Odetta Holmes was born in Birmingham, Alabama on December 31, 1930. Odetta sang from coffeehouses to Carnegie Hall in a span of almost 60 years. She became one of the best-known folk-music artists of the 1950s and ’60s. Her recordings of blues and ballads on dozens of albums influenced Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Janis Joplin and many others.
“A teacher told my mother that I had a voice, that maybe I should study,” she recalled. “But I myself didn’t have anything to measure it by.” She found her own voice by listening to blues, jazz, and folk music from the African American and Anglo-American traditions. She earned a music degree from Los Angeles City College. Her training in classical music and musical theater was “a nice exercise, but it had nothing to do with my life,” she said.
In 1953 she moved to New York and began singing in nightclubs cutting a striking figure with her guitar and her close-cropped hair, her voice sinking deep and soaring high. Her songs merged the personal and the political, the theatrical and the spiritual. Her first solo album, “Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues,” released in 1956, resounded with an audience eager to hear old songs made new.