Local girl, grew up and made good. (Well, didn't get out here until the age of 6, but still.)
One of those people who was so good she deserved to be known by one name, because there could'nt be another seen as deserving to use the name singly.
The AP article notes that the singer considered herself a folk historian, and in fact that's how the folk movement got started. Pete Singer's biography or autobiography says his start was with parents trying bring classical to poor people in the South for "culture", but then noticed that the people there had their own culture and music. (It was bluegrass at that time IIRC. I guess that was before 'Country Western' took over the entire region.)
And everything that the AP article "American folk music legend Odetta dies at 77" says about the singer's voice is true. Too bad she didn't make it to the inauguration.
Excerpt:
"The power would just come out of her like people wouldn't believe," he said.
With her booming, classically trained voice and spare guitar, Odetta gave life to the songs by workingmen and slaves, farmers and miners, housewives and washerwomen, blacks and whites.
First coming to prominence in the 1950s, she influenced Harry Belafonte, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and other singers who had roots in the folk music boom.
An Odetta record on the turntable, listeners could close their eyes and imagine themselves hearing the sounds of spirituals and blues as they rang out from a weathered back porch or around a long-vanished campfire a century before.
"What distinguished her from the start was the meticulous care with which she tried to re-create 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.
"She is a keening Irishwoman in `Foggy Dew,' a chain-gang convict in `Take This Hammer,' a deserted lover in `Lass from the Low Country,'" Time wrote.