First Person with Wayne Shepherd

First Person: Odessa Settles

This soft-spoken Registered Nurse (RN) from Nashville uses her music to remind us of the struggle of African-Americans for freedom following slavery. Send your support for FIRST PERSON to the Far East Broadcasting Company: FEBC National Processing Center Far East Broadcasting Company P.O. Box 6020 Albert Lea, MN 56007 Please mention FIRST PERSON when you give. Thank you!

Duration:: 23m
Broadcast on:: 05 Nov 2010
Audio Format:: other

This soft-spoken Registered Nurse (RN) from Nashville uses her music to remind us of the struggle of African-Americans for freedom following slavery.

Send your support for FIRST PERSON to the Far East Broadcasting Company:
FEBC National Processing Center
Far East Broadcasting Company
P.O. Box 6020
Albert Lea, MN 56007

Please mention FIRST PERSON when you give. Thank you!

You know, I grew up in a segregated community and I often wanted to know why this was so. Just about everything that I choose to do and life has something to do with it with breaking down balance. Welcome to First Person, a weekly one-on-one conversation. I'm Wayne Shepard and today I want you to meet a woman with a unique gift and message. I'll introduce you to Odessa Settles in just a few moments. But first, let me tell you about our website where you can go for not only more information about today's guest, but also an extension of our interview which we couldn't fit into today's broadcast. At FirstPersonInterview.com you'll be able to hear the rest of the conversation. Plus, you can explore our archive of past programs. Check the calendar for upcoming broadcasts and contact us via email. Call us all at firstpersoninterview.com. Odessa Settles comes from Nashville, Tennessee and you'll hear about her family in a moment. But I've heard Odessa sing some of her songs now several times and every time I hear her, something stirs my soul as she sings and tells the story of African Americans in their struggle for freedom. She's part of the group to Princeton Players and we'll put a link on our website to that group. But I invited Odessa to join me at the Mole and Studio in Franklin, Tennessee for a conversation about her life and the message of her music. I was born and raised here in Nashville, Tennessee in a traditional working class family. I had seven brothers and it was me. That's a story in itself, I'll bet. I know. It was interesting being in that particular mixture. My father made the eighth mail so it was interesting because my mom grew up in a traditional household as well where the women kind of took care of the males. So my brothers and my father, they were well taken care of. We set food in front of them. Everything would put in the fork to their mouth, which was interesting. They had to learn later though once they got married. My brothers did because their wives were definitely not putting up with that. So did you have any alliances with any of those brothers or one in particular? There were two sets in a sense and I was right in the middle and I ended up being closely aligned with the younger group. So there were four up under me and we hung together more so than the older ones. They had their own thing. You kind of ran as a pack. Yes. So it's interesting. It's still sort of like that today too. Was music always a part of your family experience? Music was. It was as long as I can remember. There has been music in our family. It's been part of our daily lives almost. My father was a musician as well as a builder. He was a professional singer in a sense because he was part of a group. One of my favorite groups that he had was the Golden Harp Jubilee Singers. One of the reasons is from a musical standpoint, that's when my siblings and I really learned harmonies because they rehearsed at our home. They were singing gospel? They were singing gospel. They called it quartet singing but they had about five or six people in a group and a guitar player. So it was nice from a social standpoint too because when they rehearsed at the home, people in the neighborhood would bring chairs and set them out on our lawn just to listen to the rehearsal during the summer months. Some of the kids would be just hanging out so you would see all these people peeping through the doors and my mom would make coffee and nourishments for the members of the group and everything. So it was fun. It was a fun time. Well, we would have loved to have been there in one of those family concerts. It was great. Yeah, and we would be singing in the other room. So at an early age, we realized that, oh, this particular voice is suitable to you. That was great. So did mom and dad encourage you then to start singing along? It was one of those things like being born into it. It was just a part of our life. We were encouraged just by example because my father sang, then we did too. We wanted to do what he did, so that's what we did. My mother was not a professional singer, but she could sing. I loved her voice. She had this rich, alto-sounding voice like Nina Simone. She did sing in the church choir, so it was always a treat to hear her when she would lead a song. Years later, your father was a part of the Fairfield 4? Yes, yes. He actually joined Relder late in life. He was in 1992, I think, in 1991 is when he came along into the group. This was after Reverend Sam McCraery passed away and preach a man if anybody can remember him. He did sing with preach a man a little bit. But after Reverend Sam McCraery passed away, then my father was part of the group. He was there until his demise in '99. He passed away in 1999. Did you go through all the piano lessons and that sort of thing as a kid, or did you pick it up naturally? What happened with you? I did have some piano lessons starting maybe at age 12, maybe about three years rather. Was that a chore for you or? No, no. I loved it. I really loved it. We had a piano at our home, so I took some lessons, and it definitely helped me a lot. I wish I could have taken them longer, but it turns out that that was not the case. So I can play piano, and I do teach myself pieces that I interested in learning. But you've learned to play stringed instruments? I'm learning those on my own as well. So my favorite right now is the ukulele. I have a collection of baritone ukuleles and have had actually two made for me that are kind of atypical in size. I like the rich sound of the baritone, so my larger one I call