WPLN News Archive; Odessa Settles (Rebecca Bain) 1 14 05; News Archive 1/13/05-2/11/05

and i guess the settlement grew up listening to her mother sing in church or her family worship acquire she joined as a teenager so when she agreed to take on the formidable task of finding enough volunteers to form the salute to freedom choir meet lee thought a great source of sinners the initial recruitment started out by sending out a letter to practically every church in the davidson county area and the surrounding counties how many churches that nearly nine hundred as a matter of fact but the church was in odessa settles only musical influence growing a good goal in a small man and her father sang in the gospel quartet in fact he eventually joined the fairfield for so she grew up intuitively understanding how voices blend my three youngest brother and i you know just kind of form a

little group and we would say in that cheese and we were three and four part harmony and even a very young age what does i had four more brothers in addition to the three she performed with i'm the only girl i had to be tough and still tough are being tough was necessary if you were black in the segregated south but odessa settles got the chance for her voice to be heard at nashville's cameron high school in nineteen sixty seven her music and drama teacher form the princely players a group of students who traveled around the country sharing the african american experience through a capella gospel songs and dramatic recitations it was a great opportunity for us to reach our some of the things that we would feel in a particular term because it was kind of the height of the civil rights movement there was a lot of negative feelings you know at first we were very passive in the sense that once we

became more and more aware about what was going on because we all grew up in a segregated environment i am after they graduated the princely players all went to college studying law and medicine in biochemistry but at their tenth high school reunion i decided to re form the group today they are still together performing all over the country this in addition to their day jobs but as the settlers as a director of a broad deal pulmonary dysplasia treatment center vanderbilt children's hospital she says the reason they do it is simple we have to the city's say no it's not but when you think about the reason that you do it then it's all worth it but odessa was finally forced to take on a project not of her choosing breast cancer that was sixteen years ago and today she's cancer free i thought i enjoyed life before that i didn't know

you know life is so great i think is probably one of the reasons that i do so many things now not take projects that are really important to me that make me feel like i'm doing something positive in a world or does his latest project was to join forces with two of her brothers and a friend to form a quartet called the settles connection there a studio musicians and they're great but sometimes people and so i felt a snitch so we get these calls all the time you know from different people in the industry so weird since the moody bluegrass we worked on maybe about thirteen fourteen projects at a rehearsal earlier this week for the martin luther king jr tribute concert odessa settle seem to be everywhere and reading the

sixty five volunteers she recruited fischer spoiler many are familiar faces to actually seen them before in her eleven years of gathering up the score the fact that we came together with so many different people from so many religious spectrum different cultures people from all different walks by a different races you know affective apologies to people came together to sing so that's what keeps us coming back to freedom concert is this saturday night that impacts tax in nashville i'm rebecca bain these bees