Video: Odetta

A delayed post from earlier this month, no less poignant now... On Dec. 2, the Queen of American folksingers, Odetta, died of heart failure just short of her 78th birthday. Odetta Holmes was born in Birmingham, Ala., on Dec. 31, 1930, in the depths of the Depression. The music of that time & place...particularly prison songs & work songs recorded in the fields of the Deep South...shaped her life. Her discography is an aural history, centuries deep, of abduction, enslavement, social & sexual abuse by the whites in [...]

Odetta, RIP Odetta , the classically trained folk, blues and gospel singer who used her powerfully rich and dusky voice to champion African American music and civil rights issues for more than half a century starting in the folk revival of the 1950s, has died. She was 77. She was admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City for a checkup in mid-November but went into kidney failure. She died there Tuesday of heart disease, her manager, Doug Yeager, told the Associated Press. [...]

There was an Odetta record that sat in the midst of my dad's jazz albums. I never really took any interest in it, and regularly passed it by to play Cannonball Adderly's 'Them Dirty Blues'. In 2001 I attended the WC Handy Awards in Memphis and halfway through the show, Odetta took the stage. It took one note from the powerhouse that was Odetta to make me realize I'd had a big hole in my blues education. Odetta was the real deal. Oh my God, was she the real deal. I met her that night. [...]