Just before Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his iconic “I Have a Dream” speech at the 1963 March on Washington, folk singer/songwriter and civil rights activist Odetta set the tone with her song, “I’m On My Way.”  King, who described her as the “Queen of American Folk Music,” had asked her to accompany him to that momentous event.

Odetta

This year, she had hoped to lend her unforgettable voice to the inauguration of President-Elect Barack Obama.  That was not to be. Odetta was hospitalized Nov. 9 for kidney failure and other ailments in Manhattan, her home, and died Dec. 2. She was 77.

In her 60-year career, Odetta’s voice was considered the iconic soundtrack to the civil rights movement. Rosa Parks, known as the mother of that movement for decades, was asked once which of Odetta’s songs had the most meaning for her. She replied, “all of the songs Odetta sings.”

She had been battling heart disease for some time, but performed 60 concerts in the last two years, her singing ability as powerful as ever, according to her manager Doug Yeager. “The power would just come out of her like people wouldn’t believe,” he said.

Born Odetta Holmes in Birmingham, Ala., in 1930, she grew up in Los Angeles, where she first found her musical voice. A junior high school teacher steered her toward classical music studies, but in her teens, Odetta fell in love with folk music. While touring with the popular musical “Finian’s Rainbow” in 1949, Odetta found her muse and her purpose in coffeehouse protest music and songs that grew out of the blues.

The music of her youth, which included prison songs and work songs recorded in the fields of the South during the Great Depression, molded her activist aesthetic. “They were liberation songs,” she said in an interview with The New York Times. “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. And you reach a fork in the road and you can either lie down and die or insist upon your life.”

Insist she did. The degree in classical music and musical theater she earned from Los Angeles City College was “a nice exercise, but it had nothing to do with my life,” she told the Times. “The folk songs were the anger,” she said. She shared with the Washington Post in 1983 that she was “a musical historian [rather than] a real folk singer.”

Folk legend Bob Dylan credits Odetta with turning him on to folk singing. In 1965, she returned the favor with her album “Odetta sings Dylan,” featuring several of his most popular standards. Others who cite the power of Odetta’s influence and inspiration include Harry Belafonte, Joan Baez, Taj Mahal, Pete Seeger and Janis Joplin. In 1961, when King had crowned her “The Queen of American Folk Music,” her duet with Harry Belafonte, “There’s a Hole in My Bucket,” was a hit in the United Kingdom. She counted Tracy Chapman, Joan Armatrading and Sweet Honey in the Rock among her “musical daughters.”

As an activist, Odetta called folk music her vehicle for “my teaching and preaching, my propagandizing.”  She shared her gift around the world, singing folk, blues, jazz, work and protest songs and Negro spirituals from coffeehouses, clubs, festivals and college campuses to Carnegie Hall.

Committed to using her success for social progress, Odetta was active in the civil rights movement, marching with King on more than one occasion and performing for President John F. Kennedy on the nationally televised civil rights special, “Dinner with the President” in 1963. Her contributions to numerous grassroots efforts for human rights, including protests against the Vietnam War, earned Odetta the World Folk Music Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

She acted in several films, including William Faulkner’s “Sanctuary” in 1961 and “The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman” in 1974. She also performed in the U.S. Bicentennial opera, “Be Glad Then America,” in 1976.

Odetta recorded several albums, and her most recent, “Gonna’ Let It Shine,” was nominated for a Grammy in 2007. She was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts’ National Medal of Arts from President Bill Clinton in 1999, a Living Legend tribute from the Library of Congress, and a National Visionary Leadership award from the National Visionary Leadership Project of The Library of Congress in 2003.

She is survived by a daughter, Michelle Esrick of New York City, and a son, Boots Jaffre, of Fort Collins, Colorado. A memorial service is planned for January.

Though her final dream of lending her voice to Obama’s inauguration was not to be fulfilled, Odetta’s gifts and legacy will live on to inspire future generations of musical artists, activists, laborers and leaders alike.