Time For Last Song of Hope

Odetta, 77, Folk Singer
ON the same day, on the same steps where Martin Luther King Jr. would deliver his "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963, Odetta—only 33 but already a folk-music force—sang "I'm on My Way." And she was. The singer and civil-rights activist, born Odetta Holmes in Birmingham, Ala., produced 37 albums, received three Grammy nominations and inspired giants of music including Janis Joplin, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan (who told Playboy in 1978 that"the first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta"). Her final interview—which she gave 10 months before her death from heart failure on Dec. 2—was with PBS host Tavis Smiley. He spoke to NEWSWEEK's Samantha Henig about his memories of a woman whose optimism brought him to tears:

We never know when we're talking to people for the last time. It's a humbling experience, and one that I've had more often than most. I was the last to interview Odetta, and also the last to interview Ossie Davis, Oscar Brown Jr. and Coretta Scott King.

After our interview, Odetta performed "Keep On Moving It On"—a song whose hopeful lyrics in the midst of a historic election brought tears to my eyes in January. Odetta had said before she passed that she hoped to sing at Barack Obama's Inauguration. That might have been an appropriate song: it speaks to what her whole life and legacy was about, and it's a clarion call to the country. The fact that Obama is now the president-elect does not mean that we live in a post-racial America. There's still work to be done. Obama is not going to be able to wave some black magic wand and make all the problems in black America go away. But we have to keep on moving it on.

Off camera, I asked Odetta why she remains hopeful, and she talked about the path that the country had traveled just in her life. She said she could not have imagined back in her heyday that she'd ever be on PBS talking to a black man who had his own show.

That's the beauty of the people in her generation, and that's the lesson to us today: that you have to remain hopeful. Keep on moving it on. That's the story of her life. When I read that she had passed, I thought about that song. And I thought about the words of Samuel Beckett: "Try again. Fail again. Fail better." That's what it means to keep on moving it on.

© 2008