CHAPTER FOURTEEN

BLUES EVERYWHERE I GO

In the early 1990s, Marc Carpentieri was a part-time blues drummer in Huntington, New York, a town of modest homes nestled among blue-blood mansions and Revolutionary War relics on the North Shore of Long Island. Carpentieri’s band, Somethin’ Blue, played a typical mix of Chicago blues and other related styles, mainly in local bars, its most notable gig having been as an opener for Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown. Carpentieri, then in his late twenties, started MC Records with his wife, Catherine, in their home as a way to distribute cassette recordings of his group, but he soon decided to try his hand at producing other artists. By the latter part of the decade, the fledgling company had built a modest following releasing material from aging Mississippi bluesmen Big Jack Johnson and R. L. Burnside.

Carpentieri was looking for an artist to help take MC Records to a new level of success when, in 1998, he was flipping through a music magazine and came upon a write-up about an Odetta concert. He turned casually to Catherine and said, “Hey, we ought to record Odetta.” Carpentieri had first heard Odetta’s name in grammar school during a lesson on the March on Washington, and later, as a deejay for WBAU in Hempstead, New York, he occasionally played Odetta’s music. He knew her name didn’t generate the same kind of recognition that it once had, and the idea of helping revive her career was something that appealed to him. A meeting was arranged to see if he and Odetta would get along, which was hardly guaranteed. “I was kind of scared shitless,” Carpentieri recalled of the introduction, which occurred backstage at a small club called Bodles Opera House in Chester, New York, where Odetta was performing. “You know, she could intimidate you with a stare very quickly.” But it became clear right away that Carpentieri had passed muster, and Odetta, who had released only one studio recording in the past three decades, decided to give the blues another try.¹

Ironically, it was Odetta’s struggles that may have helped pave the way for her to do this. If one has to suffer to sing the blues, then Odetta had had more than her share of career letdowns, personal setbacks, and emotional lows since her heyday as the Queen of Folk. And the nineties hadn’t been especially kind to her either.

To start off the decade, she’d gotten a small role in Spike Lee’s jazz film Mo’ Better Blues, scored by Lee’s father, Bill Lee, and the screen time might have brought her renewed visibility. But in what seemed like an increasingly typical disappointment, her scenes had been left on the cutting-room floor. Around 1996, she’d suffered a heart attack, beginning a gradual decline in her health in her sixty-sixth year. In 1997, Len Rosenfeld had become gravely ill, and he died the following year. Fortunately for Odetta, Rosenfeld had asked his friend Doug Yeager if he could take over as Odetta’s manager. Earnest, sturdily built, and with a stentorian speaking voice that could almost rival Odetta’s singing pipes, Yeager was already managing Josh White Jr. and had worked with Odetta as a concert agent. Yeager would go far above the call to help make Odetta’s last decade an artistically productive one.

After Odetta signed with MC Records, she and Carpentieri held auditions for a piano player/band leader, and Odetta rejected the first few, including some well-known and respected ones. “I know what they’re going to play before they play it,” she complained.² Still smarting from the reception of her straight-ahead interpretations of classic blues nearly forty years earlier, Odetta was sure about one thing: she longed for a different sound.

Eventually they settled upon Seth Farber, a keyboard maestro who was equally at home as a rock sideman and Broadway musical director. Farber could effortlessly vamp a blues, stomp out some New Orleans boogie, or add the perfect amount of whimsy to a show tune. His choice turned out to be vital not only to Odetta’s new sound but also to the touring act that would follow the record. “She would come over to my place day after day and we would listen, discuss, she would have a list of fifteen or twenty songs from Victoria Spivey, Memphis Minnie, Ethel Waters, various blues singers from the 1920s,” Farber recalled. “And she would say, ‘What can we do to make this not just a copy of them, make it our own?’” “For me it was like falling in love with a girl in a musical way,” he added. “At that time a youngerish white guy and an olderish black woman, if you looked at them on the street you wouldn’t see any particular connection, and yet there was this great connection. It was exciting to be entrusted with musically taking care of her.”³

