Tribute to Odetta

Name: Tribute to Odetta
Start: 2025-04-19T19:00:00-05:00
End: 2025-04-19T20:45:00-05:00
Location: Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, Inc.

Schedule

Sat Apr 19 2025 at 07:00 pm to 08:45 pm

UTC-05:00

Location

Alabama Jazz Hall of Fame, Inc. | Birmingham, AL

Misty Blues will perform a tribute to Odetta, the “Voice of the Civil Rights Movement”. This will be a 90-minute theatre show. Between each song performed from Odetta’s extensive catalog, lead singer Gina Coleman will regale the audience with stories about the voice of the Civil Rights Movement/Queen of American Folk. Misty Blues is a powerful vocalist with a voice that is perfectly suited to do justice to the songs of Odetta.
Odetta Holmes was born in Birmingham in 1930 and moved with her parents to California when she was seven. As a teenager she studied classical music. However when she was 20 she encountering and befriending a group of young balladeers in San Francisco, and started to concentrate on folk singing.
In 1961, Martin Luther King Jr. called her "The Queen of American Folk Music".
She is remembered for her performance at March on Washington, the 1963 civil rights demonstration, at which she sang "O Freedom". She described her role in the civil rights movement as "one of the privates in a very big army”.
She influenced Harry Belafonte, who "cited her as a key influence" on his musical career; Bob Dylan, said, "The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta. In 2023, Rolling Stone ranked Odetta at number 171 on its list of the 200 Greatest Singers of All Time.