(RNS) Odetta, the folk singer whose deep and powerful voice became a soundtrack for the civil rights movement of the 1960s, died Tuesday (Dec. 1) in New York after a decade-long fight with heart disease. She was 77.

Born Odetta Holmes, in Birmingham, Ala., on Dec. 31, 1930, she was one of the most well-known folk and blues singers of the 1950s and 1960s; her rich voice was equally at home in the anguish of prison and work songs, the gentlest of English ballads, as well as the anger and hope of spirituals.

But it was at the 1963 March on Washington, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., gave his “I Have a Dream” speech and Odetta sang the slave-era “O Freedom,” with its lines “before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, And go home to my Lord and be free” that forever linked her voice with the hopes, aspirations and tragedies of the movement.

Odetta moved to Los Angeles with her widowed mother in 1940 and earned a music degree from Los Angeles City College. Her training in classical music and musical theater was, she told an interviewer, “a nice exercise, but it had nothing to do with my life.”

In 1950 she began performing professionally and found a following singing in the coffeehouses of San Francisco. It was in mining the rich tradition of blues and spirituals that she found her distinctive style-a style that would influence and shape the rising generation of folk singers such as Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins and such groups as Peter, Paul and Mary.

Dylan, in a 1978 interview, recalled that, “The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta,” and he noted he learned many of the songs on her first album, “Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues.”

In 1999, President Bill Clinton awarded her the National Endowment for the Arts’ Medal of the Arts and Humanities.

After the civil rights movement peaked, Odetta’s career also moved off center stage but she continued to perform and be hailed by critics.