They assembled a group that included Farber and guitarist Jimmy Vivino from Conan O’Brien’s house band and, in late March of 1999 at Tiki Studios in Glen Cove, New Jersey, began laying down tracks from Spivey, Ma Rainey, Sippie Wallace, and, of course, Bessie Smith. But this time Odetta had something new to bring to the table. Her voice, coarsened by age, decades of smoking, and life’s hard knocks, now had more of the weathered soul it had lacked when she was thirty years old. She didn’t try to recreate the blues shouting that her idols had honed in tent shows and black vaudeville almost a century earlier, and she was no longer trying to be Bessie. She was free at last, and therefore all Odetta, on songs such as “Careless Love,” “St. Louis Blues,” and “Please Send Me Someone to Love,” firmly in control of her contralto but no longer in thrall to her operatic training, adding blue notes and just the right amount of jazz inflection to her vocals to convey emotion.

And yet in other ways, Odetta remained the same as ever, as evinced by songs such as “Unemployment Blues,” “Homeless Blues,” and “Rich Man Blues.” “The world has not improved and there are some steps being taken back,” Odetta had said a few years earlier, predicting that she would be trying to raise awareness “until we reach perfection.” Now she had a new soapbox. “She was definitely always thinking about the world,” Farber said. “Even when we were doing our record, you know, [she would ask] how does this song comment on what’s going on in the world, even if it’s a blues from 1939. . . . She was kind of a political artist from the beginning and it didn’t go away.”⁴

The one difficulty with the sessions turned out to be Odetta’s deteriorating health. Shortly before the recording began, the sixty-eight-year-old had been hospitalized for an undisclosed ailment, most likely the heart disease that was beginning to take a toll on her. “Sometimes she’d come in like a ball of energy—you just didn’t know,” Carpentieri recalled. “Even when she came in frail she’d knock it out. You couldn’t tell on that record which session she came in and you’re practically thinking, I don’t know if she’s going to sing a single note. . . . The performance when the mic comes on is always the same.”⁵

When Odetta heard the results of her efforts, it seemed to reenergize her. “We recorded like the first track or two and we go listen to the playback in the booth, you know, great speakers and all that, and she just grabs me and starts dancing with me,” Carpentieri said. “And I was like really taken aback. Because I didn’t know her that well and she was just so happy, she was so thrilled with that music and how well it turned out.” Her friends were ecstatic that after so many years in the cultural wilderness, Odetta had finally found her way out. “I loved those blues albums she did,” Frederick Warhanek said. “Her voice had matured a lot and she had a quality to her voice that she never had before. Every time she did an album she was so high from it, and hoping [for recognition].”⁶

As it happened, the recognition that she’d craved for so many years was already coming her way. On September 29, 1999, a week before the album’s release, Odetta and eighteen others, including Aretha Franklin, Steven Spielberg, and August Wilson, received the National Medal of the Arts and Humanities from President Bill Clinton at Constitution Hall in Washington, DC. Before the formal ceremony, the president shared a private moment offstage with each artist. According to Doug Yeager, Clinton placed his hand on his heart and told Odetta, “I’ve loved your music since I was a southern boy in Arkansas. . . . You were a major inspiration to me when I became aware of the civil rights movement.”⁷

Later, on stage, Clinton thanked “an extraordinary group of Americans who have strengthened our civilization and whose achievements have enriched our lives.” His voice was a bit croaky from illness or fatigue—he’d recently survived an impeachment conviction vote in the Senate. When it came time to hang the large gold medallion around Odetta’s neck, he said:

For 50 years now Odetta has used her commanding power and amazing grace not just to entertain but to inspire. She has sung for freedom with Dr. King, lifted the pride of millions of children, shaped the careers of young performers like Joan Baez, Bob Dylan and Tracy Chapman. She is the reigning queen of American folk music, reminding us all that songs have the power to change the heart and change the world.⁸

