Review: Odetta - Sings Ballads And Blues (1956)
Tracks: 1) Santy Anno; 2) If I Had A Ribbon Bow; 3) Muleskinner Blues; 4) Another Man Done Gone; 5) Shame And Scandal; 6) Jack O’ Diamonds; 7) Buked And Scorned; 8) Easy Rider; 9) Joshua; 10) Hound Dog; 11) Glory, Glory; 12) Alabama Bound; 13) Been In The Pen; 14) Deep Blue Sea; 15) God’s Gonna Cut You Down; 16) Spiritual Trilogy.
REVIEW
Most people in the world — and I do not exclude myself from that number — probably hear this record only after learning that it was (possibly) that one LP which caused a young Bob Dylan to (temporarily) abandon his infatuation with rock’n’roll and switch to acoustic guitar and log cabins instead. This is quite ironic, given the huge popularity of Odetta in the folk-loving circles of the late 1950s and early 1960s — but before you begin citing racism or sexism as a possible reason, let us remember that the absolute majority of folkies from that era ended up sinking without a trace, maybe with the possible exception of Joan Baez, whose tenaciousness and willingness to evolve with the times earned her a more stable place in popular memory than most of her illustrious peers from the era when Greenwich Village ruled over the intellectual world.
That said, Odetta Sings Blues And Ballads is both an important and a unique album, if not necessarily a great one. Prior to Odetta, most black female vocalists were either jazz singers, like Ella or Billie; or blues / vaudeville singers, gradually evolving towards R&B; or mighty gospel ladies, like the great Mahalia Jackson. The idea of a black lady playing acoustic guitar and encompassing all of the folk-Americana tradition, both black and white, was, to say the least, vastly underrepresented. Yet here was this imposing young lady from Birmingham, Alabama, who’d actually spent a large part of her childhood training to be an opera singer (in the footsteps of Marian Anderson) and then, after switching to the popular circuit, still ended up choosing a more «academic» than «commercial» singing career. Being this kind of outsider inside the racially open, but still largely white community of Greenwich-based folk singers must have been an odd experience, but also one which gave Odetta a very special edge which nobody else had.
Indeed, the material covered on Odetta’s solo debut album (her first LP, a collaborative project with Larry Mohr released in 1954, went largely unnoticed) is quite diverse — folk songs coming from various white sub-traditions are interspersed with deep blues from the Delta, and gospel-influenced working tunes sit next to covers of Jimmie Rodgers. As a guitar player, Odetta is nothing special, besides knowing all the right chords and playing them without any significant mistakes, mainly relying on the guitar as a steady rhythmic support (I think Dylan was actually far more experimental in his playing on the self-titled debut). But as a singer, of course, she is endowed with a powerful and expertly trained voice in which an inborn blues feel is combined with years of practice. She is not a thunderous screamer like Mahalia and not an overwhelming soul siren like Aretha; hers is a more restrained, more pensive approach to the material which puts her more in the Nina Simone category — though, again, with very little, if any, of Simone’s intentional provocativeness and theatricality.
If there is a single flaw to Odetta’s approach, it is the exact same one which also applies to all the classic heroes of Greenwich Village, definitely including Joan Baez: all of these old blues and folk tunes are delivered way too seriously, way too «academically», in a manner which transforms them all into sacred symbols and makes you want to stand up and remove your headgear while the album is on. When Jimmie Rodgers, the Singing Brakeman, sang ‘Mule Skinner Blues’, he did it jokingly and nonchalantly, yodeling and grinning all the way. When Odetta takes over, she sings it as if the future of the world depended on each drawn-out note — without the lyrics, you’d think this was at least about Joshua fitting the battle of Jericho and the walls comin’ tumblin’ on down rather than about how "I like to work / Rolling all the time / I can carve my initials / On any mule’s behind". Likewise, compare any of the Leadbelly originals with their interpretations here and it’d be like... well, maybe just like what you’d expect an opera-trained singer to do when taking over the legacy of poor old weathered bluesmen from way down South.
The bad news, therefore, is that despite all the diversity of source material — ‘If I Had A Ribbon Bow’, ‘Jack O’Diamonds’ and ‘Santy Anno’, to take a few examples, represent at least three very distinct traditions — Odetta’s approach makes them all into Odetta songs, essentially meaning one deep spiritual prayer stretched over 45 minutes of varying keys and tempos, sometimes a cappella (‘Another Man Done Gone’, ‘Glory Glory’), more often accompanied by guitar, but always conveying one and the same emotion, that of we-shall-overcome. It is a noble emotion and having it displayed before you over a period of, say, 20 minutes would be very healthy, but at 45, it does feel like an overdose.
The good news is that, 20 or 45 minutes, at least in 1956 there was no other album that sounded quite like Odetta Sings Blues And Ballads. So it is a bit, or even more than a bit, «academicized», but it is done by just the right person to do this: certainly I shall always take ‘Alabama Bound’ when it is delivered as a hymn by an actual native person from Birmingham over an ‘Alabama Bound’ delivered by the likes of Pete Seeger (or Lonnie Donegan from across the other side of the ocean, even if, God bless his soul, the charming old guy did quite an impressive job on that one). Not to mention an actual native person who has depth, volume, power, and manages to stay just one inch away from ruining the material by oversinging it — each single song is perfectly enjoyable and appealing in its own way, it is simply that after a while they really begin to merge together. It would also be quite a chore to try to discuss them all separately (which is why most reviews of this album tend to keep it short and sweet), because any such discussion would immediately lead you into talking about the songs rather than Odetta’s personal take on them — because, other than her skilled use of her vocal cords, there is no personal take: she simply prefers the material to speak for itself, and what good would it do to talk about the quality of material known from the recordings of Jimmie Rodgers, Leadbelly, and Blind Lemon Jefferson in a review of Odetta’s performance of that material? No good at all. But even so, the album is still a (minor) classic from the golden age of the folk movement era, and there’s nothing you can do about that.