ODETTA, THE VOICE OF THE CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT

Today, The Grandma has been listening to Odetta, the American singer and civil rights activist, who died on a day like today in 2008.

Odetta Holmes (December 31, 1930-December 2, 2008), known as Odetta, was an American singer, actress, guitarist, lyricist, and civil rights activist, often referred to as The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement. Her musical repertoire consisted largely of American folk music, blues, jazz, and spirituals. An important figure in the American folk music revival of the 1950s and 1960s, she influenced many of the key figures of the folk-revival of that time, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Mavis Staples, and Janis Joplin.

In 2011, Time magazine included her recording of Take This Hammer on its list of the 100 Greatest Popular Songs, stating that Rosa Parks was her No. 1 fan, and Martin Luther King Jr. called her the queen of American folk music.

Odetta was born Odetta Holmes in Birmingham, Alabama, United States. Her father, Reuben Holmes, had died when she was young, and in 1937 she and her mother, Flora Sanders, moved to Los Angeles.

She began operatic training at the age of thirteen. After attending Belmont High School, she studied music at Los Angeles City College supporting herself as a domestic worker. Flora had hoped to see her daughter follow in the footsteps of Marian Anderson, but Odetta doubted a large black girl like herself would ever perform at the Metropolitan Opera.

In 1944, she made her professional debut in musical theater as an ensemble member for four years with the Hollywood Turnabout Puppet Theatre, working alongside Elsa Lanchester. 

In 1949, she joined the national touring company of the musical Finian's Rainbow.

While on tour with Finian's Rainbow, Odetta fell in with an enthusiastic group of young balladeers in San Francisco, and after 1950 she concentrated on folk singing.

She made her name playing at the Blue Angel nightclub in New York City, and the hungry i in San Francisco. At Tin Angel also in San Francisco in 1953 and 1954, Odetta recorded the album Odetta and Larry with Larry Mohr for Fantasy Records.

A solo career followed, with Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues (1956) and At the Gate of Horn (1957). Odetta Sings Folk Songs was one of the best-selling folk albums of 1963.

In 1959 she appeared on Tonight with Belafonte, a nationally televised special. She sang Water Boy and a duet with Belafonte, There's a Hole in My Bucket.

More information: The New Yorker

In 1961, Martin Luther King Jr. called her The Queen of American Folk Music. Also in 1961, the duo Harry Belafonte and Odetta made number 32 in the UK Singles Chart with the song There's a Hole in the Bucket.

She is remembered for her performance at March on Washington, the 1963 civil rights demonstration, at which she sang O Freedom. She described her role in the civil rights movement as one of the privates in a very big army.

Broadening her musical scope, Odetta used band arrangements on several albums rather than playing alone. She released music of a more jazz style on albums like Odetta and the Blues (1962) and Odetta (1967). She gave a remarkable performance in 1968 at the Woody Guthrie memorial concert.

Odetta acted in several films during this period, including Cinerama Holiday (1955); a cinematic production of William Faulkner's Sanctuary (1961); and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974).

In 1961, she appeared in an episode of the TV series Have Gun, Will Travel, playing the wife of a man sentenced to hang (The Hanging of Aaron Gibbs).

On September 29, 1999, President Bill Clinton presented Odetta with the National Endowment for the Arts' National Medal of Arts.

In 2004, Odetta was honoured at the Kennedy Center with the Visionary Award along with a tribute performance by Tracy Chapman. 

In 2005, the Library of Congress honored her with its Living Legend Award.

In mid-September 2001, Odetta performed with the Boys' Choir of Harlem on the Late Show with David Letterman, appearing on the first show after Letterman resumed broadcasting, having been off the air for several nights following the events of September 11; they performed This Little Light of Mine.

In December 2006, the Winnipeg Folk Festival honored Odetta with their Lifetime Achievement Award. 

In February 2007, the International Folk Alliance awarded Odetta as Traditional Folk Artist of the Year.

On March 24, 2007, a tribute concert to Odetta was presented at the Rachel Schlesinger Theatre by the World Folk Music Association with live performance and video tributes.

