Odetta on Bob Dylan
Interviewed by Griffin Ondaatje and Craig Proctor
Writer and filmmaker Griffin Ondaatje interviewed legendary folksinger Odetta in Toronto on November 18th, 2001 for an unreleased documentary he made with colleague Craig Proctor. The transcript is published in the Dylan Review for the first time, ahead of a future collection of Ondaatje’s interviews and essays.
Generally, interviews published in the Review are conducted by our editors with contemporary subjects. In this case, however, we have made an exception because of the historical significance of Odetta’s relationship to Dylan’s career and because the interview has remained unpublished until now. The Dylan Review has taken suitable steps to confirm its veracity.
It has been edited for length and clarity.
This interview with Odetta took place one morning in November 2001. She had played a concert the night before at Hugh’s Room, a small music club in Toronto. Born in 1930, in Alabama, Odetta was 70 the day of this interview, but she was up early, suggesting we meet at 8am at her motel. We were nervous, waiting in the lobby by 7:30am. A vital artist committed to social justice for over fifty years, Odetta was a groundbreaking singer who motivated the American folk music revival. She was also an intrepid civil rights activist who helped change America. In 1963 she sang two songs at the March on Washington, joined the Selma to Montgomery march in 1965, and had a deep influence on figures such as Martin Luther King Jr., Maya Angelou, and Harry Belafonte. Rosa Parks, when asked in an interview what songs she listened to during the civil rights movement, said: “All the songs Odetta sings.” When she came down the hall she smiled, shook our hands, and asked for a cup of coffee.
My friends, Craig Proctor and Simon Dragland, and I were making a film on Bob Dylan. At age 18, Dylan was inspired by Odetta when he went to a Minneapolis record store and found her album Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues. In his memoir, Chronicles, Volume One, Dylan recalls: “I went into the listening booth to hear it. Odetta was great. I had never heard of her until then. She was a deep singer, powerful strumming and a hammering-on style of playing. I learned almost every song off the record.” Dylan recounts, in one interview, getting the same model of guitar as Odetta: “Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson.” By 1965, six years later, Odetta had recorded Odetta Sings Dylan – one of the first Dylan cover albums made. That same year Odetta performed at the Newport Folk Festival, the night before Dylan performed his legendary electric set. In the biopic A Complete Unknown, there’s a glimpse of her at Newport – standing alone offstage – during the climactic scene. Yet the real Odetta, who had such a formative impact on Dylan, was actually in the audience listening that night he “went electric.”
Odetta inspired numerous artists early in their careers – including Joan Baez, Eric Bibb and Tracy Chapman. Singer and multi-instrumentalist Rhiannon Giddens said of her: “She was a soulful force for good in both the folk world and the civil rights world.” The day we met Odetta she was concerned about what was happening in the States, reflecting on war and conflicts overseas. It was just two months after 9/11, and events following the terrorist attacks were on her mind, including The Patriot Act which had just been enacted. Revisiting our transcript from twenty-five years ago – for a book on Dylan’s music – it’s clear Odetta’s concerns still resonate today.
We finished our documentary film on Dylan – Complete Unknown – in 2002. I mailed a DVD screener of it to Dylan’s manager Jeff Rosen – who kindly watched our rambling 86-minute first-movie and later assisted with various music permissions we requested. Yet as new filmmakers, with no real budget, we ultimately couldn’t afford archive footage rights from a large American visual media company – and so our film wasn’t distributed or released. Complete Unknown screened in only a few small film festivals and has remained shelved ever since. Yet the journey making it was an amazing experience as we met dozens of “known” and “unknown” musicians, writers, artists, and fans. We spoke with Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Steve Earle, Martin Carthy, Billy Bragg, Gillian Armstrong, Robert Creeley and many others, including LeRoy Hoikkala (Dylan’s highschool friend and drummer from The Golden Chords) and Keith Butler (who claimed to have shouted “Judas!” in Manchester in 1966). Although we knew when first we set out that Dylan would remain a complete unknown, we sought to include a diverse mix of characters – even consulting an astrologist who “deciphered” Dylan’s chart. We plan to give footage from our interviews to the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and this talk with Odetta seemed like a wonderful and essential interview to share with others.
Odetta passed away on December 2, 2008, at the age of 77. The following is a shortened version of our one-hour conversation with her that morning in 2001. Passing along Lakeshore Boulevard in Toronto, where Odetta stayed, there’s a sixty-story condo tower where that small motel used to be. I remember her warm humor and strong sense of calm. A generous person with a gentle power.
