Jon Taplin's Blog

Odetta-R.I.P.

My older brother Randy used to tell me stories of a small cabin in the Shenandoah mountains owned by Paul Clayton, an ethnomusicologist at the University of Virginia. In 1962 on weekends the cabin would be filled with Clayton’s friends interested in hearing the latest songs that Clayton had “collected” from tramping around the mountains with a battery operated Uher Tape recorder. Bob Dylan and Carolyn Hester were the young pups, but Odetta was the queen. She was a great cook and had one of the most amazing voices in music with a range that defied description. She had made it her task to find work songs and prison songs that she could bring to a wider world.

“They were liberation songs,” she said in the interview with The Times. She added: “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.”

Odetta was managed by my boss and mentor Albert Grossman and when I first met her at Newport in 1965 she was both gracious and playful. When we met again in 1967 I was helping produce a tribute to Woody Guthrie. Everyone was a bit beside themselves because it was going to be the first time Dylan was seen in public since his motorcycle accident. Everyone except Odetta. She was cool but ebullient as always. The Times has a nice multimedia tribute to her. Check it out.

She was a true American original.