After the ceremony, the Clintons hosted the honorees for dinner and dancing at the White House, and Odetta sat at the president’s table. Odetta had mixed feelings at the time about getting the award from Bill Clinton. She’d campaigned for him in 1992, recording “America the Beautiful” and “Michael Row Your Boat Ashore” as part of a group called the Clintones that had included Carly Simon, Judy Collins, Lesley Gore, and others. But she’d come to believe Clinton had fallen short of his promise and had “changed midstream” during a presidency noted, in part, for his support of a tough-on-crime law that swelled the prison population, welfare reform, and the North American Free Trade Agreement. “I thought about that before receiving the medal.” she recalled. “And then I thought, this is a medal from the nation, and he just happens to be the president presenting the medal.”⁹

In some ways, the award made up for Odetta’s feelings of being sidelined by bigger stars, her friend the singer Donal Leace recalled. “I think the Clintons were very special recognition,” he said. “To some degree, I think it boils down to that five minutes or three minutes with the cameras going off and all that [at the March on Washington]. I don’t think she was broadcasting it, but I don’t think she was too terribly happy with the way some people treated her legacy. . . . It sort of validates you.”¹⁰

Odetta had nearly missed out on the whole experience when she’d suffered an accident and lingered close to death just weeks earlier. Coming back from taping an appearance on “World Cafe,” a syndicated radio show originating from WXPN in Philadelphia, she tripped on a subway grating on Eighth Avenue outside New York’s Penn Station and hit her head, sending her into a coma for several days. With friends and loved ones gathered in her room at Roosevelt Hospital, her organs began shutting down. “Her heart was already weak,” Yeager said. “But it was just like it sent the system into shock and she started to have organ failure.”¹¹ But she regained consciousness and stabilized, and a phone call from the White House about her impending award bucked her spirits and helped her make what seemed like a miraculously quick recovery.

And more validation came with the release of Blues Everywhere I Go in early October. DownBeat called the record “a triumph. . . . She uses her sweeping, dramatic voice to uncover layers of heartache and dramatic content in lyrics that few other singers could get at.” The New York Times said that “the mother goddess of the folk blues still has plenty of spice in her, as this long overdue turn proves.” Although she was ostensibly paying tribute to other blues legends, the Times said, “the real tribute belongs to the 70-year-old singer herself, sharing her extensive knowledge of hardship, good loving and the best way to bend the blues.”¹²

Not everyone was on board. The Washington Post revived an old criticism that seemed off the mark this time around, saying Odetta was still trying to imitate Bessie Smith and her contemporaries. “But Odetta’s classically trained alto is too pure, too precise to pull off the impersonation,” Geoffrey Himes wrote, although he curiously added that the failed knockoffs made the songs more interesting than successful ones would have been.¹³

The largely positive reviews and the burst of PR surrounding the medal from Clinton made it clear that a touring act built around Odetta’s blues material was in order. And that was welcome financial relief for Odetta, who didn’t have much savings and had had her share of money problems dating back to the 1970s. In the mid-1990s, the IRS had placed a lien on her apartment for back taxes totaling more than $27,000. And by the spring of 1999, she had maxed out her credit cards and was struggling to make the payments.¹⁴

Now, in addition to clubs like the Tin Angel in Philadelphia and the Knitting Factory in New York, Odetta had the blues festival circuit in the US and Europe to count on. She retired her guitar and became a blues singer, with Farber as her main pianist and traveling companion. “Now she was popular again and work was always offered in,” Yeager recalled. “I didn’t take everything and I would make sure there were rest days.”¹⁵

The switch to blues gave Odetta a whole new audience, in addition to those 1960s survivors—the crowd she had privately labeled the “folky-poos”—who had once shunned her blues singing and still sometimes longed to hear “John Henry” the way she’d done it on her first record. “She would never have been asked to do the Chicago Blues Festival and things like that that we did, so it expanded her possibilities,” Farber said. “She’d show up at a blues festival and there would be some people who would know who she was and some people who wouldn’t. But we’d always go over.”¹⁶

In January of 2000 came another honor: a Grammy nomination, the first of Odetta’s long career, and it was for blues. When Carpentieri called her to deliver the news, Odetta was speechless. Then she cried. “She has never been nominated for a Grammy award in her 50 years [as a performer],” he told a reporter, “and when I told her she just broke down.”¹⁷

