Hugo Schwyzer

I was saddened to read last night of the death of Odetta, the legendary folk-singer whose deep voice inspired generations of activists and music fans alike. I am so sorry she did not fulfill her most recent ambition (to perform at Barack Obama’s inauguration), and thrilled that she lived long enough to see him elected president.

As soon as I saw the obituary on the New York Times web page, sounds and feelings from my childhood rushed into my head. I was, from my earliest memories, a folk-music baby. Though my father (an amateur cellist) loved classical music, my mother had fallen in love with folk as a student at Vassar in the late 1950s. Folk music in the 1950s was the music of the political and cultural Left; it was also experiencing a major rebirth thanks to the efforts of folks like Odetta, Pete Seeger, and others. It was the soundtrack for my mother’s young adult years, and growing up in the 1970s, I listened over and over again to the records she had collected in the late ’50s and early ’60s.

The Newport Folk Festivals of the early 1960s were extraordinarily important in American musical history. My mother had virtually all of the recordings of these live concerts on LPs. On these records, which she or I (or less often, my little brother) would put on on rainy afternoons, I heard Joan Baez, Pete Seeger (on his own and with the Weavers), Ian and Sylvia, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, and the young — acoustic — Bob Dylan. What had been the soundtrack for my mother’s college and graduate school years became the soundtrack for my childhood.

My liberal politics were — and to some extent still are — inextricably linked to music. I have no musical ability myself, but like many children and teenagers, I found in music an opportunity to discover emotions and ideas that I could not have felt as deeply in any other way. If, like some of my conservative friends, I had been raised listening to the explicitly evangelical music of the likes of the Gaither family, I might have embraced a much more traditional world view as a child. As it was, I came of age on protest songs. I can sing from memory every verse of “Joe Hill”, of “We Shall Not Be Moved“, and “The Banks are Made of Marble.” And Odetta’s version of “Down by the Riverside” is my favorite call to pacifism I know.

I declared myself to be a socialist at 13. I got involved in left-wing politics before I was old enough to drive or vote, and though in my later adolescent years I found inspiration in radical, politicized bands like the Clash and Easterhouse, my real source of inspiration was less Marx and more the music my mother had played for me since I was in her womb. Over and over again, the songs I listened to spoke of the fight against injustice, against exploitation, and against the depradations of the wealthy. The songs I listened to spoke of the brotherhood of man and the equality of women; my mother made me a feminist, but Pete Seeger’s version of Peggy Seeger’s brilliant “Gonna Be an Engineer” helped!

I’m 41 years old, and I’ve still never crossed a picket line in my life — not that one sees many picket lines anymore — and one excellent reason is the absolute reverence for unions I got as a child, listening to my mother’s union songs. I may have grown up WASPy in Carmel-by-the-Sea; I may have grown up more familiar with the world of the Social Register than with the Elks Lodge, but by God, I was as an enthusiastic, emotional, impassioned advocate for the miner, the factory worker, and the itinerant farm laborer (Arlo Guthrie’s version of “Plane Wreck at Los Gatos” informed my view of immigration policy for years) as a fourteen year-old white boy who had never worked a day in his life could be.

I’m curious to know if any of my readers have experience with having their political or religious world view shaped by music. I suspect that had I been raised in the church by conservative Christians instead of by atheist philosophy professors, the hymns of Charles Wesley (or, one winces to think it, the voice of Pat Boone) might have had the same soul-shaping impact upon me, and I would be a different — and perhaps much less liberal — fellow today. I am my mother’s son, and among the many gifts she gave me was a weltanschauung shaped by poetry and folk music. It is no surprise that despite some periodic flirtations with the right-wing, my soul and my heart remain rooted in the music of civil rights, of socialism, of protest. And yesterday, one of those voices that rooted me there passed on.

I loved Odetta. Hers was the first African-American performer’s voice I came to know and love. (It was only in high school that on my own I discovered Mahalia Jackson). When I think of the civil-rights era of the 1960s, the soundtrack I hear starts and ends with Odetta’s music. I honor her legacy, am saddened by her death, and look forward to exposing my children to her rich and incomparable sound.