Odetta

any rate, so I took Bill Keith in there, and that was a big step forward for Bill and he was just all over the banjo within a year and you know he just couldn't get enough of it and we started playing together in college and we did a little TV show and we we did a few little local things and there was a promoter folk music promoter from Boston named Manny Greenhill who came up to Amherst College.

He wanted to put Odetta on there.

We've asked us, there was at UMass, which is in the same town, Taj Mahal and Buffy St. Marie were undergraduates there, and Bill Keith and I and a fellow named Josh Dunson were at Amherst, and together we formed the Pioneer Valley Folk Song Society.

Huh.

which is still going, as a matter of fact, and put Odetta on, and Manny offered, heard Bill and me play, and we worked up a mixture of some bluegrass-y songs, we played Bye Bye Blues, like he could do that on the banjo, and it was still this long neck banjo, which he put rabbit ears on, he made his own Scruggs tuners, so he could do that.

And then he bought a tone ring from Don,

and in the

which is unusual, right?

Odetta did a whole album very early.

Odetta did a whole album.

Nina Simone did a whole album.

You have, you know, all these gospel groups, you know.

We would lie there after they kissed us, listening to our parents talk and crack peanuts and snap cards.

They played gin and poker while they listened to Dinah Washington and Odetta.

One night I woke up around midnight and crossed the living room to get some water in the kitchen and to see if there was any strawberry shortcake left.

I saw my mother and Mr.

Well, I believe it.

You sound just like Odetta.

People love that folk music stuff.

Oh, stop.

This little light of mine-

Odetta performing at the World Trade Center Plaza on July 27th, 2001.

[singing] This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine.

Let it shine, let it shine, let it shine.

Yeah.

And, you know, even like just kind of like blues stuff, like even, you know, Odetta and like, you know, Joni Mitchell and like a lot, you know, Sinead O'Connor.

Like I like a lot of female singers, to be honest.

But then, of course, all the classics, Zeppelin, you know, let's just start and end there.

What about Charles Mingus, Fables of Faubus from 1959? His critique of the governor of Arkansas at the time who was blocking school integration and so here's a jazz musician much like sonny rollins with the freedom suite who's using jazz you know as a kind of social critique and political protest what about ray charles what i say 1959 ray charles what i say and then max roach wow with abby lincoln and that classic driver man that harks back to African-American enslavement, even though they made that record, that incredible jazz classic in 1960.

And then everybody knows I have a love affair with Odetta.

Odetta, if you want to hear some music, put on the playlist and listen to Odetta sing If I Had a Hammer from 1960.

Odetta, If I Had a Hammer.

And then what can I say about Ben E. King? Stand by me.

Repurposed.

Gospel melodies received new words.

Mass meetings became political and spiritual workshops where singing turned fear into fellowship.

But I

guess Odetta and Eddie weren't, you know, fit for the movie.

Just the little kid Jake that, in the first book, he fucking kills.

And because he feels so bad about it, that's why he has to bring him back into his world.