Odetta
In 1963, my family returned to the United States after my father’s 13-year stint as a foreign correspondent for this newspaper. I was born in New Delhi and had lived in Austria, Poland, Switzerland and Japan. I was 7 years old and had spent a total of about a month in America.
Everything about this home I never knew was strange and fascinating, but nothing more than the music. I had a red plastic transistor radio on which I obsessively listened to the Beatles. I was also obsessed with a four-LP set my parents bought in New York called “Folk Songs and Minstrelsy.” Cisco Houston, the Weavers and Tommy Makem became part of my life’s soundtrack.
But it was the voice on sides 4 and 5 of that set that had the deepest impact: Odetta, the transcendent folk singer who died on Tuesday. Her songs were at first difficult for my young ear: the power of her voice, and their unfamiliar rhythms. But in listening to Odetta, and asking my parents what her words were about, my eyes were opened to the crimes and tragedies embedded in American history. This was not a part of the curriculum in the first and second grades I attended in Tokyo and only just beginning to be a part of my New York schooling.
“No More Auction Block for Me” led to conversations about slavery, about the “many thousand gone” in the Middle Passage, about the “driver’s lash” that enforced the bondage of men, women and children....
Read entire article at Andrew Rosenthal in the NYT
Everything about this home I never knew was strange and fascinating, but nothing more than the music. I had a red plastic transistor radio on which I obsessively listened to the Beatles. I was also obsessed with a four-LP set my parents bought in New York called “Folk Songs and Minstrelsy.” Cisco Houston, the Weavers and Tommy Makem became part of my life’s soundtrack.
But it was the voice on sides 4 and 5 of that set that had the deepest impact: Odetta, the transcendent folk singer who died on Tuesday. Her songs were at first difficult for my young ear: the power of her voice, and their unfamiliar rhythms. But in listening to Odetta, and asking my parents what her words were about, my eyes were opened to the crimes and tragedies embedded in American history. This was not a part of the curriculum in the first and second grades I attended in Tokyo and only just beginning to be a part of my New York schooling.
“No More Auction Block for Me” led to conversations about slavery, about the “many thousand gone” in the Middle Passage, about the “driver’s lash” that enforced the bondage of men, women and children....