Huddie Ledbetter, known as Lead Belly,
was a unique figure in the American popular music of the 20th century.
Ultimately, he was best remembered for a body of songs that he
discovered, adapted, or wrote, including "Goodnight, Irene," "Rock
Island Line," "The Midnight Special," and "Cotton Fields." But he was
also an early example of a folksinger whose background had brought him
into direct contact with the oral tradition by which folk music was
handed down, a tradition that, by the early years of the century,
already included elements of commercial popular music. Because he was an
African-American, he is sometimes viewed as a blues singer, but blues
(a musical form he actually predated) was only one of the styles that
informed his music. He was a profound influence on folk performers of
the 1940s such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger,
who in turn influenced the folk revival and the development of rock
music from the 1960s onward, which makes his induction into the Rock
& Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, early in the hall's existence, wholly
appropriate. Huddie Ledbetter
was born on the Jeter Plantation near the community of Shiloh, which is
in turn near the town of Mooringsport, LA. He was the only son of a
sharecropper who moved his family to nearby Harrison County, TX, when
the child was about five. Ledbetter
attended school from the age of eight to about 12 or 13, after which he
worked full-time on the farm his father had managed to buy. He had
shown an early interest in music, learning the button accordion as a
child and playing in the school band. He later added other instruments,
eventually turning primarily to the guitar, having obtained his first
one in 1903. By his teens, he was playing and singing for money at local
dances. At about the age of 16, he moved to Shreveport, LA, where he
lived for two years supporting himself as a performer. From the ages of
about 18 to 20, he traveled around Texas and Louisiana, performing and
supplementing his income as a farm worker. Falling ill, he returned
home, where he recovered, married, and settled down to work as a farmer.
In 1910, he and his wife moved to Dallas, TX. There, possibly around
1912, he met the young street musician Blind Lemon Jefferson,
five years his junior, and the two teamed up to play around the Dallas
area for the next several years. During this period, he switched from
the six-string to the 12-string guitar, the instrument that became his
trademark. Ledbetter
moved back to Harrison County around 1915. In June, he was arrested due
to an incident the specifics of which are lost to history. Eventually,
he was convicted of carrying a pistol illegally and sentenced to 30 days
on a chain gang. He escaped and moved to Bowie County, TX, where he
lived under the name Walter Boyd
and returned to performing while also working as a sharecropper. In
December 1917, he was arrested and charged with the murder of Will
Stafford, the husband of one of his cousins, and with "assault to
murder" another man. He was convicted of both charges, the first
carrying a sentence of five to 20 years, the second two to ten years, to
be served consecutively. In prison, he gained his nickname, Lead Belly,
and learned many songs from inmates. In January 1924, he sang for Texas
Governor Pat Neff, including a specially written song in which he asked
for a pardon. As Neff reached the end of his term as governor in
January 1925, he actually did pardon Lead Belly,
such that, instead of serving the minimum of seven years required by
his sentences, he served six years, seven months, and eight days.
Lead Belly
moved to Houston initially, then returned home before settling in
Mooringsport. In January 1930, he was involved in a stabbing incident
that led to his being charged with "assault with intent to murder." He
was convicted, given a sentence of six to ten years, and sent to Angola
Prison. There he was a model prisoner, and due to budgetary restrictions
brought on by the Depression, he was able to participate in an early
release program. He applied for such release in June 1933 and was told
that he would be released the following year if Governor O.K. Allen
approved the petition. Song collector John Lomax, in the employ of the Library of Congress, visited Angola in July 1933 with his son Alan Lomax, looking for folk songs to record. They were introduced to Lead Belly, whom they recorded. This initial session, which has not been released commercially, included a song Lead Belly
called "Irene" that he had learned from an uncle. Subsequent research
has demonstrated that the song was not a traditional folk song, but
rather in its original form was written and published in 1886 by
African-American songwriter Gussie Lord Davis under the title "Irene,
Good Night." But the version taught to Lead Belly by his uncle was much altered from Davis' original.
