Odetta by Ian Zack

Author:Ian Zack [Zack, Ian]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2020-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Odetta the folksinger is opening her vibrant voice now. “No more moanin’ over me,” she sings. Sitting on the grass listening is a young man in straw hat and overalls. He is from Clarksdale, Mississippi. It took him and 37 companions 40 hours to get here in a bus.22

As Odetta sang the last song of the trilogy, Josh White was inspired to join her. “White didn’t wait for an introduction,” the New Yorker said. “He merely unpacked his guitar, handed the cigarette he had been smoking to a bystander, and walked up to the microphone to join Odetta in singing ‘I’m on the Way to Canaan Land.’ In a few moments, Miss Baez was also singing, and then all the folk singers gathered at the microphone to finish the song.”23

One marcher recalled the effect of hearing Odetta’s voice radiating out over the expectant crowd. “Gathered around the grounds of the monument, where thousands were trying to hear Odetta sing ‘Come Go to That Land,’ and other freedom songs, everyone began singing and clapping in the spirit of her performance. A form of solemn serenity was engulfed by all.” When the song ended and Odetta left the stage, a huge ovation erupted, with shouts of “More! More!” “The 50,000 souls crowded in the vicinity of the stand refused to turn her loose,” according to the Afro-American. Ossie Davis called back Odetta, who asked the crowd to join her as she sang “No More Auction Block” a cappella, followed by another old spiritual, “If Anybody Asks You.” “Odetta’s great, full-throated voice carried almost to Capitol Hill: ‘If they ask you who you are, tell them you’re a child of God,’” the New York Times said.24

After White sang several songs, including “The House I Live In” and “Go Down Moses,” Bob Dylan ambled up, a month removed from his success at Newport, and offered “When the Ship Comes In,” with Baez supplying backup vocals. Later, Davis introduced Lena Horne, Rosa Parks, and others luminaries, and the eight-tenths of a mile march to the Lincoln Memorial began around 11:30, with Constitution and Independence Avenues becoming seas of humanity and poster board, marchers singing and holding aloft signs with slogans like “No U.S. Dough to Help Jim Crow Grow” and “Civil Rights Plus Full Employment Equals Freedom.”

Shortly before 1 o’clock, Davis approached the microphone on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to begin the music program leading into the speeches by civil rights leaders. A French radio feed managed to capture the scene, one of the only media outlets to do so. “I would first like to congratulate all of you on the orderly, dignified manner in which you introduced the march from the Washington memorial,” Davis told the gathered masses, adding that they had shown the world “by your courage, your determination and your order that we mean business.”25

Odetta was to sing first; however, she was stuck in a sea of humanity, and big crowds—and the intimacy they demanded, with their proximity to her hidden rage—still frightened her.

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