Protest Songs Dror, Entre Les Oreilles, le 7 novembre 2012

Folk as the Sound of Self-Liberation: The Career and Performance Identity of #Odetta

This paper examines the performance career of Odetta, an African-American folk singer, guitarist and political personality active from the early 1950s through her death in 2008. Odetta’s legacy persists in American society through her association with the cultural politics of the civil rights movement, although she led an acclaimed singing and acting career which included but extended beyond her formal involvement in civil rights. Odetta helped to advance civil rights causes on a political and legal level, particularly through holding benefit concerts which raised funds for localized civil rights initiatives. But beyond the realm of politics and law, she located liberation for African-Americans in the early postwar era, then living under the persistent fact of Jim Crow segregation, in the cultural and emotional arena of individual identity production. Odetta devoted her career to exposing racist cultural norms and the way that these norms shaped black subjectivity, beginning with her own identity and lived experience as a black woman performer. To do so, Odetta relied on the idiom of “folk” as she utilized her own musical repertoire, largely drawn from the Mississippi Delta region of the American South, to encourage empathetic listening among her audiences as her music reinvented the experiences of the communities from whom these songs originated. Though an imperfect medium, the folk genre enabled Odetta to transmit, through sound, the memory of past African-American communities, and in so doing, she exposed and dismantled the racist structures she navigated in her present-day context.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/5/5a/Odetta_%281961%29.jpg/220px-Odetta_%281961%29.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/bb/Odetta.jpg/220px-Odetta.jpg

#musique
ping @sinehebdo