Music: Baby in the Cradle

“When I discovered folk music, I suddenly saw how dreadful the world could be,” says a singer from Los Angeles known to her friends as Odetta Felious Gordon but to her fans simply as Odetta.

Despite the blues, the anger and the protest that are part of her folk repertory, the world is not being dreadful to Odetta.’ This week she moves from Boston’s Storyville into Manhattan’s Blue Angel, applauded as the most exciting female folk singer in the U.S.

A large, dignified woman of 29, she faces her audience with guitar lightly cradled in her arms, her moon face impassive, her eyes coolly remote. The number for which she is most famous is Water Boy, an old Negro work song, but she has in her repertory some 200 tunes, including This Land Is Your Land, Dark as a Dungeon, Great Historical Bum, Pay Day at Coal Creek. She is a keening Irishwoman in Foggy Dew, a chain-gang convict in Take This Hammer, a deserted lover in Lass from the Low Country. Her dark, handsomely pliant voice has none of the whisky rawness long idolized in such untutored folk singers as Lead Belly or Bessie Smith. But what she may lack in sheer, gutsy exuberance, Odetta more than makes up with immense power, a fine range, and an amazing command of nuances and inflections.

Breaking Rocks. Her voice was originally trained for opera. Born in Alabama, Odetta grew up in Los Angeles, picked up money for her voice lessons working in a button factory and as a maid. By the time she entered junior college she was a chorister in productions of Verdi’s Requiem, Bach’s B-Minor Mass. In those days, she recalls, “if it wasn’t classical, I didn’t want it.” But one night at a party she heard a group of performers from a San Francisco nightspot sing folk songs until dawn, and promptly “fell in love with the music.” She put together a sketchy repertory, sang at a few local clubs—”with passionate hate and venom.”

Thus began a career that took her to TV, the concert circuit, and last May to Carnegie Hall. She has half a dozen briskly selling albums on the market, will appear as the murderess Nancy in the forthcoming film version of Faulkner’s Sanctuary. What distinguished her from the start was the meticulous care with which she tried to re-create the feeling of her folk songs; to understand the emotions of a convict in a convict ditty, she once tried breaking up rocks with a sledge hammer.

On Campus. Booked for concerts for a season in advance and for a midwinter European tour, Odetta now lives in Chicago, tries to keep nightclub dates to a minimum and sing as often as possible on college campuses, where she feels most at home. She learns most of her songs from records, and alters and polishes them to suit her needs. Although she once scorned the trappings of the folk singer, including the inevitable guitar, she has added a bass accompaniment to her performances. “It’s like a magic carpet,” says Odetta. “It puts all of the baby in the cradle.”