Bee Thousand by Marc Woodworth 39. Sonic Youth’s Daydream Nation by Matthew Stearns 40. Joni Mitchell’s Court and Spark by Sean Nelson 41. Guns N’ Roses’ Use Your Illusion I and II by Eric Weisbard

42. Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life by Zeth Lundy 43. The Byrds’ The Notorious Byrd Brothers by Ric Menck 44. Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica by Kevin Courrier 45. Minutemen’s Double Nickels on the Dime by Michael T. Fournier 46. Steely Dan’s Aja by Don Breithaupt 47. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm by Shawn Taylor 48. PJ Harvey’s Rid of Me by Kate Schatz 49. U2’s Achtung Baby by Stephen Catanzarite 50. Belle & Sebastian’s If You’re Feeling Sinister by Scott Plagenhoef 51. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon by Amanda Petrusich 52. Celine Dion’s Let’s Talk about Love by Carl Wilson 53. Tom Waits’ Swordfishtrombones by David Smay 54. Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats by Drew Daniel 55. Patti Smith’s Horses by Philip Shaw 56. Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality by John Darnielle

145

A lso available in the series

57. Slayer’s Reign in Blood by D.X. Ferris 58. Richard and Linda Thompson’s Shoot Out the Lights by Hayden Childs 59. The Afghan Whigs’ Gentlemen by Bob Gendron 60. The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash by Jeffery T. Roesgen 61. The Flying Burrito Brothers’ The Gilded Palace of Sin by Bob Proehl 62. Wire’s Pink Flag by Wilson Neate 63. Elliott Smith’s XO by Mathew Lemay 64. Nas’ Illmatic by Matthew Gasteier 65. Big Star’s Radio City by Bruce Eaton 66. Madness’ One Step Beyond… by Terry Edwards 67. Brian Eno’s Another Green World by Geeta Dayal 68. The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka by Mark Richardson 69. The Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs by LD Beghtol 70. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s Facing Future by Dan Kois 71. Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Christopher R. Weingarten 72. Pavement’s Wowee Zowee by Bryan Charles

73. AC/DC’s Highway to Hell by Joe Bonomo 74. Van Dyke Parks’s Song Cycle by Richard Henderson 75. Slint’s Spiderland by Scott Tennent 76. Radiohead’s Kid A by Marvin Lin 77. Fleetwood Mac’s Tusk by Rob Trucks 78. Nine Inch Nails’ Pretty Hate Machine by Daphne Carr 79. Ween’s Chocolate and Cheese by Hank Shteamer 80. Johnny Cash’s American Recordings by Tony Tost 81. The Rolling Stones’ Some Girls by Cyrus Patell 82. Dinosaur Jr.’s You’re Living All over Me by Nick Attfield 83. Television’s Marquee Moon by Bryan Waterman 84. Aretha Franklin’s Amazing Grace by Aaron Cohen 85. Portishead’s Dummy by RJ Wheaton 86. Talking Heads’ Fear of Music by Jonathan Lethem 87. Serge Gainsbourg’s Histoire de Melody Nelson by Darran Anderson 88. They Might Be Giants’ Flood by S. Alexander Reed and Philip Sandifer 89. Andrew W.K.’s I Get Wet by Phillip Crandall

146

A L S O AVA I L A B L E I N T H E SE R I E S

90. Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II by Marc Weidenbaum 91. Gang of Four’s Entertainment by Kevin J.H. Dettmar 92. Richard Hell and the Voidoids’ Blank Generation by Pete Astor 93. J Dilla’s Donuts by Jordan Ferguson 94. The Beach Boys’ Smile by Luis Sanchez 95. Oasis’ Definitely Maybe by Alex Niven 96. Liz Phair’s Exile in Guyville by Gina Arnold 97. Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy by Kirk Walker Graves 98. Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album by Charles Fairchild 99. Sigur Rós’s () by Ethan Hayden 100. Michael Jackson’s Dangerous by Susan Fast 101. Can’s Tago Mago by Alan Warner 102. Bobbie Gentry’s Ode to Billie Joe by Tara Murtha 103. Hole’s Live Through This by Anwen Crawford 104. Devo’s Freedom of Choice by Evie Nagy 105. Dead Kennedys’ Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables by Michael Stewart Foley

106. Koji Kondo’s Super Mario Bros. by Andrew Schartmann 107. Beat Happening’s Beat Happening by Bryan C. Parker 108. Metallica’s Metallica by David Masciotra 109. Phish’s A Live One by Walter Holland 110. Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew by George Grella Jr. 111. Blondie’s Parallel Lines by Kembrew McLeod 112. Grateful Dead’s Workingman’s Dead by Buzz Poole 113. New Kids On The Block’s Hangin’ Tough by Rebecca Wallwork 114. The Geto Boys’ The Geto Boys by Rolf Potts 115. Sleater-Kinney’s Dig Me Out by Jovana Babovic 116. LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver by Ryan Leas 117. Donny Hathaway’s Donny Hathaway Live by Emily J. Lordi 118. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Psychocandy by Paula Mejia 119. The Modern Lovers’ The Modern Lovers by Sean L. Maloney 120. Angelo Badalamenti’s Soundtrack from Twin Peaks by Clare Nina Norelli

147

A lso available in the series

121. Young Marble Giants’ Colossal Youth by Michael Blair and Joe Bucciero 122. The Pharcyde’s Bizarre Ride II the Pharcyde by Andrew Barker 123. Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs by Eric Eidelstein 124. Bob Mould’s Workbook by Walter Biggins and Daniel Couch 125. Camp Lo’s Uptown Saturday Night by Patrick Rivers and Will Fulton 126. The Raincoats’ The Raincoats by Jenn Pelly 127. Björk’s Homogenic by Emily Mackay

128. Merle Haggard’s Okie from Muskogee by Rachel Lee Rubin 129. Fugazi’s In on the Kill Taker by Joe Gross 130. Jawbreaker’s 24 Hour Revenge Therapy by Ronen Givony 131. Lou Reed’s Transformer by Ezra Furman 132. Drive-By Truckers’ Southern Rock Opera by Rien Fertel 133. Siouxsie and the Banshees' Peepshow by Samantha Bennett 134. dc Talk’s Jesus Freak by Will Stockton and D. Gilson 135. Tori Amos’s Boys for Pele by Amy Gentry

148