Last night in New York the world of music lost Odetta. She was 77. The folk and blues singer’s renditions of civil rights anthems accompanied historic events and made history themselves.
Odetta had been suffering with heart and lung ailments for many years.
She died at Lenox Hill Hospital, which she had entered at the end of October for treatment of kidney failure, according to her manager, Douglas Yeager.
Yeager said that her hope and determination to sing at the Jan. 20 inauguration of President-elect Barack Obama had helped keep her alive for weeks when medical experts had despaired of her prospects for survival.
Odetta has been recognized as an important influence on the careers of other famous figures of the musical world, including Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, Joan Baez and Joan Armatrading, all of whom have often been cited as performers who owed much to her inspiration.
“I’m the mama and they’re the children,” Odetta once said, when asked about who had influenced whom.
Dylan credited Odetta’s first solo record, “Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues” (1956), as “the first thing that turned me on to folk singing. . . . [It] was just something vital and personal.”
Information from the New York Times contributed to this report.