A year passed without any action being taken on Lead Belly's petition for early release. John and Alan Lomax returned to Angola in the summer of 1934, and they recorded another session with Lead Belly. A few of these recordings were released commercially by Elektra Records in 1966 in a box set called The Library of Congress Recordings and were reissued in 1991 by Rounder Records on a CD called Midnight Special. As that title indicates, among the songs was "Midnight Special," a song Lead Belly
first heard during his incarceration in Texas in the early 1920s and
which he adapted. The session also included "Governor O.K. Allen," a
song Lead Belly had written to encourage the governor to sign his petition of release. The Lomaxes
took a record of the song to the governor's office, though there is no
evidence that he actually listened to it. But on July 25, 1934, he
signed Lead Belly's petition, commuting his sentence to three to ten years, and since Lead Belly
had already served four and a half years, he was released on August 1,
1934. In later years, the state of Louisiana repeatedly denied the
legend that Lead Belly had sung his way out of prison for a second time.
Upon his release, Lead Belly initially moved to Shreveport, but in the fall of 1934 he sought out John Lomax,
who was living in Texas, and went to work for him, acting as his
chauffeur and assistant on further trips to prisons in search of songs.
At the Cummins Prison Farm in Arkansas, Lead Belly
first heard a prisoner perform "Rock Island Line," a song he added to
his repertoire and altered extensively. In the winter of 1934-1935, he
accompanied Lomax
north, where they made a series of appearances at academic and
scholarly gatherings such as the annual meeting of the Modern Language
Association (MLA) in Philadelphia and lecture-performances at Yale and
Harvard. They attracted considerable media attention, including articles
in major newspapers and appearances on radio and newsreel versions of
Time Marches On. Lead Belly signed a management agreement with Lomax
and was in turn signed for a series of recordings by the American
Record Corporation (ARC), which issued records on a variety of
low-priced labels and also owned the venerable Columbia Records label.
The ARC recordings, 40 sides, were made in January, February, and March
1935, though ARC only released two singles at the time, with a third
issued the following year. Viewing Lead Belly
as a blues artist, ARC emphasized that aspect of his large repertoire,
but the records did not sell well in the blues market and most of the
recordings remained unissued for decades. The first extensive release of
them came with the Columbia Records LP Includes Legendary Performances Never Before Released in 1970, and more of them appeared on Columbia/Legacy's King of the 12-String Guitar in 1991. During this period, Lead Belly
also made more recordings for the Library of Congress, some of which
appeared on the 1966 Elektra LP and on the 1991 Rounder albums Midnight Special and Gwine Dig a Hole to Put the Devil In. In March 1935, John Lomax, who had found Lead Belly unreliable during a northeast tour, severed his relationship with the singer, and Lead Belly returned to Louisiana. There he obtained legal representation and sought more money from Lomax, and over a period of months the two worked out a settlement that allowed Lomax to use Lead Belly's songs in his book Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, published in 1936. In February 1936, Lead Belly
moved back north, settling in New York City and attempting to build a
career as a performer. From 1937 to 1939, he made more recordings for
the Library of Congress at the behest of Alan Lomax,
some of which have appeared on the Elektra and Rounder albums already
mentioned. He was taken up by left-wing activists who increasingly used
folk music as a forum for the expression of their political beliefs, and
though he himself appears to have had only a limited interest in
politics in general, his fervor for civil rights, expressed in such
songs as "The Bourgeois Blues," concurred with theirs. He became part of
a community of urban folk musicians, including Aunt Molly Jackson, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and the team of Sonny Terry & Brownie McGee, among others. In March 1939, Lead Belly
was arrested for stabbing a man in New York. While on parole before
trial, he made his second set of commercial recordings for Musicraft
Records, a session arranged by Alan Lomax
to help pay his legal bills. The recordings were issued initially on a
Musicraft album called Negro Sinful Tunes and have since been reissued
by such labels as Stinson, Everest, and Collectables. Lead Belly was convicted of third-degree assault and served an eight-month sentence.
