Once back in Los Angeles, Odetta began to build her project. She studied Carl Sandburg’s “The American Songbag” anthology and found recordings of prison songs archived by the Library of Congress, preserved on tape by John and Alan Lomax. Folk music, paradoxically, is one of the most mediated forms of song we have. Odetta didn’t only sing songs handed down to her through the ages. She located many of her sources in libraries, and likely heard others on records and the radio. The basic idea, that the songs in question are part of a homegrown, amateur tradition not rooted in commercial entertainment, is not completely untrue, but the necessary interventions of the recording era make the idea sort of fanciful. The decisions made in preserving folk music create as much artifice as a producer sending a vocal through a stack of effects—the difference being that the song being revived may have represented a practice (singing outside while breaking rocks) or tradition (telling stories through song) that would otherwise have been lost. But once you factor in the bowdlerizations of the Weavers and the rewriting that even Lead Belly did on a song like “Goodnight, Irene,” you’re not looking at an act so different from quoting a tune in a solo or sampling a break beat. A musician found some preëxisting piece she liked and decided to use it in her own music.
Odetta had a specific archival focus, though. As Matthew Frye Jacobson writes in “Odetta’s One Grain of Sand,” 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. Her voice was already an incredible force, and her guitar playing became deft and powerful. She could have gone into any number of fields, most obviously stage and film, but she’d found an error of affect in folk music that she could correct. “As I sang those songs, nobody knew where the prisoner began and Odetta stopped, and vice versa,” she told NPR, in 2005. “So I could get my rocks off, being furious.”
Odetta and Elvis Presley both put out their first records in 1954, when there was nothing like pop music as we know it now. Color TV had just arrived but was not yet common. There had not yet been any Beatles, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, or Rolling Stones records. Some of the songs that would become staples of the (white) English blues movement were about to be introduced into the popular consciousness—by Odetta. It was precisely Odetta’s ability to convey spiritual elevation and personal pride that allowed her to convince a suspicious public that “Another Man Done Gone” was as important as “Goodnight, Irene,” and that Black Americans had a right to hear stories of their history in the present as popular culture. Listening to her fifties records now, though, they don’t sound like popular music, as a Lead Belly recording from 1935 often does. Odetta’s dignity is precisely what might alienate a younger listener wanting a more unfettered kind of anger; there’s something missing from her regal delivery and allegorical songs.