The awards ceremony took place on a rainy February 23 at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Odetta sat in the audience with friends and family including Jimmie Lee, Jan Ford, and Frederick Warhanek. When the category of traditional blues came up, however, the shiny statuette went to B. B. King, who already had eight Grammys to his credit and would add several more before he was finished. Odetta received the news stoically. “She kept a stiff upper lip,” Warhanek said. “Her sister, Jimmie Lee, was in tears, just crying like crazy. And [Odetta] said, ‘Just cut it out!’ And she made some comment about, you know, he’s a brilliant musician and he deserves it too.”¹⁸

Still, her career was in ascendance again. In 2000, she played fifty American cities and toured Europe three times. In 2001, she touched down in seventy cities worldwide. She was once again “captivating” and “enchanting” and soaking up “thunderous applause,” according to reviews of her shows, which now centered on piano-based blues, with some bluesified folk mixed in, always with a dollop of political commentary. “Odetta talked of immigrant groups of all colors being taken advantage of on reaching America, and sang ‘Got a Little Light, Let it Shine,’” one critic noted after she performed in Charleston, West Virginia, in this period. “She spoke of AIDS, said ‘teen-age pregnancy’s been going all through history,’ advised ‘don’t forget those prophylactics’ and uncorked ‘Careless Love.’ As she sang the ancient lament of unwed mother-to-be, she morphed into the physicality, complete with postural back pangs.”¹⁹

She also used her new bully pulpit to try to forge a sense of community in her audiences filled with harried, overworked early-twenty-first-century denizens of whatever city she happened to be visiting that night. That usually meant group singing, 1960s style, and a command to toss off inhibitions and put some feeling into it. “It’s the only thing all of you will ever do together,” Odetta told the crowd at the end of a rain-swept Ottawa Bluesfest. “Which seemed like a point worth pondering,” the local paper noted, “as Odetta left the stage with the audience doing just that. It was a small magical moment.”²⁰

So much travel for a woman in declining health required that her accompanists do much more than simply back her up musically. Farber—and a few other pianists who filled in when he was unavailable—had to become road managers and learn to deal with Odetta’s medical requirements, ingrained routines, and sometimes short fuse.

They took pains to make sure no one interrupted her before and after shows, when she was getting into—or out of—the deep place in her soul that she summoned to perform, although they didn’t always succeed. Radoslav Lorković, one of the pianists who accompanied her during her final years, recalled that she could be “angelic” with a nervous teenager who buttonholed her, cutting the tension with, “Welcome, child.” But, he said, “somebody would kind of barge in and say, I was at the show in 1972 on March 17, do you remember me? And then the flames would come out. ‘How am I supposed to remember?!!’ And that person would never be the same again.”²¹ In the blues documentary Lightning in a Bottle, the cameras caught Odetta’s fiery temper on full display in her late period as she furiously dressed down a backup band including Dr. John and Levon Helm during a rehearsal for allegedly playing too loud behind the singer Ruth Brown, who seemed happy with her performance. It isn’t hard to read the confrontation, given Odetta’s history of feeling “drowned out” of the culture.

Mike Koster, who founded the Thirsty Ear festival in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and worked with Odetta a handful of times beginning in 2001, came to expect a bit of offstage unpleasantness but also a transcendent show. “Even though you might be miffed at her or whatever for the way she just treated somebody backstage, she had this tremendous moral authority when she got up there and started singing and telling her stories, of course, which were as powerful as her music and singing,” he recalled.²²

Friends said that, with help, Odetta by then had her problems with alcohol under better control. On stage, she began each concert with a quote from Return to Love, a bestselling book by the self-help author and spiritual guru Marianne Williamson. The quote that Odetta recited before she ever sang a note also spoke to her own lifelong search for personal freedom and the validation of her people.

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.

It is our light not our darkness that most frightens us.

We ask ourselves, who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,

talented and fabulous?

Actually, who are you not to be?

You are a child of God.²³

She usually followed that up by commanding the crowd to join her on the next song. “We are re-confirming ourselves,” she might say. “If your neighbor looks at you like they don’t like the key you’re singing in, look right back at ’em, bless ’em and continue to sing.”

