Odetta's One Grain of Sand

Matthew Frye Jacobson

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781501333323
• eBook ISBN: 9781501333330
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Mezzi di comunicazione e arti performative
• Subtopic: Musica folk

When 20-year-old Odetta 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 folk tunes before mixed-race audiences in 1950s coffee houses, she was making one of the most portentous decisions in the history of both American music and Civil Rights. 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 "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 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.

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.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/arts/music/03odetta.html?_r=2&pagewanted=2&hp (accessed July 2, 2017). Jacqueline Trescott, “Up from the ‘60s, Odetta Finds a Song,” Washington Post, January 16, 1980, at https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1980/01/16/up-from-the-60s-odetta-finds-a-song/3baf2abe-b252-4fdb-84bb-e0c6cbf3f6dc/?utm_term=.52d46249d8c3 (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.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/arts/music/03odetta.html?_r=2&pagewanted=2&hp (accessed July 2, 2017).

6. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time [1963] (New York: Vintage, 1993), p. 81.

7. “Odetta: the Last Word,” [2007 interview with Tim Weiner, The New York Times], at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/03/arts/music/03odetta.html?_r=2&pagewanted=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/artists/97739742/odetta (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).

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/artists/97739742/odetta (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.

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 U...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Dedication
• Title
• Contents
• Epigraph
• 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
• Acknowledgements
• Notes
• Also available in the series
• Copyright