growing up as a child of the 60’s; we heard her voice at rally’s, church gatherings, and of course civil rights events. She was such an icon. her unmistakable message and her commitment to our freedom – We shall miss her singing, and her lecturing. she was the voice of our generations’ soul.

We Remember Her as an Activist, First and Foremost

We Remember Odetta

Odetta – House of the Rising Sun

Odetta
Odetta performing in 2006.
Background information
Birth name	Odetta Holmes
Also known as	Odetta Felious (her stepfather’s surname), Odetta Gordon
Born	December 31, 1930(1930-12-31) Birmingham, Alabama, United States
Died	December 2, 2008 (aged 77) New York City, New York, United States
Genre(s)	Folk, blues, spirituals, country blues, jazz blues
Occupation(s)	Singer, musician
Instrument(s)	Vocals, acoustic guitar, keyboard
Years active	1944-2008
Label(s)	Fantasy Records Tradition Recordings Vanguard Records RCA Victor M.C. Records[1] Silverwolf[2] Original Blues Classics
Associated acts	Leadbelly, Janis Joplin, Bessie Smith, Bob Dylan, Bonnie Raitt [3], Harry Belafonte
Website	M.C. Records

Odetta, Voice of Civil Rights Movement, Dies at 77

Odetta, the singer whose resonant voice wove together the strongest songs of American folk music and the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday in Manhattan. She was 77

The cause was heart disease, her manager, Doug Yeager, said.

Odetta, who lived in Upper Manhattan, had been admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital three weeks ago with a number of ailments, including kidney trouble, Mr. Yeager said. In her last days, he said, she had been hoping to sing at the presidential inauguration for Barack Obama.

In a career of almost 60 years, Odetta sang at coffeehouses and at Carnegie Hall. She became one of the best-known folk-music artists of the 1950s and ’60s. Her recordings of blues and ballads on dozens of albums influenced Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Janis Joplin and many others.

Odetta’s voice was an accompaniment to the black-and-white images of the freedom marchers who walked the roads of Alabama and Mississippi and the boulevards of Washington to end racial discrimination.

Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her seat to a white passenger led to the boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala., was once asked which songs meant the most to her. “All of the songs Odetta sings,” she replied.

One of those songs was “I’m on My Way,” sung during the pivotal civil-rights March on Washington on Aug. 28, 1963. In a videotaped interview with The New York Times in 2007 for its online feature “The Last Word,” Odetta recalled the sentiments of another song she performed that day, “Oh Freedom,” which is rooted in slavery: “Oh freedom, Oh freedom, Oh freedom over me/ And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave/ And go home to my Lord and be free.”

Odetta Holmes was born in Birmingham, Ala., on Dec. 31, 1930, in the depths of the Depression. The music of that time and place — particularly prison songs and work songs recorded in the fields of the Deep South — shaped her life.

“They were liberation songs,” she said in the interview with The Times. She added: “You’re walking down life’s road, society’s foot is on your throat, every which way you turn you can’t get from under that foot. And you reach a fork in the road and you can either lie down and die or insist upon your life.”

Her father, Reuben Holmes, died when she was young, and in 1937 she and her mother, Flora Sanders, moved to Los Angeles. Three years later Odetta discovered that she could sing.

“A teacher told my mother that I had a voice, that maybe I should study,” she recalled. “But I myself didn’t have anything to measure it by.”

She found her own voice by listening to blues, jazz and folk music from the African-American and Anglo-American traditions. She earned a music degree from Los Angeles City College. Her training in classical music and musical theater was “a nice exercise, but it had nothing to do with my life,” she said.

“The folk songs were — the anger,” she emphasized.

In a National Public Radio interview in 2005 she said: “School taught me how to count and taught me how to put a sentence together. But as far as the human spirit goes, I learned through folk music.”

In 1950 Odetta began singing professionally in a West Coast production of the musical “Finian’s Rainbow,” but she found a stronger calling in the bohemian coffeehouses of San Francisco. “We would finish our play, we’d go to the joint, and people would sit around playing guitars and singing songs and it felt like home,” she said.

