Folk for You Folk
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Artist:
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Album:Tradition Masters
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Track:Gallows Tree
Dear Friends,I'm not writing much because my mother is in the hospital with pneumonia, and I am running back and forth to the hospital, which is an hour and a half from here. But I came into my office for a few hours and got caught up on some e-mail and wanted to share this from the Daily OM Music review and a couple of websites where you can read about her and here some music.http://folkmusicarchives.org/odetta.htmhttp://www.music.com/person/odetta/1/January 24, 2007At the Gate of HornOdetta 1957"The folksinger Odetta has been rightly acclaimed as a national treasure. Her solo debut album, 1956's Sings Ballads and Blues, went a long way toward kick-starting the folk music revival-even inspiring a young Bob Dylan to pick up the acoustic guitar-and since then she has remained a proud, versatile, and unimpeachably authentic force in American music. As much of a milestone as that first LP was, Odetta's sophomore effort, At the Gate of Horn, stands, arguably, as her finest effort. Not actually a live record as the title implies, the album recreates the singer's set from Chicago's Gate of Horn, an important folk club of the era. Accompanied by her own feverish rhythm guitar and the sympathetic bass of jazzman Bill Lee (father of filmmaker Spike), Odetta turns in a series of full-throated performances that catch her at her youthful best.A classically trained singer, Odetta's deep, operatic vocals elevate traditional material to the peaks of high drama. The opening number, "Gallows Tree (Gallows Pole)," sets her taut vibrato over a dark, moody momentum: "Hangman, hangman, slack your rope / Slack it for a while / I think I see my mother coming / Riding a-many a mile." Her sorrowful voice and scrambling, ringing guitar-slow but steady, weary but driving-evoke the bottomless fear of flight by moonlight. Later, she revives this same sense of heart-pounding chase with "The Fox" but for a more comic effect. The song tells the tale of a fox stealing ducks for his family's supper, and here Odetta lets loose her great theatricality, alternating between the voices of the song's characters, from the alarmist farmer's wife to the manically quacking duck.Above all, Odetta is an arresting and moving performer, and some of the disc's best moments come when she displays her skills most directly. On the emotional "Maybe She Go," she invests a simple song of indecision with remarkable boldness and stridency. Playing a nearly Flamenco-style guitar part, full of trills and harsh strums, she wails loudly above it, captivating the listener with her powerful, deep-voiced cries. At the Gate of Horn presents Odetta as both a peerless entertainer and a nearly supernatural receiver of people's sufferings. For all her training and technique, her most striking quality is the deep, mournful transcendence in her voice: She seems to sing for the experiences of generations."
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