Odetta 1930-2008

I got the news of the grand singer’s passing when I was on-air Wednesday morning. I had clicked on over to Yahoo to check my mail and saw the headline. She had died of kidney failure at the age of 77. I hadn’t thought about Odetta for some time, hadn’t played her on my show in over a year. I scrambled to find something, anything to play, but the KDHX digital music library let me down. I came home that afternoon and checked my collection: five vinyl LPs, a handful of MP3s in iTunes, no CDs.

How could that be? Her output is vast, like-her-voice vast, and riveting, like-her-American-story riveting. I once interviewed her, in 1998, but the Riverfront Times archive yields no results. I dug through my clipping files and found the tear sheet–a paltry 700 word feature, with a few good lines, yet almost no consideration of her contribution to the Civil Rights movement. Many have sung “No More Auction Block”; no voice better captures the fierce beauty of it. There are many reasons Bob Dylan wrote “Blowin’ In the Wind.” Odetta is chief among them. I need to remedy my ill-preparedness this Wednesday with a tribute to the singer next week.

Till then, here’s Odetta singing “You Don’t Know My Mind.”

Posted by | December 4, 2008 | Music, Video/Film | Comment 

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