– Griffin Ondaatje
Griffin Ondaatje: Thanks for meeting us this early Odetta. We’ve been working on this documentary for two years, and hope to go down to New York again soon to interview more artists and musicians. Emmylou Harris is another musician we hope to speak with.
Odetta: I wonder, how about Dave Van Ronk? Of course he’s just had an operation, he may not be strong enough by the time you get there. It’s a terrible piece of news – cancer – [his] operation happened I guess about a week ago.[1]
GO: Is Dave Van Ronk a musician friend you’ve often kept in touch with?
Odetta: No, we just live in the same city. We have to be on the road or at a festival to meet up with each other. That’s the way it always is. Once he and Andrea [Vucuolo, Van Ronk’s wife] had me over for dinner, and that was really lovely. But generally speaking we meet on the road. Not just Dave – that whole community. When I have free time I don’t want to hear about a suitcase, a plane, a train, or a bus! [laughs]
GO: Did you always feel that way, Odetta, when you were touring? Even in the 1960s?
Odetta: Well, I’ve been looking for the glamour of travel for over fifty years, yet I haven’t found it. I’m ready for the transporter room as in: “Beam me up, Scotty.” The travelling itself at times can get really tedious. But the getting there is the dessert – and the people you start working with. Within this area of music there are aware people that have gone out further than the pap that is given to them on regular radio and television programs. And you meet families – kindred kinds of spirits. That’s the joyous part. The travel ain’t such-a-much, unless you’re in a vehicle that’s going through a beautiful piece of topography. That can be a joy.
GO: You were already established and touring in the late 1950s when Bob Dylan was first being influenced, in a deep way, by your music. Were you aware of your influence on him?
Odetta: Bob never told me, but I’d heard that he had told people that he was playing the electric guitar and he heard me and my guitar. And then he went and got an acoustical guitar. Through that, I think, he discovered Woody Guthrie [who] was closer to his area – especially being a writer. But at one point I heard that his repertoire was a record that I had done [Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues]. He’d learned all the songs. That’s a wonderful thing to hear. Whatever I did helped him on a step towards what he has developed into.
One hears a lot of stories that are filled with imagination; but I am not sure I ever met Bob until he got to New York. There were certainly encouraging words – there and then – when I met him. It was perfectly obvious the man was thinking – and brilliant – through the songs that he had written.
GO: Dylan travelled to England in 1962. I’d wondered if you had encountered him at all in England around that time?
Odetta: No, it was in Rome. Albert [Grossman] was with me in Italy. And Bob and Mary Travers were in England. I think that Bob had been doing a concert or something there. Anyway, Mary and her daughter and Bob came to Italy and we all hung out together. Golly, there was a dance that was very popular in those days. It was a group dance, everybody did the same steps, you know? I’ve forgotten what that dance was called. Anyway, I think many performers are basically shy people – basically introverts. Now that is just a contradiction. When they’re into whatever it is they’re doing, it’s almost like they’re another person who is more outgoing than the person they are as a civilian. And I think Bob and I – as I look back on it – are shy of each other.
Maybe one of these days we might get into the same room, when there’s not a lot of people around, and we could actually sit down and talk together. It happened once. You must know about his motorcycle accident? Well, friends of mine were the Thalers. Dr. Ed Thaler is not only a doctor but he’s a physician – he doesn’t just have that piece of paper on the wall. He’s quite wonderful. Albert [introduced] Bob [to] Eddie Thaler – to help keep track that doctors were doing right. When Bob was recuperating, the Thalers had their attic fixed up for him to stay there. Their kids had already been trained not to talk about famous people that were coming over to their house.
So Bob was there. I had gotten back off of a tour. [The Thalers] are like my adopted family, so I went up to see them. Mom and Pop and the kids had gone to sleep. Bob and I were sitting around the kitchen table. It was after I’d done an all-Bob Dylan record [Odetta Sings Dylan] and Bob was wondering – it wasn’t by way of complaint – but he was wondering why it was that people did his songs other than the way he wrote them. We went into the fact that, as someone hears your song, your song goes into what their experience has been. You cannot take your experience out of how you approach anything, including a song. And you don’t do a song the same way twice – because of experiences you’ve had between the last time you [sang] it and this time.
GO: What was your experience of recording Odetta Sings Dylan in 1965?
Odetta: Bob came to RCA when we were recording that record. Recording in those days was really frightening to me. And he and his entourage were there. He had sent tapes to the publisher and someone transcribed the words. And he heard a few things that were not quite right. So he took the words and changed whatever needed to be changed or corrected. And then I said, “Okay Bob, you’re gonna have to leave. I am so nervous of this microphone and the tape picking up every mistake. I don’t need the composer here saying: I didn’t mean it like that.” He understood. And they left! [laughs]
GO: Interpreting those songs, were you content with how it all went?
