O Freedom

"In 1950, Odetta began singing professionally in a West Coast production of the musical 'Finian’s Rainbow,' but she found a stronger calling in the bohemian coffeehouses of San Francisco. 'We would finish our play, we’d go to the joint, and people would sit around playing guitars and singing songs and it felt like home,' she said in the 2007 interview with The Times.
"She began singing in nightclubs, cutting a striking figure with her guitar and her close-cropped hair. (She noted late in life that she was one of the first black performers in the United States to wear an 'Afro' hairstyle—'they used to call it "the Odetta,"' she said.)"

Tim Weiner in The New York Times reports the death of folksinger Odetta.