Odetta
Odetta Sings Dylan
(BG Camden)

Originally released: 1965 If there were to be one occasion Odetta Holmes deserved to sing at, other than Barack Obama’s inauguration, it would be the war crimes tribunal of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and the rest of the sordid, craven band of thieves, fraudsters and murderers who initiated the global “War on Terror” that has destabilized a large swath of the world and hurt, killed or—yes—terrorized hundreds of thousands of people.

 

The right song even suggests itself: her intense, accusatory version of “Masters of War”; a relentless, funereal acoustic crawl overtop of which she elucidates the shameful greed, cowardice and perfidy of the profiteering functionaries of professional conflict in her stagge≥ring, huge, doomy voice. Sure, the words are Bob Dylan’s, but Odetta absolutely makes them her own, with the commanding conviction of creation. 

 

Alas, Odetta slipped from this life on December 2, less than a month from her 78th birthday and two and a half months before the veteran civil rights activist was to honour the ascension of the first African-American president—a man who carries so many peoples’ fervent wishes for peace on his shoulders that the psychological damage, should he prove even half as much of an emperor as his predecessor, would be tremendous enough to incite either international despair or revolution.

 

Odetta Sings Dylan, her collection of offerings from the folkie bard, holds a song for that occasion, too. “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” in her capable hands, drapes a stern warning over a spidery, spare, sometimes dissonant acoustic arrangement. And yet, she betrays a glimmering hope for the future beneath the righteous indignation she breathes into that anthem of dissent, with strange little flutters of flamenco-esque guitar like sunshine breaking through a ceiling of clouds. 

 

The remainder of the album is also treated with the same kind of craft and transformative genius Odetta shares with Nina Simone (they sound like enormously gifted sisters with slightly different tastes; Simone more jazz, pop and classical; Odetta marked by the field songs and backporch blues of the South and the labour movement hymns of the North). Their voices are even close: the same weight and enormity; different texture and colour, and a propensity for different moods—although on the rollicking “I’m In The Mood For You,” the usually supernatural Odetta is outright lusty.

 

She has Simone’s sweeping breadth, even within her clear preferences for a dry aural palette against which she can set her voice, as solid and dominant as a mountain: “Paths of Victory,” under Odetta’s care, becomes a southern spiritual, her emotive voice thrown up to heaven in a redemptive glory-call; “Mr Tambourine Man” is a lysergic, 10-minute long hazy epic that winds down and curls back up again, beguilingly, over and over again; “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” has a vague Tin Pan Alley sentiment, but is poured out with the intensity of rock trapped in a molasses crawl; “Blowin’ In the Wind” is elegiac, an operatic graveyard of a song that draws back the curtain on the hope of an afterlife of grace and the possibility of peace on earth.

 

Perhaps Odetta has taken her place as a big-voiced saint of sorts regardless, her everlasting music a landscape of justice. V