The singer was busy in 1940, appearing on the
network radio series Folk Music of America and Back Where I Come From
and launching his own weekly 15-minute program on local WNYC, a show
that ran for a year. He also undertook his third set of commercial
recordings in June, this time for RCA Victor and accompanied on some
tracks by the Golden Gate Quartet.
These sessions resulted in an album called The Midnight Special and
Other Southern Prison Songs, released on RCA's Bluebird imprint. A 1964
compilation of the material on RCA was called Midnight Special, there was a 1989 collection called Alabama Bound, and in 2003, as part of its Secret History of Rock & Roll series, Bluebird issued When the Sun Goes Down, Vol. 5: Take This Hammer, a compilation containing all 26 tracks that were recorded. In August 1940, Lead Belly
also returned to recording for the Library of Congress, and some of
these tracks have turned up on the previously mentioned Elektra set as
well as on the Rounder albums Gwine Dig a Hole to Put the Devil In and Let It Shine on Me (1991).
In May 1941, Lead Belly recorded his first session for Asch Records, a tiny independent label run by Moses Asch. Lead Belly
went on to record extensively for Asch and its successors, Disc and
Folkways, this material later reissued both by Smithsonian/Folkways
(from the 1990s on) and by various small labels that acquired rights to
it. In 1944, he moved to the West Coast, where he remained for the
better part of two years. While there, he signed to Capitol Records and
did three sessions for the label in October 1944 that resulted in a
series of singles. Later, Capitol issued such compilation albums as
Classics in Jazz (1953) and Leadbelly: Huddie Ledbetter's Best (1962), drawn from these sessions. Back in New York from 1946 on, Lead Belly continued to record for Folkways, his 1948 recordings later turning up on a series of LPs called Leadbelly's Last Sessions and gathered together into a four-CD box set by Smithsonian/Folkways in 1994. By 1948, he was beginning to suffer unexplained
spells of numbness in his legs, and was often forced to walk with a cane
and perform sitting down. In May 1949, he toured in France, but his
increasing physical difficulties led to a visit to a doctor who
diagnosed him as having contracted amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS),
better known as Lou Gehrig's Disease, an incurable condition leading to
paralysis and death. Returning to the U.S., he was able to manage a few
more performances, including ones in Texas and Oklahoma in June. (The
Texas show was recorded and later released by Playboy Records under the
title Leadbelly, erroneously marketed as the singer's last concert.) But
he was soon bedridden, and he died at 61 in December. Lead Belly's
fame began to increase almost immediately after his death. In 1950, his
song "Irene," now called "Goodnight, Irene," was recorded by the Weavers, a folk group including Pete Seeger and other musicians acquainted with Lead Belly, and became a number one pop hit, with hit covers by such pop singers as Frank Sinatra and a number one country recording by Ernest Tubb and Red Foley. The Weavers then adapted a Lead Belly
song called "If It Wasn't for Dickey" (itself based on the Irish folk
song "Drimmer's Cow") into "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine," which they took
into the Top 40 in 1951 and which Jimmie Rodgers covered for a Top Ten hit in 1957. In 1956, the Lonnie Donegan Skiffle Group reached the Top Ten in the U.K. and the U.S. with their recording of "Rock Island Line," taken directly from Lead Belly's version, setting off the British skiffle fad that inspired many later British rock stars, including the Beatles. (Johnny Cash scored a Top 40 country hit with his version in 1970.) "The Midnight Special" in Lead Belly's version had first reached the charts for the Tiny Grimes Quintet in 1948. Paul Evans had a Top 40 hit with it in 1960, and Johnny Rivers also took it into the Top 40 in 1965. Lead Belly's "Cotton Fields" (aka "Old Cotton Fields at Home") was a Top 40 hit for the Highwaymen
in 1961. All of these songs have become standards. When the folk
revival hit in the late '50s, its practitioners frequently covered other
songs associated with Lead Belly in arrangements that recalled his. Lead Belly's
own recordings, in addition to the more legitimate reissues on Rounder,
Columbia/Legacy, RCA Victor, Capitol, and Smithsonian/Folkways, have
turned up on a dizzying number of labels in the digital era, especially
as they have come into the public domain in Europe (where copyrights
extend only 50 years). Confusing as this discography may be, it is a
testament to the continuing influence of Lead Belly on contemporary music.