By the end of 2001, Odetta had recorded a second album for MC Records, a tribute to Lead Belly entitled Lookin for a Home. Lead Belly’s repertoire of work songs and blues allowed Odetta to continue mixing politics and music, with tunes like “Jim Crow Blues” and “Bourgeois Blues,” the latter being Lead Belly’s lament over the segregation he encountered in restaurants and hotels in Washington, DC, in the late 1930s. While Odetta sounded in even stronger voice than she had the previous year, the release date of Lookin for a Home, August 21, put the record in the unfortunate crosshairs of the September 11 attacks, which meant that it got almost no publicity. “I feel that record somehow got lost,” Carpentieri said.²⁴

In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, entertainers had a difficult time resuming their acts, not wanting to seem oblivious or flip in a time of national mourning. Comedians had the trickiest task: making America laugh, but not too much. When David Letterman returned to the air with his Late Show on CBS the week of September 17—the first late-night host to take this fragile step—he sought out guests who would provide a measure of reassurance and evoke a spirit of perseverance. Odetta was on his short list. “They were concerned with, how can we come back on the air,” Yeager recalled. “We need someone with presence, spirituality who can give the right presence, the right music and the right solemnity to the occasion.”²⁵

Odetta appeared as the second musical guest that week. Backed by the Boys Choir of Harlem, she returned briefly to her folk roots and sang a medley of “We Shall Overcome”—altering the lyric to “we shall overcome today”—and “This Little Light of Mine,” which she delivered with a dignified joy that conveyed exactly the feeling Letterman was hoping to invoke. Her longtime fans tuning in that night would have been struck by two things: she danced on stage, something the old Odetta never would have done, even regaling the audience with what appeared to be a version of Michael Jackson’s moonwalk; and she had lost a lot of weight, her health problems having reduced her once large frame to the point where she looked almost svelte in a gray dress and turquoise African cap. During the commercial break, she brought the house down with “Amazing Grace.”

Despite the lack of publicity, Lookin for a Home earned two W. C. Handy blues award nominations, and in 2002, Odetta performed another seventy dates worldwide. The following year, Jimmie Lee died, and the loss of her closest companion sent Odetta into a tailspin. “After my mom’s death, auntie fell into a great depression,” Jan Ford recalled.²⁶ Odetta stopped eating, and her weight dipped even further. But she continued to perform.

Although it devastated her, Jimmie Lee’s passing had one unforeseen consequence that brought Odetta much joy during her last half decade of life: she formed a familial bond with the New York–based filmmaker Michelle Esrick, who had met Odetta several years earlier and saw now that she was hurting and offered to help. The two women grew so tight that Odetta began referring to Esrick as her daughter, and Esrick to this day calls Odetta “my mother,” although she has two biological parents whom she loves. “She took care of me just as much as I took care of her; emotionally, spiritually, we had each other’s back,” Esrick said. If someone raised an eyebrow when Odetta introduced Esrick, a Jew from Florida, as her kin, Odetta had an answer for that too: “What, you’ve never heard of adoption?”²⁷ Like Boots Jaffee and Kenichi Takeda, Esrick gave Odetta the gift of motherhood. In return, Odetta made them all feel special and cared for, helping them get in touch with their “I Am.” Despite her self-designated hermit status, Odetta had practically run a side business over the years doling out maternal advice and hard-earned wisdom to her faithful friends and “adopted” children.

As Odetta’s health declined, Esrick in particular would be there, along with Doug Yeager, making sure she got the care she needed to keep singing through a series of health crises. In July of 2005, Odetta tripped on cobblestones near her home on Fifth Avenue and broke her hip. She spent weeks at Mt. Sinai Hospital and several months recuperating at the New Jewish Home on West 106th Street. With her healthcare bills piling up, she had no real nest egg to draw upon, and canceling months’ worth of gigs was something she could ill afford to do. Friends tried to help out financially. Elizabeth Elliott, a friend from Colorado, bought a piece of art from her. “She wouldn’t take money from me and so I said, ‘Odetta, if you don’t really love that piece of art, I would really love to buy it.’ And she said, ‘Well, what do you think it’s worth?’ and I said, ‘Oh, I wouldn’t take any less than a thousand dollars for it.’ The piece of art was nothing. It’s a print. I couldn’t tell you who it’s by. It’s a woman clown with a tear rolling down its cheek.”²⁸

