Sings Ballads And Blues

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“She was astonishingly strong and direct and wanted her songs to help this world get to be a better place,” as Pete Seeger put it. It’s hard to come up with a better piece of background for this release, Odetta’s debut album as a soloist, which captures a singer already road-tested and widely praised. Seeger had heard her playing around the folk circuit for years, and Maya Angelou and Harry Belafonte would name her as an influence before she’d ever committed a song to record; <i>Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues</i> would shortly thereafter inspire a young Bob Dylan to trade his electric guitar for an acoustic one and start singing the same folk songs she was. Those are just a few of the iconic names that share Odetta as a formative reference point, mentioned in order to try to underscore her importance to the ’50s folk revival movement. The classically trained singer, who was born in Birmingham but spent most of her youth in Los Angeles, formed the bridge between Lead Belly and Seeger—extending the work of Paul Robeson to a (slightly) broader audience. This album includes blues popularized by Blind Lemon Jefferson and Ma Rainey, African-American spirituals, work songs, and folk songs, with Odetta’s potent, forceful singing threading together their shared DNA. The album was released in the fall of 1956, just ahead of the Greenwich Village folk scene’s explosion. Its most remembered contribution, though, might be the three-spiritual medley that forms the album’s conclusion. Odetta united “Oh, Freedom,” “Come and Go With Me,” and “I’m On My Way” into one uplifting song, perfectly suited to become the anthem of the ascendant Civil Rights movement. Though no one would have given her credit for it in the moment, Odetta was asserting the Black roots of folk music as she fought for the equality of Black people—two quests that unfairly pushed her into the margins of the music’s history.

via Apple Music