More than any other black folk-blues artist
of his time Leadbelly helped expose his race's vast musical riches to
white America, and, in the process, helped preserve a folk legacy that
has become a significant part of the nation's musical treasury. He was
not a blues singer in the traditional sense; he also sang spirituals,
pop, field and prison hollers, cowboy and childrens songs, dance tunes
and folk ballads, and of course his own topical compositions. It has
been said his repertoire was at least 500 songs. He never saw any
commercial success during his lifetime. Not until after his death did a
broader public come to know his songs and the amazing story of his life. Huddie
William Ledbetter was born on January 29, 1889 on the Jeter Plantation
near Mooringsport, Louisiana. He was the only child of sharecropper
parents Wesley and Sally. Huddie and his parents moved to Leigh, Texas
when he was five and it was there that he became interested in music,
encouraged by his uncle Terrell who bought Huddie his first musical
instrument, an accordion. Over the years he became fluent on the
piano, harp, mandolin and harmonica but he is best remembered for his 12
string guitar. By the age of 18 he had two children and had smashed his
father over the head with a poker during an argument. Though
little is known about Leadbelly's early life - he rarely spoke of those
days - he left home at 20 and over the next ten years wandered
throughout the southwest eking out an existence by playing guitar when
he could and working as a laborer when he had to. Sometime around 1915
he met the seminal Texas bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson and worked and
traveled with him as his “lead boy” (guide, companion and protégé) on
the streets of Dallas.
By this time, Leadbelly had settled on the twelve-string
guitar as his instrument of choice. Leadbelly also developed a
wonderfully rhythmic guitar style in which he imitated the walking bass
figures commonly employed by barrelhouse piano players on Fannin Street,
the most celebrated street in Shreveport's red-light district, where
Leadbelly was known to have worked. In 1916 Huddie was jailed in
Texas for assaulting a woman. He escaped and spent two years under the
alias of Walter Boyd before killing a man in a fight and being sentenced
to thirty years hard labor in Texas' Shaw State Prison Farm. After
seven years he was released after begging pardon from the governor with a
song. Huddie left Huntsville a free man, but in 1930 he was again
convicted of attempted homicide. It was in the Louisiana State
Penitentiary in July 1933 that Huddie met folklorist John Lomax and his
son Alan who were touring the south for the Library of Congress,
collecting unwritten ballads and folk songs using the newly available
recording technology. The Lomaxes had discovered that Southern prisons
were among the best places to collect work songs, ballads and spirituals
and Leadbelly, as he now called himself, was a particular find. Over
the next few days the Lomaxes recorded hundreds of songs. When they
returned in the summer of 1934 for more recordings Leadbelly told them
of his pardon in Texas. In 1935 Lomax took Leadbelly North as his
chauffeur and he began performing to an appreciative new audience in the
leftist folk community, befriending the likes of Woody Guthrie and Pete
Seeger. In his later years, like Guthrie, he performed for political
rallies and labor unions. From 1937 to 1939, he made more recordings for
the Library of Congress.His
keening, high- pitched vocals and powerful, percussive guitar playing
commanded attention, and he became known as “the King of the
Twelve-String Guitar.” By 1940 Leadbelly had recorded for a
variety of labels, including Folkways and he performed tirelessly.