Odetta: Yeah, I can say I was. Dylan had, up to that point, written the song and then almost “recited” it. Whatever emotion was in his early recordings, you put in there yourself. He wasn’t interpreting his songs, you know? I find many music songwriters like that. There was Lynn Gold. Gorgeous voice. She had a voice in the area of a Joan Baez. High soprano, really quite warm and lovely.
She was coming to New York and wanted me to come hear her. Every song she sang that somebody else wrote was crystal clear, [but] when she got to her own songs you couldn’t make out the words. When she finished I said: “You were brave enough to expose yourself writing, but there’s this last wall protecting yourself by not letting us understand what you’ve written.”
Bob is really singing more now than he did in his early days. It was like precision in his early days. It is our response to him that makes us think he was emoting something. The words were. But he’s more, now, an interpreter of his songs, I think. Well, he must’ve been a scared kid too. And with the brilliance of Albert Grossman – those were two “brilliants” together; I mean, there was no one around at that time dressing like Bob was and recording songs that went up to three and four minutes and played on the radio! [Radio] only wanted something 2:50 or under so they could get their ads in. They really crashed a wall. In many respects Bob was responsible.
GO: He changed that side of things.
Odetta: Before Dylan, as we would get together and tune our guitars doing hootenannies in somebody’s living room, someone would sing a song we’d all know, and we would be singing and harmonizing together. But with the advent of Bob Dylan, we started hearing singer-songwriters where you just sat and listened – because you didn’t know the song. Audience participation [in hootenannies], some felt it was hokey; I never did. I felt that that good healing stuff for me, in singing, is good healing stuff for others to sing – to get that vibration going all the way through their own bodies.
GO: We interviewed Peter Guralnick a couple of years ago, a wonderful writer and music historian. He wrote a biography of Elvis Presley and apparently Presley, with the advent of Dylan, preferred to listen to Dylan’s music through your voice, through your album Odetta Sings Dylan. He found Dylan’s own voice a bit too … gravelly.
Odetta: That’s the first time I’m hearing that. Someone did introduce me to a song Presley did [“Tomorrow Is a Long Time”] and it was my arrangement exactly, which surprised me. But this is the first time that I’ve heard that. Isn’t that something?
GO: Yeah, apparently at one point on his tour bus Elvis was listening constantly to your record Odetta Sings Dylan. He liked Dylan’s lyrics but preferred your voice singing them. What do you think about people complaining about Dylan’s voice, the gravelly aspect?
Odetta: People complain, but he’s out there, isn’t he? [laughs] There’s something there that keeps [audiences] coming towards him. What do you think of his singing now?
GO: We just saw him in concert a week ago. There’s a new song where he sings: “You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way”— it’s kind of poignant the way he sings it. What do you think of his voice on the new album? [“Love and Theft”]
Odetta: I’ve not listened to the whole record. He sings “gravelly” yes, but he sings more now than he did before. I don’t know if I can explain it. I think before he was reciting, and now he is involved with the music. He feels comfortable enough to go that next step and be that vulnerable.
GO: The Newport Folk Festival in 1965 has become sort of controversial because of Dylan’s performance of “Maggie’s Farm” when he played electric guitar.
Odetta: What do you mean “sort of” controversial? [laughs]
GO: Well I guess “sort of” in the sense that half the time I read people who said things like: “Well the booing wasn’t as bad as it sounded,” or “Yeah, the booing was as bad as it sounded.” So you were there, quite close by?
Odetta: Yeah I was there.
GO: So what was your feeling at the time?
Odetta: Well to start a little before that summer festival at Newport, as I would go around doing concerts, there would be youngsters asking me all about Bob Dylan. He was a hero, he was a hero to his audience. And it seems, within the United States anyway, as one becomes a hero of an audience, it’s like the audience is betrayed if the performer goes in another direction – or does something that they’re not used to. I think we all feel that everything is changing around us and we can’t depend on anything, including ourselves. But the performer, they’re supposed to stay right there, because that’s their touchstone. And then when their touchstone moves – they’ve been betrayed and hurt. Actually very hurt. You didn’t have to wait for a review to find out what that audience felt about this electric guitar.
Craig Proctor: Was that not only because the music had shifted to electric, but also because the nature of the songwriting was becoming less public and more –
Odetta: There was so much noise I’m not quite sure that we could hear what the nature of the writing was.
CP: But, generally, at the time when Dylan started writing Another Side of Bob Dylan, when he started moving away from topical songs, protest songs, traditional folk songs I’m wondering if there was a bit of resistance?
