NEW YORK — Odetta’s monumental voice rang out in August 1963 when she sang “I’m On My Way” at the historic March on Washington, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.
She had hoped to perform again in Washington next month when Barack Obama is inaugurated as the nation’s first black president. But the acclaimed folk singer, who influenced generations of musicians and was an icon in the civil rights struggle, died Tuesday after battling heart disease. She was 77.
In spite of failing health, Odetta performed 60 concerts in the last two years, and her singing ability never diminished, manager Doug Yeager said.
“The power would just come out of her like people wouldn’t believe,” he said.
She was admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital with kidney failure about three weeks ago, Yeager said in confirming her death.
With her classically trained voice and spare guitar, Odetta gave life to the songs by working men and slaves, farmers and miners, housewives and washerwomen, blacks and whites.
First coming to prominence in the 1950s, she influenced Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and other superstars of the folk music boom.
“What distinguished her from the start was the meticulous care with which she tried to re-Âcreate the feeling of her folk songs; to understand the emotions of a convict in a convict ditty, she once tried breaking up rocks with a sledge hammer,” Time magazine wrote in 1960.
Odetta called on her fellow blacks to “take pride in the history of the American Negro.” When she sang at the March on Washington — along with Baez, Dylan, Josh White and Peter, Paul and Mary — “Odetta’s great, full-throated voice carried almost to Capitol Hill,” The New York Times said.
“I’m not a real folk singer,” she told The Washington Post in 1983. “I don’t mind people calling me that, but I’m a musical historian. I’m a city kid who has admired an area and who got into it. I’ve been fortunate. With folk music, I can do my teaching and preaching, my propagandizing.”
In 1999, she was honored with a National Medal of the Arts. President Bill Clinton said her career showed “us all that songs have the power to change the heart and change the world.”
She was nominated for a 1963 Grammy award for best folk recording for “Odetta Sings Folk Songs.” Two more Grammy nominations came in recent years, for her 1999 “Blues Everywhere I Go” and her 2005 album “Gonna Let It Shine.”
A memorial service was planned for next month, Yeager said.
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