She moved to New York in 1953 and began singing in nightclubs like the storied Blue Angel, cutting a striking figure with her guitar and her close-cropped hair, her voice plunging deep and soaring high. Her songs blended the personal and the political, the theatrical and the spiritual. Her first solo album, “Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues,” released in 1956, resonated with an audience eager to hear old songs made new.

Mr. Dylan, referring to that recording, said in a 1978 interview with Playboy, “The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta.” He said he heard something “vital and personal,” and added, “I learned all the songs on that record.” The songs included “Muleskinner Blues,” “Jack o’ Diamonds” and “ ’Buked and Scorned.”

“What distinguished her from the start,” Time magazine wrote in 1960, “was the meticulous care with which she tried to recreate the feeling of her folk songs; to understand the emotions of a convict in a convict ditty, she once tried breaking up rocks with a sledgehammer.”

That year she gave a celebrated solo concert at Carnegie Hall and released a live album of it. Eight years later she was on stage there again, now with Mr. Dylan, Pete Seeger, Judy Collins, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and other folk stars in a tribute to Woody Guthrie, which was also recorded for an album.

Odetta’s blues and spirituals led directly to her work for the civil rights movement. They were two rivers running together, she said in her interview with The Times. The words and music captured “the fury and frustration that I had growing up.”

Her fame hit a peak in 1963, when she marched with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and performed for President John F. Kennedy. But with King’s assassination in 1968, much of the wind went out of the sails of the civil rights movement, and the songs of protest and resistance that had been the movement’s soundtrack began to fade. Odetta’s fame flagged for years thereafter.

In 1999 President Bill Clinton awarded her the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Medal of Arts. In 2003 she received a Living Legend tribute from the Library of Congress and a National Visionary Leadership award.

Odetta married three times: to Don Gordon, to Gary Shead, and, in 1977, to the blues musician Iverson Minter, known professionally as Louisiana Red. The first two marriages ended in divorce; Mr. Minter moved to Germany in 1983. There are no immediate survivors, Mr. Yeager, Odetta’s manager, said.

Odetta was singing and performing well into the 21st century — 60 concerts in the last two years, Mr. Yeager said — and her influence stayed strong.

In April 2007, a half-century after Mr. Dylan first heard her, she returned to Carnegie Hall to perform in a tribute to Bruce Springsteen. She turned one of his songs, “57 Channels,” into a chanted poem, and Mr. Springsteen came out from the wings to call it “the greatest version” of the song he had ever heard.

Reviewing a December 2006 performance, James Reed of The Boston Globe wrote: “Odetta’s voice is still a force of nature — something commented upon endlessly as folks exited the auditorium — and her phrasing and sensibility for a song have grown more complex and shaded.”

Mr. Reed called her “a majestic figure in American music, a direct gateway to bygone generations that feel so foreign today.”

In her 2007 interview with The Times, Odetta spoke of the long-dead singers who first gave voice to the old blues and ballads and slavery songs she sang. “Those people who made up the songs were the ones who insisted upon life and living, who reaffirmed themselves,” she said. “They didn’t just fall down into the cracks or the holes. And that was an incredible example for me.”

NEW YORK: Odetta, the folk singer and civil rights campaigner, has died before she could fulfil her wish to sing at Barack Obama’s inauguration as president. She was 77.

Odetta died on Tuesday of heart disease at Lenox Hill Hospital, said her manager of 12 years, Doug Yeager. She was admitted to the hospital with kidney failure almost four weeks ago, four days after Mr Obama’s election victory.

One of the great voices of the civil rights movement, Odetta brought the diva-like power of an opera singer to US folk music.

Had she chosen the world of R&B, gospel and soul music, she might have been a rival to Aretha Franklin, Mavis Staples and Nina Simone, but she preferred the more understated pleasures of folk, although her repertoire did also encompass blues, spiritual, jazz and and civil rights songs.

Odetta sings “Battle Hymn of the Republic”

All About Odetta from Wikipedia

An early influence on Bob Dylan, she drew her own inspiration from the great seam of traditional US song and the acoustic blues of the pre-war era.

A tireless campaigner for liberal causes, she was at the side of Martin Luther King in Washington in 1963 when he made his “I have a dream” speech and she was one of the first names Barack Obama pencilled in to sing at his inauguration ceremony.

