"Water Boy” was already an old song when the folksinger Odetta performed her version of it at Carnegie Hall in 1960. Originating with African American convicts in Jim Crow Georgia, or so the story goes, the song’s lyrics give voice to parched laborers as they call for water and defend the value of their work. “There ain’t no hammer / that’s on this mountain / that ring like mine,” Odetta sang, and in her meaty contralto, the claim acquired echoes of Sojourner Truth’s 1851 “Ain’t I a Woman” speech (“Look at my arm! I have ploughed and planted … and no man could head me”). Halfway through her performance, Odetta added a vocal accent to her strumming and singing: a sharp, guttural Waow!, mimicking the sound of hammer striking rock that’s heard on field recordings of prison work songs. Part snarl, part half-swallowed scream, the sound Odetta made got a little louder and longer each time. By the end of the song, it verged on a roar.

Odetta is less well known today than her folk-revival compatriots Pete Seeger and Harry Belafonte. Bob Dylan credited her with igniting his interest in the genre. Martin Luther King Jr. is said to have called her the “queen of American folk music.” She sang “Oh Freedom” at the March on Washington in 1963. Yet there is no biography of her, no feature-length documentary or biopic. Anyone who seeks out the music she recorded over her half-century-long career is obliged to listen without a very detailed picture of the life she lived. This is an injustice. But it’s also an opportunity.

Songs can and often do outlive their singers. Streaming services like YouTube and Spotify, with their unprecedented access to vast searchable archives, allow a new way of listening: Instead of tracking an individual artist over a necessarily brief slice of time, we can follow particular songs across decades, chart their transit from one generation to the next, opening up different vantage points on history. “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” was first recorded by Blind Lemon Jefferson in 1927 and again by Mavis Staples this year. The seventeenth-century English ballad “Matty Groves” had by 1800 morphed into the Appalachian “Shady Grove.” Each new version carries traces of where the song has been before and perhaps even an anticipation of where it might go next. When we listen to all of this, tuning in to form and flux over the years, we get an encounter with music that places us both in and out of time, revealing how the present is entwined with the longue durée of history and art.

Greil Marcus takes this form of listening to marvelous extremes in his two most recent books, last September’s History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs and this fall’s Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations. As their titles suggest, these books track the journey of individual pieces of music across time: A representative chapter title is “‘All I Could Do Was Cry’: 2013/1960/2008.” Wildly, lyrically, Marcus writes in Three Songs of seemingly “authorless” compositions—songs by no one that belong to everyone, that change as they appear and reappear with new interpreters. “Breaking and entering,” he explains, “the song can retrieve its words from your subconscious; notes can compose a melody you sense but don’t hear.” In this alluring mystico-musicology, songs bend singers to their disembodied will, not vice versa: “The song writes itself,” and a particular singer may just stumble into “something the song always wanted to say.”

It was the 1920s when “Water Boy” became a staple of concert singers’ repertoires. An arrangement for voice and piano was published in 1922, and Paul Robeson recorded it three years later; he said he hoped that by singing this song he could show his audiences a shared core of human emotion transcending racial difference. It’s less clear whether the mid-century swing-band arrangements were all motivated by the same wish, and Jimmie Rodgers’s country music version of 1957 sounds so laid-back, it’s not evident it had any motivation at all. But “Water Boy” endured, and if its history seems to partly bear out Marcus’s idea about the power of songs over their singers, it also shows us something more: A song is never just having its way with a singer. Musicians are always doing the work of performance, of rewriting a song in real time.