Folk icon didn't let ailments keep her from stage

By Polly Anderson
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Thursday, December 04, 2008

NEW YORK — Odetta, the folk singer with the powerful voice who moved audiences and influenced fellow musicians for a half-century, has died. She was 77.

Odetta died 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 about three weeks ago, he said.

"Hers was always a lead voice," singer Nanci Griffith, formerly of Austin, said Wednesday. Odetta appeared on Griffith's Grammy-winning 1993 album "Other Voices, Other Rooms" and the 1998 follow-up "Other Voices, Too." "I don't think she would ever have just been in the choir." The two first met in New York in 1982 as Griffith was breaking into folk music.

Despite failing health that caused her to use a wheelchair, Odetta performed 60 concerts in the past two years, singing for 90 minutes at a time.

Odetta's last Austin performance was a June fundraiser for St. James Episcopal School in its "One Voice" concert series. Kent Burress — a St. James trustee and executive director of Ronald McDonald House Charities of Austin and Central Texas — put the show together.

"The remarkable thing to us is that she was quite frail," Burress said. "She came out in a wheelchair, but when she opened her mouth and started singing, it was like the Odetta I'd heard since the '60s."

Burress and Odetta got to spend time around Austin before the gig, ending up at the Continental Club. "She was rocking in her chair, drink in hand, having a blast. It was a phenomenal experience getting to know her."

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, black people and white people.

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.

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.

"What distinguished her from the start was the meticulous care with which she tried to re-create 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 sledgeammer," Time magazine wrote in 1960.

"She is a keening Irishwoman in 'Foggy Dew,' a chain-gang convict in 'Take This Hammer,' a deserted lover in 'Lass from the Low Country,'" Time wrote.

Odetta called on her fellow African Americas 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, "Odetta's great, full-throated voice carried almost to Capitol Hill," The New York Times wrote.

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."

"I'm not a real folksinger," she told The Washington Post in 1983. "I don't mind people calling me that, but I'm a musical historian. I'm a city kid who has admired an area and who got into it. I've been fortunate. With folk music, I can do my teaching and preaching, my propagandizing."

Among her notable early works were her 1956 album "Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues," which included such songs as "Muleskinner Blues" and "Jack O' Diamonds"; and her 1957 "At the Gate of Horn," which featured the popular spiritual "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands."

Her 1965 album "Odetta Sings Dylan" included such standards as "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right," "Masters of War" and "The Times They Are A-Changin'."

In a 1978 Playboy interview, 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.

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.Odetta also played the Cactus Cafe several times. "She was a good friend to the club," booker Griff Luneburg said, noting that former U.S. Rep. Barbara Jordan once showed up for an Odetta show at the storied club. "She was a very intense and spiritual person but always very gracious and kind."

"She was hilarious on the road," Griffith said. " The sweetest thing about Odetta was her rider: flowers and a bottle of vodka, that's it. My manager asked her, 'What do you need that vodka for? You don't drink it.' She said, 'Honey, all God's children need vodka.' "

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 Oct. 4 at San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, where she performed in front of tens of thousands at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass festival, Yeager said. She also performed Oct. 25-26 in Toronto.

Odetta hoped to sing at the inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama, though she had not been officially invited, Yeager said.

Born Odetta Holmes in Birmingham, Ala., in 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.

She got much of her early experience at the Turnabout Theatre in Los Angeles, where she sang and played occasional stage roles in the early 1950s.

"What power of characterization and projection of mood are hers, even though plainly clad and sitting or standing in half light!" a Los Angeles Times critic wrote in 1955.

Over the years, she picked up occasional acting roles in TV and film. None other than famed Hollywood columnist Hedda Hopper reported in 1961 that she "comes through beautifully" in the film "Sanctuary."

In the Washington Post interview, Odetta theorized 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."

Odetta is survived by a daughter, Michelle Esrick of New York City, and a son, Boots Jaffre, of Fort Collins, Colo. She was divorced about 40 years ago and never remarried, her manager said.

A memorial service is planned for next month.

American-Statesman music writer Joe Gross contributed to this story.