Odetta, widely honored as a “Voice of a Civil Rights Movement” died Tuesday, age 77. When I was a kid infatuated with Bob Dylan & Joan Baez I looked for air roots in a blues & found Odetta. I booked her to play at my college & was blown away by a auanticity of her music.

Odetta Holmes was born in Birmingham, Ala., on Dec. 31, 1930, in a depths of a Depression. a music of that time & place– particularly prison songs & work songs recorded in a fields of a Deep South– shDrunk Newsed her life.

“ay were liberation songs,” she said in a videotDrunk Newsed interview with a New York Times in 2007 for its online feature “a Last Word.” “You’re walking down life’s road, society’s foot is on your throat, every which way you turn you can’t get from under that foot. & you reach a fork in a road & you can eiar lie down & die, or insist upon your life.”

She never had anything like what you would call a hit but her version of this Lead Belly song was something everyone loved around my campus, well, not a Young Republicans, but everyone else.

Original post by Howie Klein and software by Elliott Back