Recordings for RCA (with the Golden Gate Quartet backing on many
tracks), for the Library of Congress (with Alan Lomax supervising) and
for Moe Asch, filled in the now busy schedule. The RCA sessions in
particular were superb, and issued on media and packaging of outstanding
quality for the time. Asch would go on to found Folkways Records,
struggling through some hard times in the industry, and become Huddie's
principal recorder and issuer. Neither Leadbelly nor Asch ever made much
money from these recordings, though, and by 1944 Leadbelly was
restless. Hollywood took his fancy. Leadbelly headed out to
Hollywood in hope of landing a part there, he was soon disillusioned,
but made a reasonable living playing the club circuits. He also had the
opportunity to record some material for Capitol records, unusually
backed by zither, including some rare piano rags very seldom featured in
his repertoire. The Capitol sessions remain some of Leadbelly's
best recorded work, especially since the recording technology used was
the best he had yet been subjected to. He also gained some radio airplay
- including some children's music for Standard Oil - retained hopes of
landing a movie part, and did some concert tours in parts of the West.
But he had tired of the West by late 1946, and set off for New York once
more. Leadbelly returned to renewed interest in his music, buoyed
by the revival of dixieland jazz, and interest in the origins of roots
music forms. A book of essays titled “A Tribute to Huddie Ledbetter” had
been published in England in 1946, and he found steady (but not
lucrative) work playing the jazz clubs, and occasional concerts. By now
he had come to keenly resent the “convict” image that he had acquired
since his initial “discovery” and arrival in New York, but found it
impossible to shake off. Back in New York from 1946 on, Leadbelly
continued to record for Folkways, his 1948 recordings later turning up
on a series of LPs called “Leadbelly's Last Sessions” and gathered
together into a four-CD box set by Smithsonian/Folkways in 1994. This is
considered to be his defining moment. He toured briefly in
France, where jazz had become hugely popular, in early 1949. While in
Paris, persistent muscle problems led to a diagnosis of Lous Gehrig's
disease - amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Some six months later he
succumbed to the disorder, on December 6, 1949. In 1950, his trademark
song “Goodnight Irene”, which he had learned from his uncle Bob
Ledbetter, became a nationwide number one hit for the Weavers.
Huddie William Ledbetter (/ˈhjuːdi/; January 23, 1888 – December 6, 1949),[1] better known by the stage name Lead Belly, was an American folk and blues singer, musician and songwriter notable for his strong vocals, virtuosity on the twelve-string guitar, and the folk standards he introduced, including his renditions of "Goodnight, Irene", "Midnight Special", "Cotton Fields", and "Boll Weevil".
Lead Belly usually played a twelve-string guitar, but he also played the piano, mandolin, harmonica, violin, and windjammer.[2] In some of his recordings, he sang while clapping his hands or stomping his foot.
Lead Belly's songs covered a wide range of genres and topics including gospel music; blues
about women, liquor, prison life, and racism; and folk songs about
cowboys, prison, work, sailors, cattle herding, and dancing. He also
wrote songs about people in the news, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Jean Harlow, Jack Johnson, the Scottsboro Boys and Howard Hughes. Lead Belly was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2008.
Though many releases credit him as "Leadbelly", he himself wrote it as "Lead Belly", which is also the spelling on his tombstone[3][4] and the spelling used by the Lead Belly Foundation.[5]
Biography
Personal life
Lead Belly's draft registration card in 1942 (SERIAL NUMBER U2214 and address listed as 604 E 9TH ST., N.Y. N. Y.)
Lead Belly pronounced his first name /ˈhjuːdi/ (HYOO-dee, as if spelled "Hudie").[6] He can be heard pronouncing his name this way on one of his recordings of "Boll Weevil".[7] The younger of two children, Lead Belly was born Huddie William
Ledbetter to Sallie Brown and Wesley Ledbetter on a plantation near Mooringsport, Louisiana.[8] On his World War II draft registration card in 1942, he gave his birthplace as Freeport, Louisiana ("Shreveport").
