Odetta, the singer whose deep voice wove together the strongest songs of American folk music and the civil rights movement, died Tuesday. She was 77. The cause was heart disease, said her manager.
Odetta sang at coffeehouses and Carnegie Hall and released several albums, becoming one of the most widely known and influential folk-music artists of the 1950s and 60s.
Born in Birmingham on Dec. 31, 1930, Odetta Holmes spent her first six years in the depths of the Depression. The music of that time and place, in particular prison song and work songs recorded in the fields of the deep South, shaped her life.
Her father, Reuben Holmes, died when she was young; she and her mother, Flora Sanders, who later remarried, moved to Los Angeles in 1937. Three years later, Odetta discovered she could sing.
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.
In a 2005 National Public Radio interview, 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.
She began singing in nightclubs, cutting a striking figure with her guitar and her close-cropped hair. Her voice plunged deep and soared high, and her songs blended the personal and the political, the theatrical and the spiritual. Her first solo album “Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues” resonated with an audience hearing old songs made new. The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta, Bob Dylan said, referring to that record, in a 1978 interview with Playboy.
Her fame hit a peak in 1963, when she marched with Martin Luther King in Selma and performed for President John F. Kennedy. But after King was assassinated in 1968, 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. Odetta s fame flagged for years thereafter. She recorded fewer records, although she performed on stage as a singer and an actor, during the 1970s and 1980s. She revived her career in the 1990s, and thereafter appeared regularly on “A Prairie Home Companion”, the popular public-radio show. In 1999 she recorded her first album in 14 years, and that year President Bill Clinton awarded her the National Endowment for the Arts Medal of the Arts and Humanities from.
She was singing and performing well into the 21st century, and her influence stayed strong through the decades.
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