Civil rights-era singer Odetta dead at 77

NEW YORK, Dec. 3 (UPI) -- Civil rights movement-era singer Odetta died of heart disease Tuesday in New York, her manager said. She was 77.

Doug Yeager told The New York Times Odetta had been hoping to sing at the presidential inauguration of Barack Obama next month.

Odetta, who was born Odetta Holmes, got her start singing in coffeehouses and wound up at Carnegie Hall. She also sang "O Freedom" at the 1963 civil rights march on Washington.

She grew up listening to blues, jazz and folk music, and earned a music degree from Los Angeles City College. In 2005, she told National Public Radio "School taught me how to count and taught me how to put a sentence together. But as far as the human spirit goes, I learned through folk music."

Her career waned in the 1970s and '80s but revived in the 1990s with regular appearances on the public radio show "A Prairie Home Companion." In 1999 she recorded her first album in 14 years and she was awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Medal of the Arts and Humanities from. In 2003 she received a "Living Legend" tribute from the Library of Congress and the Kennedy Center Visionary Award.

Odetta was married three times, to Don Gordon, Gary Shead and Iverson Minter, a musician known professionally as Louisiana Red. The first marriages ended in divorce.