Obituary here<\/a>.<\/p>\nIt’s strange. I feel like a part of my own personal history has left the earth, even though I was barely born at the time she was making her big impact. But it trickled down. My mother plays the guitar, and she used to play Odetta songs all the time when we were growing up. We had her records in the house, beat up, scratchy, and earthy as hell. You could feel the energy of the entire world behind those songs. I knew that Odetta really meant<\/i> something, as a little kid, although I wasn’t sure what. I just knew that my parents loved her, and that we heard her music all the time.<\/p>\n
Mitchell went to go see Odetta a couple of years ago at the Old Town School of Folk Music and his stories are wonderful. I will re-tell them here, but I hope he can show up today and tell them himself. It was a rainy day and he went to the concert by himself. There weren’t that many people there, folks sitting politely at little tables, clapping, but it wasn’t a huge crowd. Odetta, a woman nearly 80 years old, sat up on that stage, glasses perched on her nose, so comfortable in her skin that you felt like you were in the presence of something divine, and sang through all her old songs.<\/p>\n
I cannot remember the song in question – was it “This Little Light of Mine”, Mitchell? Please remind me. I am pretty sure it was something Christian. Anyway, Odetta looked out at the 20 odd people in her audience and said, “We’re going to do this one together …” She was requiring participation. So there was Mitchell, the Jew, sitting by himself, singing at the top of his lungs about the glory of Christ, as Odetta had requested. I am laughing and crying right now. Mitchell was having the time of his life. But the crowd was small enough that people got shy, people weren’t really<\/i> participating. It was a hesitant group. Mitchell found himself the only one singing along. But Mitchell was like, “What, Odetta’s gonna ask me to do something and I’m gonna say No? I will TOTALLY obey Odetta, even if she’s making me sing about being washed in the blood of Jesus … I’m IN. IT’S ODETTA, PEOPLE, get your hands together!”<\/p>\n
Odetta stopped the song, and gently asked people again for their participation. She wasn’t going to go on if everyone wasn’t involved. Fearless, beautiful, inclusive. This time, it worked. The small crowd sitting in that small theatre on that rainy day all joined in, clapping and singing along.<\/p>\n
It is true, a “force of nature” was Odetta. What a life. Here’s a great photo<\/a>.<\/p>\nI miss her already.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[17,23],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8653"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8653"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8653\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":24358,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8653\/revisions\/24358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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