Odetta and Dylan: The Legend of Politics and Song in Mid-Century America
Open AccessThis project unpacks questions of cultural legacy and power: the decades of cultural memory that have made Dylan a figure worthy of blind appreciation and left Odetta to the margins of being known yet unknown. At the core of this are, unsurprisingly, questions of race and gender, and I will examine the ways Odetta’s Black femininity and Dylan’s white masculinity have been culturally defined, both by themselves and us, and how in turn their identities—their personas real and imagined—have defined aesthetics of political music and counter-culturalism from the 1960s through today. This project takes an expansive view of each artists’ cultural contributions, grounded in the music, but encompassing album art, liner notes, hairstyles, performances, speeches, interviews, and photographs. My approach marries cultural history with close readings to explore the vast web of threads between influencer and influence across Odetta and Dylan’s narratives, and to build a new frame for discussing cultural development and impact that spans gendered and racial lines. There are two interlocking goals of this project: the first is to bring Odetta back into the fold of our cultural conversations of the 1960s and beyond, acknowledging and unpacking her vast influence on our ideas of political music and aesthetics of resistance, her complication of the folk genre, and our idealization of the songwriter; the second is to analyze Odetta’s artistic foil, Bob Dylan, whose success has overshadowed the narrative of Odetta in our cultural memory even as his iconography is deeply indebted to the labor of not only Odetta but a whole host of Black cultural and political influences from which he defined his brand of political music and countercultural aesthetics. In placing these two artists in conversation with each other, my goal is to highlight their symmetry and symbiosis within the cultural landscape of mid-century America. I argue that we cannot fully trace the breadth of Odetta’s influence without addressing Dylan and the ripple effect he has had on popular music in the twentieth century and beyond. But so, too, do I argue that we cannot—and more importantly should not—unpack the influence of Dylan without Odetta. In this project I hope to demonstrate how our cultural conversations can be reformed to hold space for both Odetta and Dylan, combatting the notions of Dylan-exceptionalism—the idea that his artistry exists separate and special from everyone else—that has taken hold since the winning of his Nobel Prize in 2016. Too long has his story been told without hers.
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