Odetta, the folk singer with the powerful voice who moved audiences and influenced fellow musicians for a half-century, died Tuesday of heart disease. She had been admitted to the hospital with kidney failure about three weeks ago. In 1961, Martin Luther King, Jr. anointed her "The Queen of American folk music".
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. 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.
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. With an Odetta record on the turntable, listeners could close their eyes and imagine themselves hearing the sounds of spirituals and blues as they rang out from a weathered back porch or around a long-vanished campfire a century before. Odetta called on Blacks to "take pride in the history of the American Negro" and was active in the civil rights movement. When she sang at the March on Washington in August 1963, where her great, full-throated voice carried almost to Capitol Hill.
She was nominated for a 1963 Grammy award for best folk recording for "Odetta Sings Folk Songs." Two more Grammy nominations came in recent years, for her 1999 "Blues Everywhere I Go" and her 2005 album "Gonna Let It Shine." In 1999, she was honored with a National Medal of the Arts. Then-President Bill Clinton said her career showed "us all that songs have the power to change the heart and change the world." In a 1978 Playboy interview, Bob Dylan said, "the first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta." He said he found "just something vital and personal" when he heard an early album of hers in a record store as a teenager. "Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar," he said. Harry Belafonte also cited her as a key influence on his hugely successful recording career, and she was a guest singer on his 1960 album, "Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall."
She continued to record in recent years; her 2001 album "Looking for a Home (Thanks to Leadbelly)" paid tribute to the great blues singer to whom she was sometimes compared. Odetta's last big concert was on October 4 at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, where she performed in front of tens of thousands at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival. She also performed October 25-26 in Toronto.
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". In 2005, the Library of Congress in Washington honored her with its "Living Legend Award". 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, California.
Born Odetta Holmes in Birmingham, Alabama, on December 31 1930, she moved with her family to Los Angeles at age 6. Her father had died when she was young and she took her stepfather's last name, Felious. Hearing her in glee club, a junior high teacher made sure she got music lessons, but Odetta became interested in folk music in her late teens and turned away from classical studies. Odetta is survived by a daughter, Michelle Esrick and a son, Boots Jaffre. She was divorced 40 years ago and never remarried.
One writer said “A couple of weeks ago I was listening to "Harry Belafonte Returns to Carnegie Hall" and there she was with that great voice and on another part of the double album set there was Miriam Makeba. In the last month, we have lost two huge voices both musical and political.
No comments:
Post a Comment