One of the great voices of the Civil Rights movement, Odetta brought the diva-like power of an opera singer to US folk music.

Had she chosen the world of R&B, gospel and soul music, she might have been a rival to Aretha Franklin, Mavis Staples and Nina Simone, but she preferred the more understated pleasures of folk — although her repertoire did also encompass blues, spiritual, jazz, work hollers and civil rights songs. An early influence on Bob Dylan, she drew her own inspiration from the great seam of traditional US song and the acoustic blues of the prewar era.

A tireless campaigner for liberal causes, she was at the side of Dr Martin Luther King in Washington in 1963 when he made his “I have a dream”speech and she was one of the first names Barack Obama pencilled in to sing at his inauguration ceremony. In the event, she was too ill to attend.

Maya Angelou said of her: “If only one could be sure that every 50 years a voice and a soul like Odetta’s would come along, the centuries would pass so quickly and painlessly we would hardly recognise time.”

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Odetta Holmes Felicious Gorden was born in 1930 in Alabama. Her first experience of singing came in church and, after the family had moved to California in the mid-1930s, she received classical training as an opera singer at Los Angeles City College. In 1949 she landed a role in a production of Finian’s Rainbow and came to hear the blues harmonica playing of Sonny Terry, who was also a member of the cast. His music had a profound influence on her, and the following year, while performing in a production of Guys and Dolls in San Francisco, she started to frequent the bohemian folk music crowd based in North Beach.

As she launched herself on a new path as a folk-blues singer and guitarist, she met Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger and Harry Belafonte, all of whom encouraged and supported her. Her debut album, The Tin Angel, recorded with Larry Mohr, was released in 1954, and although her voice betrayed her classical training, her operatic tendencies lent a new and unusual emotional potency to her repertoire of simple folk and blues songs. The release of her bestselling 1956 album Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues was a key moment in the folk revival, and a live album, At the Gate of Horn, the following year, was another tour de force.

No folk singer of Dylan’s generation was immune to her influence. By the time Joan Baez and Dylan appeared on the scene, she was already a star. Dylan had heard her Odetta Sings Ballads and Blues in 1959, before he arrived in Greenwich Village, and its impact on him was as profound as his discovery of Woody Guthrie. He was still a teenage rock’n’roller and he later claimed that it was hearing Odetta’s album that persuaded him to sell his electric guitar and amplifier and buy an acoustic instrument.

In his autobiography, Chronicles Volume One, he wrote: “Odetta was great.She was a deep singer, powerful strumming and a hammering-on style of playing. I learnt almost every song on the record right there and then.”

By the early 1960s, although still in her thirties, Odetta was the grande dame of the folk revival. In 1961 Martin Luther King described her as “the queen of American folk music”. Two years later he asked her to accompany him on his freedom march on Washington. At the Lincoln Memorial, she sang I’m on My Way before he made his famous speech, and it was this song which Obama asked her to sing at his inauguration 46 years later.

During the 1960s she recorded prolifically, releasing 16 albums in that decade alone. They included a live set recorded at Carnegie Hall, Odetta and the Blues (1962), and a collection of Dylan songs. She continued to tour regularly but by the late 1970s the recordings had dried up and she lapsed into obscurity. She made a comeback in 1998 with the album To Ella, dedicated to the recently deceased Ella Fitzgerald, and followed it a year later with the even better Blues Everywhere I Go, a tribute to the female blues singers of the 1930s which was nominated for a Grammy award.

It was followed three years later by Looking for a Home, a collection of songs by Leadbelly. Her final release was Gonna Let It Shine (2007), a set of gospel and spiritual songs also nominated for a Grammy.

Her return to recording and the public eye in the last decade of her life was gratifying. In 1999 President Bill Clinton presented her with a National Endowment for the Arts award. In 2005 the Library of Congress conferred on her its Living Legend Award, only the third time it had been given.

In 2001, when David Letterman’s Late Show returned to the airwaves from its New York TV studios a week after 9/11, Odetta’s voice was chosen to lend the necessary dignity to the occasion. She had already appeared in a handful of films, including Cinerama Holiday (1955), Sanctuary (1961) and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1974) and Martin Scorsese’s film about Dylan, No Direction Home (2005).

In 2008, despite ill health, she embarked on her last US tour, physically frail but singing as strongly as ever from a wheelchair. She was admitted to hospital with kidney failure four days after Obama’s election victory.

Odetta, folk singer and civil rights activist, was born on December 31, 1930. She died on December 2, 2008, aged 77