Odetta brings lessons

Odetta did not come to the Grand in Ellsworth to perform. She came to lead a campfire sing-along with people huddled together against a sudden snow squall. She came to teach the slave songs her ancestors sang in the cotton and tobacco fields. She came to sing the people’s history, not tell the one written in textbooks.

The 67-year-old folk singer sat alone on the bare stage Saturday night and began by leading the crowd in a prayful rendition of “Kumbaya.” With her guitar resting on her lap, a stick of incense smoldering above the strings, Odetta taught her audience spirituals like “When I Lay My Burden Down,” “Somebody Talkin’ About Freedom” and “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize.”

“These songs were in a kind of code,” she explained, as her foot tapped out the beat. “The slaves would sing, `When we break bread together on our knees’ or `I fall on my knees with my face to the rising sun,’ and that would mean a prayer meeting would be called for sunrise. The overseers didn’t pay attention to what they were singing.”

Odetta was born in Birmingham, Ala., but raised in Southern California. By 1949 she had moved to San Francisco, where she fell in love with folk music and learned to accompany herself on the guitar. However, it would take another decade before she became known outside the tiny folk clubs that dotted the nation’s cities in the 1950s.

“Back then, the folk music scene was so small that if someone hit a great lick in New York, you heard about it the next morning in San Francisco,” she said, leading the audience in a blues ballad version of “Good Night, Irene.”

Odetta told those who had braved an unexpected snowstorm to attend that she had not realized when she was growing up that she and her fellow African-Americans had a culture. Not until she visited the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and heard the old recordings of artists like Leadbelly did she discover her own rich musical history.

“I offered to give a benefit to raise money to help preserve some of these recordings,” she said between songs. “But because they’re a government agency, they can’t take money from the people. I wish they’d tell me that at tax time.”

A small but stately woman, Odetta is a commanding and dignified presence on stage. She has sung her way through some of the most turbulent times in the nation’s history — the McCarthy era, the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the women’s movement, Watergate. She plans to keep singing into the next century.

“I find that when those with the power have their feet on our throats, singing helps us get through to the next day, don’t you?” she asked.

Then, as if conducting a benediction, she led her “congregation” in “Amazing Grace,” before sending them off into the snowy night singing.