Brother from the 3rd stone

Farewell, Odetta
By Keith Josef Adkins TheRoot.com
A dedication to the voice that combined song and politics.

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Dec. 3, 2008--During my "real education" years, you know, post-undergrad and confused, there were five major players in the shaping of my consciousness: Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Henry Dumas, Toni Morrison and Odetta.
I would sit in my living room in San Francisco, uncombed, Thrift Store gear and read excerpts of Angela Davis, Etheridge Knight with Odetta evoking plenty of folk-blues mood in the background. Me and my crew were about 15 years too late for original appreciation of such greats, but it's what we did in the Bay Area in the early '90s—communed with iconic poets, musicians and thinkers who symbolized grand thought and compassion and offered blueprints for what a growing mind needed: to know there is no other way but to step into yourself and be heard.

No one in my crew knew Odetta (or had attended one of her concerts). We weren't the sons or daughters of prize-winning novelists or singers who rolled in those crowds and had casual access to her. We were simply a group of young social refugees looking for ourselves and who longed for some parental figure to appreciate and then endorse our poetic...pensiveness. Odetta, hanging from a poster above the living room sofa, was that. She appeared introspective, but warm. Someone who wasn't interested in the fleeting illumination of celebrity or popular fame, but who was dedicated to a genuine mission to combine song and politics and to make her listeners feel deeply.
I will always remember her for that.
Keith Josef Adkins blogs for The Root at On The Dig .