NY Daily News: Odetta Left Message of Hope

Odetta left message of hope

BY DAVID HINCKLEY, DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITER, Thursday, December 4, 2008

Less than a week before she died, the city's much-loved singer Odetta urged her fans and admirers to keep the faith.

The Thanksgiving message, sent from the Lenox Hill Hospital bed where she died Tuesday of heart disease at 77, underscored her lifetime of commitment, in social activism and song, to what she called positive change.

"The world is trembling under the weight of many problems," she wrote, but she urged everyone to still give thanks for friends and community.

She was exhilarated, friends said yesterday, by the election victory of Barack Obama, whose ascension she considered the fruit of a half-century of activism in which she had played an unrelenting role.

She sang alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at the 1963 March on Washington, and she had hoped to return to sing at Obama's inauguration, according to her longtime manager, Doug Yeager.

She was known as a folk singer, though she recorded blues, rock, popular and classical music.
"I'm called a folk singer because it's short and easy, I guess," she said in 1987. "I don't mind. But I'm really a song interpreter. We have all kinds of songs going on within us."

With a voice that could range from a whisper to a roar, she became a major influence on artists from Harry Belafonte to Joan Baez and Bob Dylan. John Waters saluted her stature in "Hairspray" with a beatnik played by Pia Zadora who purred, "When I'm high, I am Odetta."

She was nominated for several Grammys and awarded the National Medal of the Arts in 1999.
Brought up in Los Angeles on popular and classical music, she also was drawn to topical folk songs and artists like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith.

"I learned black history from music," she said, and one of her life missions was to pass along those lessons.

One of her last appearances was in October, when she sang from a wheelchair for tens of thousands in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.

She was a familiar figure in many places around New York, where she lived for much of her life at 110th St. and Fifth Ave.

On the eve of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, she gathered a group of children atthe Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and told them they needed to tell grownups war is wrong.
Even if no one seems to listen, she said, it's important to raise your voice, and she led them in "This Little Light of Mine."

Married once years ago and divorced, she is survived by a daughter, Michelle Esrick of New York, and a son, Boots Jaffre of Fort Collins, Colo.

Yeager says a memorial service is planned for next month.

http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/music/2008/12/04/2008-12-04_odetta_left_message_of_hope.html