a bass ukulele. Of all the instruments in the world, why that particular one? Well, I've always loved the string instrument. I like atypical instruments, especially for accompaniment, vocal accompaniment, which is my favorite instrument, singing. But the ukulele, the ukulele is what they call it. It's easier to play than the guitar. I have guitars as well, and I can play some, but not as well as the ukulele. But it's pronounced ukulele? It's ukulele. I've never heard that before. Yeah. And I'm still learning. It's a learning process, so I can play well enough to show people what I want. Music always has been and probably always will be a part of your life, Odessa, but there's other things that you do in life as well. I'd love for you to tell everybody what you do vocationally. Vocationally, I am a registered nurse in advanced practice. I work with children who are born preterm. These are babies who are very small and at risk. I think the smallest baby I've ever taken care of was maybe weighed 15 ounces at birth, that baby survived. That's incredible. Yes, it is. It's amazing. You know, life is amazing. Could you hold him or her in the palm of your hand? Pretty much so. Pretty much so. It's tiny, tiny little girl. That must take a big emotional investment on your part. It really does, you know, but it also, I'm fortunate to work in a developmental follow-up clinic as well, where I can see these children develop over a period of three years and to see how they turn out is just amazing. You know, they teach me a lot about life and what's important and what's not, you know. Do the two come together? Does your music ever enter into that world? It definitely does. You know, I'm a novice songwriter and I write a lot about the children that I take care of. The ones that I normally write about, you know, not all the stories are great from a social standpoint. There are some families who are unable to take care of the children as well as they should. There are some babies that do not make it because of that, you know, and those are the ones that I usually sing about. What would you sing to them? Ah, my goodness. I wish I had bought some of the lyrics that I have. Just a ten or a phrase. But there's a song that I didn't write, actually, that I sing a lot. This one is brown baby, brown baby, brown baby, when you grow up, I want you to drink from the plenty cup. I want you to stand up tall and proud, I want you to speak up clear and loud. Ah, brown baby. So I end up singing a lot of lullabies, you know, to babies. But it, you know, it becomes emotional sometimes, very emotionally charged at some visit, you know, when I know that the social situation is not as good as it should be. What do you think is going on in those little minds as you sing those songs to them? It obviously must have an effect on them. Yeah, they respond. I think the parents, you know, even the ones that, you know, in a good social situation, I've seen to all of them, by the way, is one of the ways to relax the families, even the parents, you know, they may come in with a baby, it's crying, you know, and they say, "It cries like this all the time, it's getting solvable." And so I take the baby up and I start singing to them and the baby quiets and listen, and the parents always say, "Oh, can we take you home with us?" I said, "Just sing to them, yeah, but we don't sound like that." I said, "That's not what they're looking for, trust me." You need to see the lullabies is what you need. Yeah, yeah. One of the things that my father regretted because he wanted to actually record a CD of lullabies, and I might just carry that out for him, you know, but that's, he really liked to sing the lullabies. I really enjoyed hearing him do those. You miss your father, don't you? A lot. Yeah, he was a great friend, great buddy. Well, let's break for just a moment, but when we come back, Odessa sings for us here in the studio. Next time on First Person, a medical doctor gets a wake-up call from God. I have the opportunity to work with the Lord God Almighty. He knows what I'm doing. He knows that he's sending him a phone. That's okay. All I have to do is show up and listen to what God is doing, look at things with his eyes. It's the best decision I've ever made. Dr. Bruce Steffes went from attempting suicide to serving God in Africa. I'm Wayne Shepard. Join us next time here on First Person. Let's return to our studio conversation now in Franklin, Tennessee with Miss Odessa Settles, and I would be remiss to have Odessa here without asking her to sing. So let's go back to the studio as she begins to sing one of those old spirituals now. How long, Jesus, to walk with me? How long, Jesus, to walk with me? While I'm owning it, it's teachers returning, I want Jesus to walk with me. What pictures are in your head as you sing those songs? I think about my journey. I grew up doing the height of the Civil Rights Movement. I also grew up in a segregated community, and I often wanted to know why this was so. What I have done since that time, since growing up, is to spend my time trying to number one else at that question and also to break down the barriers. Just about everything that I choose to do in life, musically and socially almost, has something to do with that with breaking down barriers. How do you go about doing that? One situation at a time, one person at a time. We were talking about my career as a nurse. I'm going to tell you a story about, once I used to transport babies, I was a transport practitioner where we would take the ambulance and go out to community hospitals, maybe about a hundred mile radius of where I worked, stabilize the baby and bring them back to the hospital in a larger hospital. I went to pick up a baby once, and the whole entire family was there, so white family. Baby was very ill, needing emergency care. The father simply said, "I don't want you to touch my baby." I looked at him, and his whole family was around, so he had to keep up whatever face that he had for his family. You realize in where he came from, I just simply, to make a long story short, I pulled him aside. I said, "Can we go in another room?" I looked at him, and I said, "You don't know me, and I don't know you." Today, this is not about you or me, it's about whether or not you want your baby to survive. I said, "If you tell me that you don't want me to do anything for your child at this point, I won't." I said, "And at that particular time, tears