Personal Information

    Name originally Odetta Holmes; surname legally changed to Felious, 1937; born December 31, 1930, in Birmingham, AL; daughter of Reuben and Flora (Sanders) Holmes; married Don Gordon in 1959 (divorced); married Gary Shead in the late 1960s (divorced); married Iversen "Louisiana Red' Minter in 1977. Education: Earned a degree in classical music and musical comedy from Los Angeles City College.

Career

    Professional folksinger. Worked as an amateur singer at Turnabout Theater, Hollywood, CA, 1945; performed in the chorus of Finian's Rainbow, San Francisco, CA, 1949; has performed in numerous concerts and festivals, including Newport Folk Festival, New Orleans Jazz Festival, and Ann Arbor Folk Festival. Actress appearing on stage, in motion pictures, and in television films, including The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and Sanctuary. Guest on television programs, including Tonight With Belafonte, 1959, and Dinner With the President, 1963.

Awards

    Sylvania Award for Excellence, 1959; presented with the key to the city of Birmingham, AL, 1965; Duke Ellington fellowship, Yale University.

    In her 1987 memoirs With A Voice To Sing With. Joan Baez described her first encounter as a young folk singer with her idol Odetta. "I was a nervous wreck waiting to see her and was at the bar when I realized that she had arrived," Baez wrote. "I watched her for a minute from across the room. She was big as a mountain and black as night. Her skin looked like velvet. She wore massive earrings that dangled and swung and flashed, and her dress looked like a flowing embroidered tent. She had a split between her front teeth which showed all the time because her face, between expressions of worry, surprise, concern, and mock anger, would shift back into a smile big enough to match the rest of her. Her chin jutted out round and full of dimples when she laughed, and I thought she was the most dignified person I'd ever seen. To overcome the panic whaling up in my chest, I went up to her and flat out did an imitation of her singing, "Another Man Done Gone." She looked surprised and then pleased, and then she enveloped me in her great arms. I felt about six years old, and my heart didn't get back to normal a week."

    Odetta seems to have that affect on people and musicians in particular. Baez is just one of many folk artists who cite Odetta as a musical influence. When she burst onto the folk scene in the middle fifties, Odetta was unlike anyone the music industry had ever experienced. She stood tall, imposing and proudly African. Odetta was the first prominent black woman to sport the cropped coif called an afro in the 1950s, and the style was so associated with her that it was often simply called an "odetta" in the black community Before black was beautiful, Odetta was an African queen singing in a booming, clear voice about the sundry struggles of mankind to deal with this thing called life. She opted to carry on the grassroots bluesy folk tradition popularized by Leadbelly, Bessie Smith and later Mahalia Jackson. And she did it by recording prison work songs, blues, ballads, lullabies and spirituals which she brought to life with an emotional sincerity and impact that can't be taught in a class. "In school, you learn about American history through battles,” Odetta told the New York Times in 1981. "But I learned about the United States and the people of the United States through this music, through the songs that I sing."

    Odetta is a musician's musician. She cares about the spirit and integrity of the art. She doesn't care about ego and being in competition with her peers. Her feeling is they do their thing, she does her's and the audience benefits. Bottom line is the lady just loves to perform. During soundcheck a couple of years back at the prestigious John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., Odetta ceased strumming her guitar midway through a song. She said, "This is a pretty nice place here, isn't it?" As she went through several choruses of "Life Is A Railroad Train" (which she criminally did not sing in concert that night), Odetta queried busy audio technicians about feedback frommonitors and other technicalities before insisting that she needed none of them. She and her guitar "Baby" would do fine alone tonight she reasoned, and the techies agreed that the concert hall was perfectly built to amplify the acoustic sounds she would be transmitting later on.

    The show was billed as "The Blues Ladies." It featured Broadway performer Carol Woods and was headlined by R&B legend Ruth Brown. Odetta stepped on stage that night and immediately drew the audience in with a few disapproving wisecracks about President Clinton's NAFTA Treaty and moved on to spiritual matters as she got the mostly white, over forty, upper middleclass audience into singing "Kum Ba Ya" and even getting them to repeat her cry, "Somebody needs ya lord, kum ba ye." After doing about five songs and one encore over a forty minute set, she left the stage only to return an hour and a half later. At that time, she joined Brown and Woods for a rousing finale. The trio gave us vaudeville with their "off-to-Buffalo" antics and double entendre jokes. They finished the show with a stirring rendition of "Stormy Monday" where Odetta brought the bassist elemems of her contralto to the fore and, at last, received a standing ovation from the fiercely conservative audience.  It's that meshing brand of charisma, spunk and naked talent which strongly influenced Joan Baez, Janis Joplin, Tracy Chapman, the Indigo Girls, and to a lesser extent, Bob Dylan among others. Odetta was the first urban folk singer to break down the barriers between traditional folk and contemporary folksong (i.e., spiritual, work, prison and protest songs). In the late 1950s Odetta popularized the song "Oh, Freedom" and charted a successful course in traditional folk music that no other black woman has begun to and few have sought to match.

    She was born Odetta Holmes on December~31, 1930 in Birmingham, Alabama. Her father, Reuben, was a steel mill maker, who died shortly after Odetta's birth. Her mother, Flora, was a domestic engineer who fell madly in love with a custodial engineer named Zadock Felious. When Odetta was about six years old, the maid and janitor pulled up stakes and moved their brood of three children to Los Angeles. Her stepfather encouraged music in the home and toted Odetta and her sister to see black performing artists. "The music I fed on then," she told the New York Times, "Was Jimmie Lunceford's orchestra, Nat Cole when he had a trio, Ella Fitzgerald, Duke Ellington, Jimmy Rushing and Count Basie's Band." Later that would change when Odetta took voice lessons from Metropolitan Opera soprano Janet Spenser until she felt her instructor was trying to mold her into a clone of the contralto Marian Anderson. She graduated from Belmont High School in 1947, took work in her mother's occupation, and studied classical music nocturnally at Los Angeles City College.

    In 1949 Odetta joined the chorus of "Finian's Rainbow." When the tour stopped through San Francisco, Odetta was introduced to folk music by a friend and has been a devotee ever since. She taught herself to play the guitar and frequented folk clubs such as the hungry i. She was pulled out of the audience one night and did an impromptu performance which gained her the offer of a gig at the hungry i. A presumably jealous male performer who regularly performed there objected and the offer was withdrawn. Odetta, instead, took a year's engagement at a rival folk club, the Tin Angel, where her regional fame spread quickly as a sublime interpreter of work songs and spirituals. This lead to a month long stint at Manhatten's trendy. but exclusive Blue Angel nightclub where she attracted luminous admirers such as Pete Seeger and Harry Belafonte.