The Jazz Foundation, which helps elderly musicians make ends meet, also stepped in, paying the mortgage and maintenance on Odetta’s apartment and getting her a private room at the nursing home so that she could begin to sing and rehearse. When she felt well enough to perform again, the foundation continued to assist her, with gigs at foundation events. “We had to say, ‘Odetta, I’ve got a gig coming up for you, and it’s just enough, the same exact amount as the mortgage,’” recalled Wendy Oxenhorn, the foundation’s executive director.²⁹

By the end of September, Odetta had recovered enough to travel to London and sing “Tomorrow Is a Long Time” and “Mr. Tambourine Man” at a Bob Dylan tribute concert at the Barbican. Her new piano-based renditions went over well. “The best performance of the night came from the veteran gospel and blues singer Odetta, whom Dylan massively admired,” the Guardian reported.³⁰

As the year drew to a close, MC released what would be Odetta’s final album, Gonna Let It Shine, a live record of spirituals recorded at Fordham University in New York with the Holmes Brothers, a soul-blues group from her hometown of Birmingham. She continued to tour, walking with a cane at first and later using a wheelchair to get around, but soldiering on, even opting for dental implants to finally close up the gap in her front teeth that had long bothered her. “She was so powerful in her presence, I never even noticed the wheelchair,” Radoslav Lorković recalled. “In a way, it made her more queenly.”³¹

In January of 2007, during a grueling West Coast tour, Odetta’s health gave out as a crowd waited to hear her perform at the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley, California. Friends came to her side as she lay in bed in her hotel room, including Wavy Gravy, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Frederick Warhanek, and Carrie Thaler. Odetta refused to see a doctor, until Gravy threatened her with a “sit in.” “Everybody said, ‘Wavy Gravy, we can’t get her out of bed to go see the doctor.’ I said well let me take a crack at it,” he recalled. “I says, ‘Odetta, you’re gonna go up and see the doctor or I’m gonna lay down on the floor and sing “We Shall Overcome.”’ She got up and went to see the doctor.”³²

Doctors diagnosed her with severe pulmonary fibrosis, a scarring of the lungs, and said that her heart was so severely diseased that it was functioning at only 11 percent of capacity. They delivered the verdict that she should never perform again and would need to be on oxygen. But Odetta refused to fade away, refused to give up her place in the spotlight after so long in the shadows. When her cardiologist wouldn’t sign papers allowing her to travel with an oxygen tank, Esrick found her another doctor. “She said, ‘Michelle, I have to perform. I can’t just lay on the bed and wait to die,’” Esrick recalled. “She said, ‘I wanna die on stage.’”³³

She recovered enough from the crisis in Mill Valley—or summoned the will—to do sixty concerts around the world in 2008, singing from a wheelchair, relying on oxygen before and after every show. For every out-of-town gig, Yeager had to arrange for an oxygen tank to travel on a flight with her, which took two days of paperwork and red tape amid the post-9/11 airport security apparatus. Yeager also found volunteers in every city who helped care for Odetta around the clock, made sure she ate, helped her dress, and gave her oxygen when she wasn’t performing. “She’d be short of breath but she’d be able to sing and she wouldn’t have the oxygen on the stage,” Seth Farber said. “That was the one hour that was the best hour of her day.”³⁴

The next year was filled with poignant moments. In March, she made a surprise appearance at her own tribute concert outside Washington, DC, sponsored by the World Folk Music Association and featuring Janis Ian, Oscar Brand, Josh White Jr., Tom Paxton, and Ronnie Gilbert of the Weavers. At the end of the show, the performers were supposed to sing “This Little Light of Mine” as a serenade to Odetta, who had made the trip, against her doctor’s wishes, from New York in an SUV alongside her oxygen tank, and was seated in a private box. But instead, Odetta insisted that she be wheeled out onto the stage and sang it herself. “And of course Odetta sang very strongly,” White recalled. “It was Odetta in a wheelchair, you closed your eyes and you wouldn’t know she was in it.”³⁵