were running down his eyes, and then he looked at me and he said, "You know, do what you can." I did that, I had no idea whether or not a baby would make it back to the hospital at this point. Got him back to the hospital, and at that particular time, I usually let the children go because I work in another area. Maybe about a couple of months later, in the clinic where I follow babies with chronic lung disease, this man comes walking in, holding a baby. He walks up to me, and he says, "You remember me." And I said, "Yes, I do." He gave me a hug, and he said, "Thank you." So those are the kind of things that you do. It's one person at a time, one situation at a time. You know, if you look at the entire world, it's just too overwhelming, too overwhelming. That's a remarkable story. You have to bring it home. Many people would compartmentalize their life and say, "This is what I do on the job, and this is what I do with my family, this is what I do to have fun." It's all the same to you, isn't it? It's all the same. It's all the same. People are people everywhere, wherever it is, whether you're working, whether you're in a grocery store, whether you're walking down the street. My father was like that, too. I learned that from him. You're your father's daughter. Yeah. I know that you love to tell the story of the plight of the African slave, and I'd like for you to talk to me about that and talk to us about that here today. You do it through music? I'm with a group called The Princely Players, and we tell the story about the African-American experience from Africa through the civil rights movement on a show called On the Road to Glory. We do that through acapella singing and dramatic presentations. So we start off with an African chant coming from Africa and ask people of nobility and proud, proud people, and then we come through that middle passage, and from then on it kind of goes downhill. We had, of course, we know that initially slavery was like, it was indentured servants at first, and then there was a movement where gradually it changed to racial slavery, and that's when it got really, really bad. So we tell that story, you know, but still, you know, what happened, you know? Through the music, they tell the story of their plight, and they also tell the stories of how they were able to overcome and also escape. You can't tell that story without music, can you? No, you cannot tell it without music. We have such a simplified view of those spirituals, but we really have to look kind of deeper into those songs to really understand them. You can help us do that. Yeah. Well, we know that, you know, historically spirituals, you know, were disseminated through oral tradition, and it was songs of an oppressed people. You know, these songs came from the cotton fields or the camp meetings of the slaves. And you know, what's interesting about the spirituals too is that it definitely helped the Africans assimilate to this country, and also kind of padded the relationship between slave holders and the slaves themselves. Do you have a song in mind that would illustrate that, and what is really being said in the lyric of the song? Okay. Let me think of one, like two of the favorite songs of Harriet Tubman, you know, was used in the Underground Railroad, was like, "Still Away." You know, "Still Away," and that was one of her favorites. So the lyric doesn't mean just "Steal Away to Glory." It means "Steal Away" from this oppression. That's correct. You know, and also "Swing Low Sweet Harriet." It also could depict a direction. You know, the direction that the slaves could go to get away, like when she was taking the slaves to a safer state, you know, northern state, and then those songs would just kind of tell them, you know, what we're getting ready to do. Were some of those songs really aimed at the masters getting the message? Yes, that one song that I like to bring out is, "You got a robe, I got a robe, all God's chilling got a robe. When I get to heaven, I'm going to put on my robe and I'm going to shout all over God's heaven." Everybody talking about heaven ain't going there, heaven, heaven. It's a great song. You know, that's the thing about it. It's like in your face, but they, you know, the slave holders didn't realize that. Your song with a smile. A song with a smile. A song with a smile, and also beautiful melodies. You know, think about it, still away, still away, still away to Jesus. That is such a beautiful melody, you know, and you have people who, you know, when they sing that song, they know that it's time to get your things together and let's go. You know, so it's amazing how they use those songs. And then what's interesting is like when you move into the civil rights movement, you know, the songs and during slavery time, it's very secretive, you know, coded. But then when you came to the civil rights movement, the message was overtly stated. Some of the songs were still used like, "Ain't going to let nobody turn me around or we shall overcome. Keep your hands on the plow. Go tell it on the mountain, let my people go, or woke up this morning." See, woke up this morning with my mind stayed on Jesus, changed to woke up this morning with my mind, stayed on freedom. You know, "Ain't going to let nobody turn me around, ain't going to let no racism turn me around." So those songs became protests and overtly stated, you know, people were tired and angry. It's time, it's a new day, you know, we wake up America, you know? So that's what it was all about. Odessa settles. Well listen, this conversation is not over. That day in the studio, Odessa and I kept talking about music and the civil rights movement. We also talked about her involvement with a group called The Princely Players, preserving the African-American experience through song, dance, and drama. And you can hear the rest of the interview and find a link to more information about The Princely Players at our website, firstpersoninterview.com. First Person is a weekly program featuring dialogue that tells someone's unique story and celebrates God's faithfulness, you'll find us online at firstpersoninterview.com. Next week we'll meet a medical doctor who thought his life contributed nothing of importance to anyone, but God met him in his despair. You'll meet Dr. Bruce Steffas next week. Thanks to producer Joe Carlson, I'm Wade Shepherd, we'll see you next time for First Person. in the studio. (upbeat music) [MUSIC PLAYING]