She sang with Cash, she sang with Dylan, she sang for Martin Luther King, but Odetta tells Belinda McKeon that she's still shy at heart
In August 1969, when ABC Television's Johnny Cash Show was at the height of its popularity, the folk singer Odetta made a guest appearance. A duet with Cash was on the cards, and the producers had in mind what they thought was the perfect number: the American spiritual song All o' God's Chillun Got Shoes. But they hadn't reckoned on Odetta, by then established as one of the most politically engaged musicians of the folk movement. It wasn't for keeping her counsel, after all, that Martin Luther King had named her queen of American folk, five years previously. Excited as she was at the prospect of singing with Cash, the Alabama native put her foot down.
"I said, I can't do that," she says, a single bead dangling at her forehead, a vivid scarf wound around her braided grey hair. "I can't do that, 'cause all God's chillun ain't got shoes! So we gotta find another song to do." The producers may have been flustered, but Cash was impressed. "They call a lot of people soul singers," he said, "but I think they oughta not throw that name around too much. They oughta wait until you come along."
Then came their duet, the Calypso song Shame and Scandal, and a more flirtatious three minutes could barely be imagined. Hardly a shrinking violet, Cash seemed almost to be blushing as the song drew to a close. It looked like they were having a lot of fun?
"Oh, yeah," Odetta laughs her deep, luxuriant laugh. She looks nowhere near her 76 years, and even in conversation, her voice still glides smoothly along the scale; from sultry to shrill, from whisper to boom. On Cash, she's wistful, calling him "a sweetheart of a man, a curious man, a concerned man, a hero", and on Bob Dylan the singer to whom she herself was an early hero, she's frank. "The man is brilliant," she says. "But I don't know him, really. I've always said I'm a hermit, and, looking at it now, I am. Really. I think it takes being together, to get to know each other, and with him there never has been such a being together. Except maybe once, maybe for an hour or so, after I recorded his songs. But I'm shy of him. And I think he's shy of me."
This news comes as a surprise, given that in the minds of many of their fans, the two musicians are so closely linked. It was after hearing one of Odetta's early blues and ballads albums that the young Dylan went out and traded his electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustic guitar. "She was the first thing that turned me on to folk singing," he told Playboy magazine in 1966. Almost concurrently as he was praising her, Odetta was paying tribute to Dylan, by becoming the first artist to record an album entirely consisting of songs by him. Amazingly, she had no idea at that stage of the influence she'd had on him. Though her management says she'll be back in the studio this year recording a second Dylan album, Odetta herself just smiles and shrugs when asked about the prospect. "I'm thinking about it," she says. Please do it, I say. She laughs that laugh again.
With some 30 albums behind her, Odetta's output is astonishingly prolific, even given that her career is now in its sixth decade. Growing up in Los Angeles, she studied classical music and voice, an interest which had no precedent in her family background; while she listened to broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera on Saturday afternoons, her parents were impatiently waiting for the programme from the Grand Ole Opry.
"For me, if it wasn't classical, it wasn't anything" she says, shaking her head. "I don't know how my family put up with me." Yet when the Grand Ole Opry came on the radio, she listened on, and years later, the results began to show. "I thought it went in one ear and out the other. But when I became interested in folk music, it's amazing what I remembered of what I thought I wasn't listening to."
As a teenager, however, Odetta seemed set for a destiny of chorus line and classical song; she sang occasionally at the Hollywood theatre where her mother was a cleaner, and first sang professionally in the chorus of a West Coast production of Finian's Rainbow. Odetta might well have become a Broadway star, but an encounter in San Franscisco's North Beach neighhourhood changed everything. It was an evening, she remembers, "of what they called folk songs." And, unlike classical music and song, it had everything to do with the life she knew too well: the life of struggle.
"When we had left Alabama for Los Angeles," she says, "I was six years old. My sister was three. In Alabama, they had had signs that said 'coloured drinking fountain'. 'Coloured toilet'. We would have to go to the balcony for the films. They didn't have those signs in LA, but they didn't have to have them, because we knew. We knew by attitude that there were places you don't go.".
She would go to church and see the parishioners professing Christianity. "When the music was there, I believed that they were dedicated to the spiritual celebrations, the worship of God. But as soon as they shut their mouths, no." She laughs. "But I knew how that music made me feel. And there was nothing like it. Not even food."
Folk music had the same effect. Except this music seemed even more vital. "Because it was always around political issues," she says. "Union organising, people being laid off . . . always social issues. When I came into the folk neighbourhood, we were taking out petitions to save Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, who had been accused of spying. It was like being educated at the same time as learning the songs. That was a part I liked very much about the folk music."
Odetta's association with Liam Clancy, with whom she will sing this month, goes back to those first days of her career as a folk musician, when he and his brothers were part of the Greenwich Village folk revival scene and running a record label, Tradition, that brought blues and Irish music together with Appalachian song. The young Odetta recorded for them, and hung out with them at the White Horse Tavern, where people would "sit around and sing all night". The energy was incredible, she says, and the brothers were welcoming. "I'm glad that it was through them that I was baptised," she adds, "rather than going into Warner Brothers or RCA, where there's nothing but beancounters telling you to smile, even when you're hurting."
Her consciousness that people are hurting has never left her, and that single mindedness she displayed as a teenager paying for her own classical voice lessons has been translated into a determined political activism. She took part in the march for black voting rights in Selma, Alabama, in 1955. She sang at the 1963 March on Washington. She sang about civil rights for President John F Kennedy. In 1995, she attended the International Women's Conference in Beijing as an Elder. In 1999, she was awarded the National Medal of the Arts and Humanities by President Bill Clinton, who told her that her albums had been an inspiration to him as a boy in Arkansas. She still performs dozens of benefit concerts a year for civil rights. And yet, she admits, along with this fierce independence, this fighting attitude, comes a deep shyness.
For all her friendships with musicians, from Cash to the Clancys to Pete Seeger, she feels that she does not really know any of them, that they are only acquaintances. And for all her meetings with the most powerful people in politics, she feels that she has never had much to say. In words, at least. When she met Martin Luther King in the 1960s, she remembers, she could not speak for shyness. "I was a kid. When you're around older people, you don't start spouting off. You sit there and you listen. I was too scared to open my mouth, and even if I had opened my mouth I don't think that I would have been able to contribute anything." She laughs, shakes her head, points her finger. "But when I put a note to it," she says, "it works."
• Odetta will perform with Liam Clancy at the Clonmel Junction Festival on July 4 (www.junctionfestival.com, 052-28521), Vicar Street, Dublin on July 6 and 8, and the Ulster Hall, Belfast on July 7 (www.ticketmaster.ie, 0818-719300)