In May she was back in Santa Fe for a festival celebrating women, where organizer Mike Koster, who had dealt with Odetta’s feistiness so many times, barely recognized her. “It was weird for me to see Odetta so weakened, oxygen tube in her nose, skinny and stooped, little of the old fight left in her bones, singing about death with a diminished voice but with great emotional force,” he recalled.³⁶

The next month, she flew to Italy with Radoslav Lorković to appear at Musicultura, an annual festival held in a stunning outdoor amphitheater framed by neoclassical columns in Macerata. Odetta was slated to sing only a few songs, but she was so frail that organizers had to bring her in for five days so that she could get a full day’s rest after her flight and another after her rehearsal. Her performance, before a sold-out crowd of twenty-five hundred and broadcast on Italian TV, didn’t disappoint, and fans had no clue that she was getting oxygen in her dressing room. “That weakness, that frailty gave her performance even more intensity,” said Vania Santi, who arranged the show. “I always thought she lived for the music for that feeling of communicating with people, inspiring people through the music.”³⁷

By the time she sang at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park on October 4, returning to the city where it had all begun for her fifty-five years earlier, “she was dying really,” recalled Dave Keyes, who accompanied her on piano for an hour-long set. “When she was on stage, she summoned all the strength that she had.”³⁸ In the middle of performing “House of the Rising Sun,” Odetta dramatically inserted death-oriented lines a cappella from the old English ballad “One Morning in May,” which she had recorded nearly half a century earlier, as the audience and a number of stars, including Elvis Costello, Emmylou Harris, and T Bone Burnett looked on, astonished.

When I was a young girl I used to seek pleasure,

When I was a young girl I used to drink ale;

Out of the alehouse and into the jailhouse,

My body is ruined, they left me here to die.

Costello later brought his young son to get a photo with Odetta, telling Keyes, “This is royalty and I want to tell my son when he grows up that you met royalty.”³⁹

Her last concerts were two sold-out performances later that month at a Toronto nightclub called Hugh’s Room, and her condition worsened dramatically. On Saturday, November 8, with her kidneys failing, Odetta checked into the emergency room at Lenox Hill Hospital on New York’s Upper East Side, and by the next evening she was listed in critical condition in room 719 of the intensive care unit. Doctors at first said she might not survive another day, but they put her on dialysis, and she hung on. Less than a week earlier, Barack Obama had been elected president, a once-unthinkable milestone in the long struggle for equality by African Americans, a struggle in which Odetta had played a key role. Yeager taped a three-foot-tall poster of Obama on the wall of her room, and the yearning to perform at the inauguration kept her fighting for life. “Odetta believes she is going to sing at Obama’s inauguration, and I believe that is the reason she is still alive,” Yeager posted to her fans.⁴⁰

Letters of support and flowers poured into the hospital from all over. At times it seemed as if Odetta might pull through yet again. She gained back enough strength to tell friends that Obama’s election was the culmination of her life’s work. “She lit up the hospital,” Wavy Gravy told Rolling Stone. “She was just joyful.”⁴¹

On Thanksgiving she shared a message with fans from her hospital bed. “The world is trembling under the weight of many problems,” she wrote but urged people to give thanks for friends and community. In the end, her heart, kidneys, and lungs were too damaged. “The last two things she said to me, she grabbed my hand and she said, ‘Doug, I’m just trying to hang on for the inauguration,’” Yeager recalled. “Then she kind of went out and she came back up and she said, ‘You gotta get the costumes all ready for me.’ Those were the last words I heard her say.”⁴²

Odetta died at 5:12 p.m. on December 2, 2008, of organ failure and heart disease. Her body was cremated, and friends and family, including Jan Ford, Michelle Esrick, Boots Jaffee, Yeager, and Josh White Jr., took turns on a frigid and windy day throwing her ashes into the Harlem Meer, the large artificial lake on the northwest corner of Central Park that Odetta had often gazed upon from her apartment window. She didn’t get to sing at Obama’s inauguration seven weeks later, but many of Odetta’s friends felt sure that her spirit was there on January 20, 2009, probably singing “This Little Light of Mine” as the nation’s first black president took the oath of office.