Odetta

I got to meet Odetta when my friends shared the billing with her in PA.

It's the birthday of the woman Martin Luther King Jr. called "The Queen of American Folk Music": Odetta, born Odetta Holmes Felious, in Birmingham, Alabama (1930). She thought at first that she'd be an opera singer, but she heard folk music in San Francisco and decided that was the kind of music that said what she wanted to say. In a 1966 Playboy magazine interview, Bob Dylan said: "The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta. I heard a record of hers in a record store, back when you could listen to records right there in the store. That was in '58 or something like that. Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson." Odetta's albums include My Eyes Have Seen (1959), Sometimes I Feel Like Crying (1962), and Movin' It On (1987). A reviewer once said: "Odetta can't sing 'folk' at all, because she doesn't really sound like a person singing, let alone like the person next door singing. She sounds more like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir."

-Writers Alamanac