Just heard that Odetta passed away. The American folk music legend died yesterday at the age of 77 due to heart disease.
from the associated press:
In spite of failing health that caused her to use a wheelchair, Odetta performed 60 concerts in the last two years, singing for 90 minutes at a time. Her singing ability never diminished, Yeager said.
"The power would just come out of her like people wouldn't believe," he said.
With her booming, classically trained voice and spare guitar, Odetta gave life to the songs by workingmen and slaves, farmers and miners, housewives and washerwomen, blacks and whites.
First coming to prominence in the 1950s, she influenced Harry Belafonte, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and other singers who had roots in the folk music boom.
She considered herself a musical historian rather than a folk singer, saying in an interview with the Washington Post that "humans developed music and dance because of fear, "fear of God, fear that the sun would not come back, many things. I think it developed as a way of worship or to appease something. ... The world hasn't improved, and so there's always something to sing about."
She is remembered by many as a civil rights beacon, with her August 1963 performance of O Freedom in the Washington march.
Rosa Parks, the woman who launched the boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama, was once asked which songs meant the most to her. "All the songs Odetta sings," was Parks' reply.
A video about the March on Washington is shown below.
For Odetta and many other survivors of the Civil Rights Movement, the election of Barack Obama as president signaled a fulfilling chapter in the struggle. As she sank toward death in New York City, Odetta had an Obama poster taped on the wall across from her bed. Hospitalized with kidney failure on Monday, she kept willing herself to live because, her manager Doug Yeager wrote on a fansite just before her death, "Odetta believes she is going to sing at Obama's inauguration and I believe that is the reason she is still alive." via time.com
2 comments:
Wow. Just reading the headline stimulated a wave of memories: Odetta, Lead Belly, Marian Anderson. They were all reverenced in my childhood home.
Yeah, Odetta at the Newport Folk Festival...playing guitar and singing...lots of memories.
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