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“There are so many little dyings that it doesn’t matter which of them is death,” wrote esteemed poet/ author Kenneth Patchen. Yet the accrual of such dying over the course of a calendar year belies such “little”ness. As we nudge into the 21st century, the luminaries of the previous one begin to wane, the architects and innovators of prime American music forms: blues, jazz, folk, rock. The obituary page for 2008 may not feature so many marquee names, but the crucial people behind the stage—the gurus, the producers, the poster artists, the record executives, the session men—all continued to vanish as well.
We lost studio drummers like Earl Palmer and guitarist Robert Ward, Phil Spector’s engineer Phil Levine, jazz photographer William Claxton, Mothers of Invention drummer Jimmy Carl Black, Thelonious Monk saxophonist Johnny Griffin. Number groups diminished by one, be they the Count Five, the Four Tops, the Dave Clark Five, or the Kingston Trio. Here are a few of the folks-–some well-known, some never heard of— whose work and influence created a great resonance here and whose efforts will hopefully continue to reverberate in the generations to come.
Odetta, famed African-American folk singer, songwriter, actress, and activist, passed away in New York City at the age of 77 last night. Beloved by everyone from Maya Angelou to Bob Dylan to Martin Luther King, Jr. Born in Birmingham and raised in Los Angeles, she began her career in musicals before heading up to San Francisco and falling in with the folk crowd, mixing it up with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. She was signed to Vanguard Records, which was home to darn-near everybody who was anybody in the folk scene at the time. It’s important to keep in mind that “folk music” of that time was more than just people singing sad songs on acoustic guitars. It was more of a movement than a sound, and it tied directly into the social movements of the time, of which Odetta was an active participant. It was also more than a little non-white, led by artists like Harry Belafonte and Odetta. In fact, MLK himself called Odetta the “The Queen of American Folk Music.”
