Odetta redirected the path of folk music by synthesizing the stagecraft of opera and country on prime-time television.
In 1937, Odetta Felious Holmes moved from Birmingham, Alabama, to Los Angeles. Only six, she was already bigger than the other kids when she arrived in East Hollywood with her mother, Flora, and her younger sister Jimmie Lee. At home, Flora stressed the importance of “proper diction” and straightened her daughters’ hair. On Saturday afternoons, Odetta and Jimmie Lee listened to the Metropolitan Opera on KECA. Her stepfather, Zadock Felious, had a different taste in music.
In 1950, “Finian’s Rainbow,” first a Broadway hit in 1947, was revived for an outdoor presentation at the Greek Theatre in Los Angeles’s Griffith Park. A romp about a leprechaun laced with a dash of social-justice pedagogy, “Finian’s Rainbow” tells the story of a racist senator who is zapped into being Black, so that he may experience the sting of Jim Crow laws firsthand. Odetta joined the show as a chorus member, and received positive reviews.
In July, 1951, Odetta visited San Francisco as part of a summer-stock performance of “Finian’s Rainbow,” her first trip away from home. Her childhood friend Jo Mapes was living there, and came out to see the woman she knew as ’Detta. “She was one of the Ziegfeld girls, dressed up like one, who came down the famous Ziegfeld stairway,” Mapes said. “And there was ’Detta, anything but slim, anything but a dainty beauty.
,” his novella-length analysis of the Odetta album of the same name, “Odetta rescued black artistry from the often disparaging—if romantic—world of American folklorists themselves, whose own problematic practices she was clearly alert to.” She worked on her guitar technique with a teen virtuoso named Frank Hamilton, who helped her develop “the Odetta strum,” a variation on the musician Josh White’s double-thumb rhythm technique.
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