Odetta: That’s quite possible. That’s quite possible that he was deserting areas that people were very concerned about and going into [the] personal. Most of our music was the personal stuff anyway – maybe not written as well as he would write.
GO: Your feeling at that time in 1965 at Newport then, there was a controversy…
Odetta: Well I heard it. I heard from the audience. I didn’t object to it – I had no problem with it.
GO: Were you backstage at the time?
Odetta: No, I was right in the audience. I’ve heard about what went on backstage but I wasn’t there. Thank heavens! [laughs] Well, remember Sinead O’Connor? Remember that? She said something about the Pope or Catholicism or something and they booed her.[2] That’s that same area of feeling betrayed.
GO: Do you think it’s fair for an audience to expect a performer – obviously it’s not – to be the same throughout?
Odetta: If they think that life goes on the “same old,” “same old,” “same old” … then it’s fair. If they know that life changes and they change, then it’s not fair. I’ve heard people say to me: “You haven’t changed.” That’s supposed to make you feel good I suppose. “You were dumb then and you stayed dumb!” [laughs] I’m just poking fun – but it was said to me last night [in Toronto] and I said to the lady: “No. We haven’t. We’ve improved.” You haven’t changed. What is that? Some kind of “Let’s pretend” stuff?
GO: When you have free time to listen to music, what do you like to listen to?
Odetta: When I’m on the road I used to carry a radio. I’m a “radio baby.” There were no pictures when I was growing up, except at the moving picture show. So I grew up with the radio. Nowadays in motel rooms and hotel rooms they have a clock radio. So whenever I get anywhere I turn on the radio and I look for Country Western stations. That’s where occasionally you get some words very well put together. It isn’t “I love you I love you I love you” on one chord, or hollering at somebody. We live in another time but I consider it a continuation of what folk music was. It’s not a continuation of Tin Pan Alley or Radio City Music Hall – there’s nothing wrong with any of them – it’s just that they’ve been germinated by folk music and they’re carrying on the tradition of writing something that has something to do with themselves and the world around them.
CP: Going back to Odetta Sings Dylan, I was wondering how that came about. Did it come about through Albert Grossman?
Odetta: No, that came about through Odetta. It was time to record. I don’t know what it is like now but in those days you sort of owed two records a year. That was very difficult, especially since I would be out on the road three months at a time. You do the road and you come back in. So where do you go to find the songs? I thought: Bob Dylan. Plus, I don’t have to go around looking for different writers; it’s all the same writer. And also there’s some songs in there that I would like to second the motion to. So that’s how that one turned out.
GO: After Dylan’s motorcycle accident, he did John Wesley Harding and the country album Nashville Skyline. Did you listen to those too?
Odetta: It was his earlier political [songs], “Masters of War.”
GO: He sang “Masters of War” on TV at the [1991] Grammy Awards during the Gulf War. It felt like an important statement since when a war machine gets going –
Odetta: Which is what’s going on now. How dare they bomb … and all this flag stuff. The stroke of a pen has just about got rid of the Bill of Rights. What the terrorists don’t do in terrifying us, our government is gonna do, or those who represent the government. We’re going for some dark, dark time. People being arrested because of the way they look? And they don’t have to be charged? They can’t see any lawyers? I’m afraid it’s going to be like [prewar] Germany in that it’s a factor that is spoiling that will spread, and spread, and spread. And we’re not going to really realize it until we get to a point where that poison is coming towards us. Our government – they have spin doctors – they put a spin on it. It seems anything they say, a bulk of the U.S. people believe it. Even when they say one thing and contradict it two minutes later.
CP: When we saw Dylan last week he was singing songs like “A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall” which seem timeless. His concerns in 1962 seem to be the same concerns now. The music’s timeless, and the struggle also seems timeless.
Odetta: I’m afraid it is timeless.
CP: There seems to be times when there’s disillusionment with the presidency – President Nixon resigned, etc. – but the mass majority of people don’t want to know the truth, the ugly truth, or what have you.
Odetta: Well they have enough problems on their own, you know what I mean? I mean, which of us goes right into the firefight? There are some who do – but there are most who don’t. Some of us have been fortunate enough to be influenced by, or around, people who take responsibility for their concerns. And their concerns are beyond a roof over the house, and food on the table, or a car every year, or a new television set, you know?
[Pauses]
They’re dumbing us down and we don’t know. And we are the victims. Because as it is happening over there, it’s gonna happen in our country. That net is gonna come in and in and in.
[1] Dave Van Ronk died on 10 February 2002 at the age of 65, shortly after this interview took place.
[2]At Bob Dylan’s 30th Anniversary Concert Celebration on October 16, 1992.
