Review: Odetta - Sings The Ballad For Americans And Other American Ballads (1960)

Tracks: 1) Ballad For Americans; 2) This Land; 3) Old Smoky; 4) Hush Little Baby; 5) Dark As A Dungeon; 6) Great Historical Bum; 7) Payday At Coal Creek; 8) Going Home; 9) Pastures Of Plenty.

REVIEW

For some reason, this album has forever remained out of print since its original release on the Vanguard label; while all of Odetta’s classic-years catalog got the CD treatment sooner or later, Ballad For Americans has for a long, long time only been available as a piece of used vinyl, or, in more recent years, as a crudely ripped digital copy of said vinyl. Apparently, in 2017 somebody finally took proper care of the catalog and remastered the album, so now you can find it on most streaming services in better sound quality — but still not in physical form. Something, I guess, has rubbed somebody in the wrong way about Odetta expanding her horizons and covering the musical legacy of Paul Robeson.

Admittedly, it could be argued that, for all the audacity and desire to move on beyond the acoustic folk formula, Odetta’s attempt to put a slightly more modern spin on a pompous musical piece firmly rooted in 1939 does feel a bit... cheesy. The original piece, composed by Earl Robinson with a libretto by John Latouche, was basically a «lightweight classical» cantata, combining elements of operetta, spirituals, and showtunes and designed to be sung with typically pre-war dashing pathos, whether by the ground-rattling bass-baritone of Paul Robeson or, one year later, with the seductive croon of Bing Crosby (who adds so much top hat flavor to the composition, I must say, that its very purpose gets lost in the Purr-Pose). But would that same kind of grandstanding patriotic aura really hold up in 1960?

Certainly somebody like Odetta, who had received some training in classical singing (her mother, at one time, really hoped for her to become the next Marian Anderson), would be the perfect candidate to try and answer that question. For this particular recording, she is accompanied by the Symphony Of The Air Orchestra (comprised of musicians from the famous NBC Symphony Orchestra, after it was disbanded in 1954 following Toscanini’s retirement), conducted by Robert DeCormier, a good friend of Pete Seeger and one of America’s leading experts in combining classical music values with the art of folk singing (and just a little pinch of communism). Predictably, the recording sounds grand — almost as grand as the original Paul Robeson version, and definitely more imposing than the Bing Crosby one — and on the whole, Odetta in the role of the "Nobody Who Is Anybody, Anybody Who Is Everybody" is totally convincing, possessing both the gravity and the occasional lightweightness required to properly convey the many shades of the cantata.

The problem is that with this particular arrangement, the 12-minute composition kind of sounds like a medley from West Side Story, only with extra pathos on the side. In 1939, if you wanted to make a big statement on the issues of liberty, human rights, equality, and the evolution of the American Dream, there was hardly any alternative to doing it the Paul Robeson way. But by the late 1950s, fashions had changed, and it is probably fair to say that most people did not exactly expect their enlightenment to come from grandstanding, classically-enhanced mega-showtunes; they were much more likely to expect it from in-yer-face folk singers, be it the older school of Woody Guthrie or the younger school of Pete Seeger and his friends at Greenwich Village. Thus, hearing this «mini-musical» wedged right in the middle of Odetta’s impressive run of acoustic classics takes some getting used to — at best — or feels like a corny, over-acted, uninspiring melodrama — at worst. In any case, I wouldn’t call it a truly «successful modernization».

The bottomline here is that if you are in the mood to hear Paul Robeson at the height of his powers and learn what the fuss was all about, ‘Ballad For Americans’ is as good a choice as anything. If you want to hear Odetta at the height of her powers, though, I would rather recommend the B-side of this LP over the A-side. It’s just that some things designed in 1939 are best left in 1939, and continued to be enjoyed in a 1939 frame of mind if you can concoct one for yourself (not that I haven’t been in a rather 1939 frame of mind ever since February 2022, but that’s a slightly different angle of 1939, and not even Paul Robeson can be of much help here). Meanwhile, the old folk ballads and their neo-folk imitations that fill up the LP’s second side continued to be all the rage in 1960, and Odetta could still interpret them in her own ways without being held down by, let’s say, certain «gentile conventions» of pre-war musical styles, which, in this particular case, DeCormier’s orchestral and choral arrangement has not much helped her to overcome.

