Odetta was up for a Grammy this year. Fifty years on, and 27 albums later, The Queen of American Folk found herself surrounded by a certain glitz. The nominated album was last year's Blues Everywhere I Go - a contender in the Best Traditional Blues Album category, along with Ruth Brown, Bobby Bland, Pinetop Perkins and the eventual winner, B. B. King. She was very pleased to be there, but unlike most people with a backstage pass for the Grammy circus, not at all disappointed to leave without the gong.
"Well, you know I'm glad I didn't win the Grammy. And let me tell you why. There were people in that category who have been playing since before God made dust. I'd have voted for Pinetop Perkins - he'd have gotten my vote - he's been around a long, long, long time. I'm happy I was nominated but I'm glad I didn't win. I'd have been embarrassed."
Born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1930, Odetta Holmes seemed destined for music in one way or another. Growing up in LA, she took piano and voice lessons and by secondary school age, her talents as a singer were obvious. At 14 she performed in the Turnabout Theatre in Hollywood and dreamed of being Marian Anderson. But a dream was all it ever could be. This was America in the 1940s.
"Well, you know honey, there was very little opportunity for a little black girl. It wasn't until the last years of Marian Anderson's career that she was invited to sing at certain prestigious venues. So there were limitations in that particular area of music. And I really wanted very much to sing oratorios. But nowadays, I'm not at all lonely without that side of things."
In her late teens, while on the road with the chorus of Finian's Rainbow, Odetta was introduced to the San Francisco folk scene. She learned to play guitar and began singing. Word spread about the girl with the big voice and when she headed north to gig in Chicago, she was welcomed at the door of the club by Big Bill Broonzy and Josh White. When she hit New York, Harry Belafonte and Pete Seeger were waiting. She was just what the folk scene needed - a black, female all-singing folk jukebox and, if she could strum it, she would sing it. In fact her strange guitar technique became known as "the Odetta strum" - something she laughs about now. "With a capo, honey, I could play a whole lot of chords !"
Ironically, Blues Everywhere I Go is Odetta's first blues album (with a band) in 40 years. Although she is known as a folksinger rather than specifically a blues-singer, the record is ample evidence of her long connection with the bluer side of American traditional music. Featuring songs by Brownie McGhee, Victoria Spivey, Sippie Wallace, Leadbelly and Percy Mayfield, it's an album which aims to reveal the blues as a still-living force with contemporary spiritual potential. It's something she feels strongly about. Like many blues fans, she feels that the music today tends to be employed in a lazy, shorthand way - played as a cheap imitation of itself and more for superficial effect than anything else. Hers is an album, she hopes, which places the music in a rather more valued position - especially within the black community of the US.
"Well that's a whole other book. You see white kids who know about blues have access to people who pass on this information. That's no excuse, but we would have lost our music if it hadn't been for white kids recording it. It might have disappeared. It's sad but it's true. I don't know what the answer is, but we have to keep educating and informing ourselves - and passing on the information. Of course me - I'm way back in history honey! I don't know what's going on with music now. But I do know that the new music doesn't come out of nowhere like Topsy!"
When the folk boom hit the US in the 1950s it seemed to many that the music had in fact appeared from nowhere. When the huge stars like Baez and Dylan arrived in the 1960s they were hailed as if they had somehow emerged, fully formed, from the backwoods themselves. The reality, of course, is that thanks to devoted collectors like Harry Smith, people like Dylan dived headlong into the secret well of American tradition and started splashing about. All of a sudden something which had previously remained in the rural background emerged almost for the first time in the mouths of urban Greenwich Village folkies. Strange but true.
Odetta's repertoire of children's songs, work songs, spirituals and blues was very much part of that scene. She had a head start on Dylan and company and so became a bit of a touchstone for the younger crowd. That said, the books never quite know what to do with someone like Odetta. For many listeners, conditioned by versions of history, the notion of folk singing is simply "not black enough" for a black artist. It's as if blues is black and folk is not. But that's to get tied up with definitions which fail to acknowledge realities. Odetta had always sung the songs she was now singing at Newport - and it had always been called folk.
"They called it folk music alright. And folk music contained all sorts of things, yes, but in reality it didn't. The problem with the folk scene in the '50s and '60s was that the bluegrass people did their thing and the spiritual people did their thing and never the twain did meet. The record companies began to focus on certain people and certain groups and it was the same thing that had happened with the blues. You have heard of the term `crossover'. What that was about was finding a black artist doing something and then getting a white artist who would do a version of it. You know about that. Of course, all you had to do was compare the two - and one of them would pale. It had happened before and it happened again with the folk boom."
As the 1960s progressed Odetta became one of the leading musical voices of the US Civil Rights Movement. She marched in Selma, sang at the Washington March of 1963 and performed for JFK on the televised special civil rights programme Dinner with the President. It was a period which made her think deeply about her role as a singer and about the very potential of music itself. She had grown up listening to the big bands, R 'n' B, the Grand Ol' Opry and classical music, and now she found herself alone with a guitar, singing what might be called "simple" folk songs. It might have seemed a long way from her dreams of being Marian Anderson, but what she had come upon was perhaps a far more valuable thing. She had brought together everything from Leadbelly to Mahalia Jackson. It was powerful stuff. She, like any real folk singer, let the world know what was happening in people's hearts.
"Imagine that time without the music. What would it have been like without the music? It gave a voice to the whole thing. But yes, the most disappointing day for me was the day I realised that I could not change the world just by singing. But music is the spirit. And on a personal level the power of music is that it heals. Sometimes I have been feeling unwell and I've had to pack up and go out and do a show. Well, after singing for a while and finishing the show, honey, I have forgotten that I was unwell in the first place!"
Odetta plays Kilkenny Rhythm 'n' Roots Weekend next Saturday