No folk singer of Dylan’s generation was immune to her influence. By the time Joan Baez and Dylan appeared on the scene, she was already a star. Dylan had heard her Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues in 1959, before he arrived in Greenwich Village, and its impact on him was as profound as his discovery of Woody Guthrie.

By the early 1960s, although still in her 30s, Odetta was the grande dame of the folk revival. In 1961, Martin Luther King described her as the queen of American folk music. Two years later, he asked her to accompany him on his freedom march on Washington.

At the Lincoln Memorial, she sang I’m on My Way before he made his famous speech, and it was this song that Mr Obama asked her to sing at his inauguration 46 years later.

From Wikipedia :

Odetta Holmes, (December 31, 1930 – December 2, 2008), known as Odetta, was an African-American singer, actress, guitarist, songwriter, and a human rights activist, often referred to as “The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement”. Her musical repertoire consists largely of American folk music, blues, jazz, and spirituals. An important figure in the American folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s, she was influential musically and ideologically to many of the key figures of the folk-revival of that time, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and Janis Joplin.

She was born in Birmingham, Alabama, grew up in Los Angeles, California, and studied music at Los Angeles City College. Having operatic training from the age of 13, her first professional experience was in musical theater in 1944, as an ensemble member for four years with the Hollywood Turnabout Puppet Theatre, working alongside Elsa Lanchester; she later joined the national touring company of the musical Finian’s Rainbow in 1949.

While on tour with Finian’s Rainbow, Odetta “fell in with an enthusiastic group of young balladeers in San Francisco“, and after 1950 concentrated on folksinging.^[1]

She made her name by playing around the United States: at the Blue Angel nightclub (New York City), the hungry i (San Francisco), and Tin Angel (San Francisco), where she and Larry Mohr recorded Odetta and Larry in 1954, for Fantasy Records.

A solo career followed, with Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues (1956) and At the Gate of Horn (1957). Odetta Sings Folk Songs was one of 1963’s best-selling folk albums.

There’s a Hole in Bucket – Odetta and Harry Belafonte’

In 1961, Martin Luther King, Jr. anointed her “The Queen of American folk music”.^[2]. In the same year the duo Harry Belafonte and Odetta made #32 in the UK Singles Chart with the song There’s a Hole in My Bucket.^[3]

Broadening her musical scope, Odetta used band arrangements on several albums rather than playing alone, and released music of a more “jazz” style music on albums like Odetta and The Blues (1962) and Odetta (1967).

Odetta also acted in several films during this period, including Cinerama Holiday (1955), the film of William Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1961) and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974).

She toured extensively on the folk music circuit from the 1960s to the 1980s, performing with Pete Seeger, Tom Winslow, and many other artists.^{[citation needed]} In May of 1975 she appeared on public television’s Say Brother program, performing “Give Me Your Hand” in the studio, in addition to speaking about her spirituality, the music tradition from which she drew, and her involvement in civil rights struggles.^[4]

Odetta released only two new albums in the 20-year period from 1977-1997: Movin’ It On, in 1987 and a new version of Christmas Spirituals, produced by Rachel Faro, in 1988.

In 1976, Odetta performed in the U.S. Bicentennial opera “Be Glad Then America” by John LaMontaigne, as the Muse for America; with Donald Gramm, Richard Lewis and the Penn State University Choir and the Pittsburgh Symphony.

Beginning in 1998, she re-focused her energies on recording and touring and her career took on a major resurgence. The new CD To Ella (recorded live and dedicated to her old friend Ella Fitzgerald upon hearing of her passing before walking on stage), was released in 1998 on Silverwolf Records, followed by three new releases on M.C. Records, which cemented a partnership with pianist/arranger/producer Seth Farber and record producer Mark Carpentieri, including: Blues Everywhere I Go, a 2000 Grammy Nominated blues/jazz band tribute album to the great lady blues singers of the 1920s and 1930s; Looking for a Home, a 2002 W.C. Handy Award nominated band tribute to Lead Belly; and the 2007 Grammy Nominated Gonna Let It Shine, a live album of gospel and spiritual songs supported by Seth Farber and The Holmes Brothers. These new recordings and an active world touring schedule created the demand for her guest star appearance on fourteen new albums of other artists (between 1999 and 2006), and the re-release of forty-five old Odetta albums and compilation appearances.

