a moment to remember odetta

odetta , the stately & luminous folk singer, died on tuesday, and though we weren't able to mark the sad occasion at the time, we would like to pay our humble respects now with a few songs and an excerpt from a memorial printed in the ny times .

we count ourselves lucky indeed to have caught her playing at the hardly strictly bluegrass festival earlier this fall, and one of the songs below comes directly from that affecting performance. she still had it, right up until the end.

odetta - another man done gone

odetta - sometimes i feel like a motherless child

odetta - rising sun & when i was a young girl (live at hardly strictly bluegrass)

odetta - battle hymn of the republic


andrew rosenthal remembers:

Her songs were at first difficult for my young ear: the power of her voice, and their unfamiliar rhythms. But in listening to Odetta, and asking my parents what her words were about, my eyes were opened to the crimes and tragedies embedded in American history. This was not a part of the curriculum in the first and second grades I attended in Tokyo and only just beginning to be a part of my New York schooling.

"No More Auction Block for Me" led to conversations about slavery, about the "many thousand gone" in the Middle Passage, about the "driver's lash" that enforced the bondage of men, women and children.

"Another Man Done Gone" shocked me with the atrocity of chain gangs and taught me about the lynchings that were a depraved public entertainment in the South. Each of Odetta's songs fed my dawning awareness of America's racial traumas and the civil rights movement that was spreading across the nation.

Over the years, that precious set of records was lost, but I never forgot Odetta's songs, or their message of defiance and survival.