Odetta is 71 now, a half-century removed from the '60s folk scene. She is no longer the girl with a guitar who believes her deep, melancholy voice can change the world.

"That was the biggest disappointment in my life, when I finally figured out there was nothing I could do," she says.

She was born Odetta Gordon in Birmingham, Ala. At 6, her family moved to Los Angeles, where she took singing lessons and, by her 19th birthday, landed a role in a production of Finian's Rainbow. In the next few years, she would drop her last name and capture the attention of Pete Seeger and Harry Belafonte. Her debut album, Sings Ballads and Blues, came out in 1956.

"The first thing that turned me on to folk singing was Odetta," Bob Dylan told Playboy in 1978. "I heard a record of hers in a record store, back when you could listen to records right there in the store. That was in '58 or something like that. Right then and there, I went out and traded my electric guitar and amplifier for an acoustical guitar, a flat-top Gibson."

Odetta cut a striking figure in those days. This was a decade before the arrival of the folk protest movement and here she was, a black woman with a close-cropped Afro and a seemingly endless catalog of folk songs. She sang "John Henry" and "If I Had a Hammer," songs that would become national anthems of the oncoming folk revival. It was during the '60s that Odetta's audience grew. She released more than a dozen albums and played Carnegie Hall. She still plays those traditional standards. Her 2001 release, Looking for a Home, was an album of Leadbelly covers.

"Whether I'm singing in the area of folk or blues or spiritual, I am a mirror in front of this audience," Odetta says. "And they look into that mirror and they get a sense of the history and the strength of the people they have come from."

It's almost a positive outlook, except when she's asked to talk about society. That's when Odetta begins to break it down into "us" vs. "them." They, she says, are the folks in power: the police, the government, corporate executives."

She also isn't pleased with the developments in the courts, where affirmative action is debated, or Washington, where wars are plotted.

One thing Odetta doesn't follow is the music charts. "Occasionally I'm someplace and I hear what's on the radio and whatever they've decided to put on the radio ... I feel such sympathy for these young ladies who feel they have to strip in order to be noticed. I see people who are put there in front who have no talent whatsoever. We have young people too who are full of talent but they don't happen to have the look."