On September 29, 1999, President Bill Clinton presented Odetta with the National Endowment for the Arts‘ National Medal of Arts. In 2004, Odetta was honored at the Kennedy Center in Washington with the “Visionary Award” along with a tribute performance by Tracy Chapman. In 2005, the Library of Congress in Washington honored her with its “Living Legend Award”.

The 2005 documentary film No Direction Home, directed by Martin Scorsese, highlights her musical influence on Bob Dylan, the subject of the documentary. The film contains an archive clip of Odetta performing “Waterboy” on TV in 1959, and we also hear Odetta’s songs “Muleskinner Blues” and “No More Auction Block for Me“.

In 2006, Odetta opened shows for jazz vocalist Madeleine Peyroux, and in 2006 she toured the US, Canada, and Europe accompanied by her pianist, which included being presented by the US Embassy in Latvia as the keynote speaker at a Human Rights conference, and also in a concert in the capital city of Riga’s historic 1,000 year old Maza Guild Hall. In December, 2006, the Winnipeg Folk Festival honored Odetta with their “Lifetime Achievement Award.” In February, 2007, The International Folk Alliance awarded Odetta as “Traditional Folk Artist of the Year.” On March 24, 2007 a tribute concert to Odetta was presented in Washington, D.C. at the Rachel Schlessinger Theatre by the World Folk Music Association with live performance and video tributes by Pete Seeger, Madeleine Peyroux, Harry Belafonte, Janis Ian, Sweet Honey In The Rock, Josh White, Jr., Peter, Paul & Mary, Oscar Brand, Tom Rush, Jesse Winchester, Eric Andersen, Wavy Gravy, David Amram, Roger McGuinn, Robert Sims, Carolyn Hester, Donal Leace, Marie Knight, Side By Side, and Laura McGhee (from Scotland).

In 2007, her album Gonna’ Let It Shine was nominated for a Grammy, and she completed a major Fall Concert Tour in the “Songs of Spirit” show, which included artists from all over the world. She toured around North America in late 2006 and early 2007 to support this CD.^[5]

Final tour

On January 21, 2008, Odetta was the Keynote Speaker at San Diego’s Martin Luther King, Jr. commemoration, followed by concert performances in San Diego, Santa Barbara, Santa Monica, and Mill Valley, in addition to being the sole guest for the evening on PBS-TV’s The Tavis Smiley Show.

In summer 2008, at the age of 77, she launched another North American tour, with concerts in Albany, New York and other cities, singing strongly and confidently from a wheelchair.^{[6] [7]} Her set in recent years includes “This Little Light of Mine (I’m Gonna Let It Shine)”,^[8] Lead Belly’s “The Bourgeois Blues“,^{[9] [10] [8]} (Something Inside) So Strong“, “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” and “House of the Rising Sun“.^[7] Her last “big concert,” before thousands of people, was in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on October 4, 2008, for the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival.^[11] She last performed in Toronto on October 26.^[11]

In November 2008, Odetta’s health began to decline and she began receiving treatment at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. She was slated to perform at Barack Obama’s inauguration on January 20, 2009. ^[12]

On December 2, 2008, Odetta died from heart disease in New York City.

External Links on Odetta :

• A page from her current record company, MC Records
• A page from her management company, Concerted Efforts
• Odetta Vanguard Records
• Fan page at Geocities
• Odetta’s oral history video excerpts at The National Visionary Leadership Project
• AP Obituary in the New York Times
• Odetta remembrance and archive at NPR Music
• Odetta Gordon performs “Give Me Your Hand video from the WGBH Archives

We remember this last clips’ controversy – because of Racism in the 50’s.

In the 50’s she sang on the Tennessee Ernie Ford Show – With Ernie.  he got major flack for it and Odetta did it to show the world, she was truly a Freedom Fighter.

What a Friend We Have in Jesus – Odetta with Tennessee Ernie Ford

Odetta Forever !

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Tags: African American Hero, Barack Obama, blues, folksinger, heart attack, Icon, kidney disease, nyc, Odetta

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