She does aim for a little consistency: to keep up with the subject of ‘Ballad For Americans’, most of the second side also deals with issues of social justice, workers’ rights and so on. Interestingly, up to that point Odetta had not yet officially covered even a single Woody Guthrie song; this album includes a whoppin’ three of them, and while I generally don’t think I need yet another cover of ‘This Land Is My Land’ in my collection, I can’t help but feel a little admiration in Odetta’s regal delivery — she makes "this land is my land" sound as if she were indeed the royal owner of this land through God-given right, and "this land is your land" sound as if you were right there, standing on one knee and receiving your personal fiefdom from the monarch. Uh, well, perhaps this is not quite the actual meaning of the song, but that’s precisely what makes it more interesting, and maybe even a little more unintentionally ironic, than most.

The true highlight of these three Guthrie covers, though, is ‘Pastures Of Plenty’. Guthrie usually sang his own song at a fast, rollickin’ tempo, with cheerful harmonica accompaniment and in an uplifting mood — the idea being that, through all the struggle and toil, paradise on Earth shall still be attained, sooner or later, by the oppressed characters of The Grapes Of Wrath. "We’ll work in this fight and we’ll fight till we win", that sort of thing. Odetta turns the song 180 degrees — hers is a dark, bleak delivery, with the same ominous guitar-and-deep-bass sound mix she and Bill Lee had going so well on ‘Foggy Dew’ from the previous album. Most notably, she changes the lyrics: that line about "fighting till we win" disappears from her delivery and is replaced by a reprise of "we come with the dust and we go with the wind" from the second verse. And then, in the last verse, the line "My land I’ll defend with my life if it be" is replaced with "Travel this road until death sets me free" — feel the difference? (Admittedly, it is a rather poor combination with the final intact line, "cause pastures of plenty must always be free": first of all, it’s bad form to rhyme the same word with each other, and second, Odetta’s reinterpretation is that the song’s heroes are not in possession of their pastures-of-plenty, and shall hardly ever be — so in this new context the final line makes much less sense than in Woody’s original).

Throw in a really impressive guitar-and-bass arrangement of Merle Travis’ coal miner anthem ‘Dark As A Dungeon’, perhaps the most complex and moody take on this chestnut in the entire history of neo-folk; some very stylish picking on ‘Payday At Coal Creek’, a song that most people would only usually listen to for the lyrics; and a rather haunting version of the old spiritual ‘Goin’ Home’ (which William Arms Fisher had originally adapted from Dvořák’s 9th symphony, though not much of Dvořák’s original theme remains in this arrangement) — and you really have a very strong side of material, a combination of bleakness, power, and instrumental professionalism unmatched by any other competitor at the Village at the time. Most importantly, the Odetta / Bill Lee combination of instrumental skill and inspiration is just as important here as the vocals are — while it would be a downright lie to say that the Greenwich folkies generally cared little about their playing skills (some did and some did not, as it always happens), Odetta at her best had a real knack for setting the proper mood with her technical proficiency. Just listen to those first fifteen seconds of ‘Pastures Of Plenty’ — there’s just two guitars in there, and the effect is already that of a symphonic sea of sound, penetrating much deeper than the loud and swirling orchestral arrangements on ‘Ballad For Americans’.

Perhaps what I’m really trying to say is that, deep at heart, Odetta is a natural-born tragic artist, and both her playing and singing work so much better when conveying bitterness and melancholy than optimism and cheerfulness (cue "my kind of woman!" in the voice of the Muppets’ Animal). Even on ‘Ballad’, she’s at her most convincing when singing lines like "nobody who was anybody believed it, everybody who was somebody doubted it". This, rather than skin color or anything else, is her biggest difference from, say, Joan Baez — they could sing exactly the same songs, but Joan has a natural gift for «Apollonic beauty» rather than tragedy, while Odetta has this natural gift for carrying the cross to Golgotha. And the contrast between the first and second sides of this record, I think, vindicates this statement better than anything else.

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