She made an appearance on June 30, 2008, at The Bitter End on Bleecker Street, in New York City for a concert in tribute to Liam Clancy. Her last big concert, before thousands of people, was in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park on October 4, 2008, for the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival. Her last performance was at Hugh's Room in Toronto on October 25.

In November 2008, Odetta's health began to decline and she began receiving treatment at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York. She had hoped to perform at Barack Obama's inauguration on January 20, 2009, but she died twenty-nine days before her 78th birthday, on December 2, 2008, in New York City, at the age of 77.

More information: The New York Times

 The blues is celebration,
because when you take sorrow and turn it into music,
you transform it.

Odetta

MIKE SEEGER, AMERICAN FOLK MUSICIAN & FOLKLORIST

Today, The Grandma has been listening to some music. She has chosen Mike Seeger's songs, the American folk musician and folklorist who was born on a day like today in 1933.

Mike Seeger (August 15, 1933-August 7, 2009) was an American folk musician and folklorist. 

He was a distinctive singer and an accomplished musician who played autoharp, banjo, fiddle, dulcimer, guitar, mouth harp, mandolin, dobro, jaw harp, and pan pipes.

Seeger, a half-brother of Pete Seeger, produced more than 30 documentary recordings, and performed in more than 40 other recordings.

He desired to make known the caretakers of culture that inspired and taught him.

Seeger was born in New York and grew up in Maryland and Washington D.C. His father, Charles Louis Seeger Jr., was a composer and pioneering ethnomusicologist, investigating both American folk and non-Western music. His mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, was a composer. His eldest half-brother, Charles Seeger III, was a radio astronomer, and his next older half-brother, John Seeger, taught for years at the Dalton School in Manhattan. His next older half brother was Pete Seeger. His uncle, Alan Seeger, the poet who wrote I have a rendezvous with Death, was killed during the First World War. 

Seeger was a self-taught musician who began playing stringed instruments at the age of 18. He also sang Sacred Harp with British folk singer Ewan MacColl and his son, Calum. Seeger's sister Peggy Seeger, also a well-known folk performer, married MacColl, and his sister Penny wed John Cohen, a member of Mike's musical group, New Lost City Ramblers.

The family moved to Washington D.C. in 1936 after his father's appointment to the music division of the Resettlement Administration. While in Washington D.C., Ruth Seeger worked closely with John and Alan Lomax at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress to preserve and teach American folk music. Ruth Seeger's arrangements and interpretations of American Traditional folk songs in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s are well regarded.

At about the age of 20, Mike Seeger began collecting songs by traditional musicians on a tape recorder. Folk musicians such as Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, John Jacob Niles, and others were frequent guests in the Seeger home.

More information: Mike Seeger

In 1958 he co-founded the New Lost City Ramblers, an old-time string band in New York City, during the Folk Revival. The other founding members included John Cohen and Tom Paley. Paley later left the group in 1962 and was replaced by Tracy Schwarz. The New Lost City Ramblers directly influenced countless musicians in subsequent years.

The Ramblers distinguished themselves by focusing on the traditional playing styles they heard on old 78rpm records of musicians recorded during the 1920s and 1930s. Tracy was also in Mike's other band, Strange Creek Singers. So was Mike's former wife, Alice Gerrard. She was Alice Seeger in that band and sang and played guitar in it. The other people in Strange Creek Singers were bass player and singer Hazel Dickens and banjo player Lamar Grier. Mike sang and played guitar, banjo, fiddle, mandolin, autoharp, and harmonica in the band.

Seeger received six Grammy nominations and was the recipient of four grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, including a 2009 National Heritage Fellowship, which is the United States government's highest honour in the folk and traditional arts. His influence on the folk scene was described by Bob Dylan in his autobiography, Chronicles: Volume One. He was a popular presenter and performer at traditional music gatherings such as Breakin' Up Winter.

Eight days before his 76th birthday, Mike Seeger died at his home in Lexington, Virginia, on August 7, 2009, after stopping cancer treatment.

The Mike Seeger Collection, which includes original sound and video recordings by Mike Seeger, is located in the Southern Folklife Collection of the Wilson Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

More information: Folkways

Of I sing for my friends
When death's cold hand I see
When I reach my journey's end
Who will sing one song for me.

Mike Seeger