Odetta

The singer who gave voice to black America

Odetta

1930–2008

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When Rosa Parks, who in the 1950s helped launch the boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala., was asked whose music touched her most deeply, she had a ready reply, “All the songs Odetta sings.” The songs Odetta sang were those of her fellow African-Americans—gospel, folk, jazz, and blues—and she sang them so tirelessly that she was widely considered the musical voice of the civil-rights movement.

Born Odetta Holmes in Birmingham, Ala., she adopted her stepfather’s surname of Felious, said The Washington Post. She studied opera as a teenager, and after she began singing in California folk clubs, a manager said that Felious was too hard to pronounce, so she dropped it. Soon she was appearing in venues as diverse as coffee­houses and concert halls. Much of Odetta’s repertoire consisted of popular favorites such as “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” and “House of the Rising Sun.” But she also championed “long-forgotten music from chain gangs, fieldworkers,” and the black underclass. This affinity for her roots drew her into the vortex of the civil-rights struggle. She wanted to share, she said, “the fury and frustration that I had growing up.” In 1963, she sang at the March on Washington; in 1965, with Martin Luther King Jr., she protested for voting rights in Selma, Ala.

“Few civil-rights rallies were complete without an Odetta rendition of ‘We Shall Overcome,’” said Time. She also inspired such singers as Janis Joplin, Joan Baez, and especially Bob Dylan. “Her stage presence was regal. Planted like an oak tree no one would dare cut down, wearing a guitar on her chest, she could envelop Carnegie Hall with her powerful contralto as other vocalists might fill a phone booth.” Once, to feel the emotional impact of a convict-gang number, she broke up rocks with a sledgehammer.

Odetta was nominated for three Grammys and received the National Medal of Arts in 1999. Even as she was struggling with heart and kidney disease in recent months, she gave concerts from a wheelchair. Odetta had hoped to sing at President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration; when she died last week, an Obama poster hung at her hospital bedside.