How Charlottesville has changed. Ten years ago, the idea of hearing a 20th-century musical icon at a small club on a Downtown side street, not to mention on a Monday night in January, was inconceivable.
The largely middle-aged crowd at the Gravity Lounge reflected the fact that icons don’t always remain in the spotlight. But the trendy flavor of America’s cultural tastes can’t erase Odetta’s impact on modern popular music. Both Janis Joplin and Bob Dylan named her as a direct influence on their work, and her importance to succeeding generations is readily apparent, such as in the music of Joan Armatrading (more on her later) and Tracy Chapman. Perhaps most significantly, her 50-year touring career and 28 albums have kept alive the traditions of blues and politically conscious protest songs.
Dressed in elegant bohemian garb, Odetta immediately awoke the audience from their winter brain freeze by asking them to sing along to her first number, “This Little Light of Mine.” Her initial comments between songs implied that much time was going to be taken up with little lectures about what’s wrong with American society. Her overall intention, though, was to let her powerful material speak for itself. One other thing became clear as the show went on: The night belonged to the blues, with a few folk songs sprinkled in.
In the hands of some singers, the blues can be monotonous and curiously vacuous. Odetta is an entirely different story. Whether performing comic songs like Leadbelly’s take on Washington D.C. (“a bourgeois town”) or tragic songs like Bessie Smith’s “Poor Man’s Blues,” she had no trouble inhabiting their original spirit, and with each verse varied her delivery and incorporated surprising tonal changes. All this proved that listening to the blues should be not so much an event as an experience.
Anyone who believes that Armatrading is one of the giants of popular music, and who hasn’t heard Odetta sing a folk song, would not only be stunned by how alike they sound, but would have to concede that Armatrading began to fly with Odetta’s wings. Both their voices have a unique depth that feels like the difference between crying and sobbing, or between pitiful speculation and resounding insight.
One final note: Odetta’s accompaniment—just your average balding white guy who can play the blues like the devil—would have really brought down the house if his tinny-sounding electric piano had been replaced with a booming acoustic one. Is it too much to ask that Gravity Lounge rent or acquire one?