From the NY Times : 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. In spite of failing health that caused h...
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With sadness I'd like to bring attention to the passing of a great Folk/blues musician, Odetta. May she rest in peace and may God bless her soul. My condolences go out to her family and many fans. According to Odetta @Wikipedia ;Odetta Holmes, (December 31, 1930 - December 2, 2008), known as Odetta, was an African-American singer, actress, guitarist, songwriter, and a human rights activist, o...
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The fine folks over at the 9513 drew my attention to some good stuff this AM. LaundroMatinee has several videos from a Joe Pug live performance, including the unreleased songs "Not So Sure" and "Bury Me Far From My Uniform," and there's a video for "Old Enough," a new bluegrass-inspired single by the The Raconteurs [...]
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Odetta, one of the most respected in American folk music died Tuesday, December 2, 2008, of heart disease. Odetta was born on New Year's Eve in 1930 as the United States of America entered the second year of the Great Depression, segregation and disfranchisement remained in place, and the droughts of the Dust Bowl forced poor families off the land. As a child in Alabama and then Californ...
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The Voice Of The Cicil Rights Movement has been silenced. Odetta. For those of us of a certain age Odetta's voice was a call to action. In her career as a folk singer she sang for paupers, kings, & presidents. She used her popularity & that gorgeous projecting voice to combat the injustices of American society and along the way inspiring others to speak out. Her infuence on a young Bob Dyl...
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Odetta - Cotton FieldsA generation of voices are dying. A generation of voices of substance, voices that told stories are dying. People get older and transition. It's a fact of life.However, losing Miriam Makeba and now losing Odetta is a blow to my soul of those who represented an era that my parents were subject to called segregation. That segregation evolved into integration but still there ...
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Dear Friends,I'm not writing much because my mother is in the hospital with pneumonia, and I am running back and forth to the hospital, which is an hour and a half from here. But I came into my office for a few hours and got caught up on some e-mail and wanted to share this from the Daily OM Music review and a couple of websites where you can read about her and here some music.http://folkmusic...
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This track is an Odetta original. It has a great build, in the tradition of "Memphis Soul Stew" or Sly's "Dance to the Music." First drum, then bass, then vocal, then guitar, tambourine, and finally the bright pop of the brass. The musicians were Muscle Shoals Sound Studios session pros, and I'm pretty sure that's Eddie Hinton's guitar on there (it sure sounds like Marlin Greene's "Tiptoe Past ...
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Odetta, who had been scheduled to perform at Obama's inauguration, passed away last night. Remembrances have focused on her folk career. I thought I would post a couple of rock/soul exceptions, from the out-of-print 1970 Polydor album "Odetta Sings." "Every Night" is a Paul McCartney tune, and while I'm not always the biggest fan of his songwriting, Odetta really brings out the pathos in the tr...
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Heaven must be a beautiful place today. We here on Earth have lost the legendary folk singer Odetta, a woman whose music made her a central figure of and one of the most cherished of voices for folk music and, more importantly, the civil rights movement in America of the 1960's. More than [...]
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We are a couple of days late on this, but we wanted to report on the passing of music and civil rights legend Odetta, of heart disease at age 77. Dubbed "The Voice of Civil Rights Movement" and "The Queen Of American Folk Music" by Martin Luther King, Jr., she help to inspire a generation [...]by Some Dude Leave A Comment
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MUSIC NEWS - Sad news from NYC, Odetta , the American folk singer with a deep voice that tied together the powerful songs of American folk music and the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday (12/2/08) at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She was 77. The cause was heart disease, said her manager, Doug Yeager. Three weeks ago she was admitted to the hospital with kidney failure, he said. ...
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The images that flooded my head when I read that Odetta had died are black and white, of a single performer in a spotlight, with a pained expression and a powerfully affecting singing voice. It's a clip used in No Direction Home, the Martin Scorcese biopic of Bob Dylan: The New York Times obituary had a beautifully succinct lede, calling Odetta "The singer whose resonant voice wove together
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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 ...
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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 blue...
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