There is uncertainty over his precise date and year of birth. The Lead Belly Foundation gives January 20, 1889,[9] and his grave marker gives the year 1889. His 1942 draft registration card states January 23, 1889. However, the 1900 United States Census lists "Hudy Ledbetter" as 12 years old, born January 1888, and the 1910 and 1930
censuses also give his age as corresponding to a birth in 1888. The
1940 census lists his age as 51, with information supplied by wife
Martha. The book Blues: A Regional Experience by Eagle and LeBlanc gives January 23, 1888,[1] while the Encyclopedia of the Blues gives January 20, 1888.[10] His parents had cohabited for several years, but they legally married on February 26, 1888. When Huddie was five years old, the family settled in Bowie County, Texas. The 1910 census of Harrison County, Texas,
shows "Hudy Ledbetter" living next door to his parents with his first
wife, Aletha "Lethe" Henderson. Aletha is registered as age 19 and
married one year. Others say she was 15 when they married in 1908. It
was in Texas that Ledbetter received his first instrument, an accordion,
from his uncle Terrell. By his early twenties, having fathered at least
two children, Ledbetter left home to make his living as a guitarist and
occasional laborer.
Between 1915 and 1939, Ledbetter served several prison and jail
terms for a variety of criminal charges. In 1934, when Lead Belly was
released from one of his last incarcerations, the United States was deep
in the Great Depression,
and jobs were very scarce. In September of that year, in need of
regular work in order to avoid cancellation of his release from prison,
Lead Belly asked John Lomax to take him on as a driver. For three months, he assisted the 67-year-old in his folk song collecting around the South. Alan Lomax, his son, was ill and did not accompany him on this trip.
Music career
By 1903, Huddie was already a "musicianer",[11] a singer and guitarist of some note. He performed for nearby Shreveport audiences in St. Paul's Bottoms, a notorious red-light district
there. He began to develop his own style of music after exposure to
various musical influences on Shreveport's Fannin Street, a row of
saloons, brothels, and dance halls in the Bottoms, now referred to as
Ledbetter Heights. While in prison, Lead Belly may have first heard the
traditional prison song "Midnight Special".[12][page needed] He was "discovered" there three years later during a visit by folklorists John Lomax and his son Alan Lomax.[13]
Deeply impressed by Ledbetter's vibrant tenor and extensive repertoire, the Lomaxes recorded him in 1933 on portable aluminum disc recording equipment for the Library of Congress.
They returned with new and better equipment in July 1934, recording
hundreds of his songs. On August 1, Ledbetter was released after having
again served nearly all of his minimum sentence, following a petition
the Lomaxes had taken to Louisiana Governor Oscar K. Allen at his urgent request. It was on the other side of a recording of his signature song, "Goodnight Irene".[clarification needed]
A prison official later wrote to John Lomax denying that
Ledbetter's singing had anything to do with his release from Angola
(state prison records confirm he was eligible for early release due to
good behavior). However, both Ledbetter and the Lomaxes believed that
the record they had taken to the governor had hastened his release from
prison.
In December 1934, Lead Belly participated in a "smoker" (group sing) at a Modern Language Association meeting at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania,
where the senior Lomax had a prior lecturing engagement. He was written
up in the press as a convict who had sung his way out of prison. On New
Year's Day, 1935, the pair arrived in New York City, where Lomax was scheduled to meet with his publisher, Macmillan, about a new collection of folk songs. The newspapers were eager to write about the "singing convict," and Time magazine made one of its first March of Timenewsreels about him. Lead Belly attained fame – although not fortune.
The following week, he began recording for the American Record Corporation,
but these recordings achieved little commercial success. He recorded
over 40 sides for ARC (intended to be released on their Banner,
Melotone, Oriole, Perfect, and Romeo labels and their short-lived
Paramount series), but only five sides were actually issued. Part of the
reason for the poor sales may have been that ARC released only his blues
songs rather than the folk songs for which he would later become better
known. Lead Belly continued to struggle financially. Like many
performers, what income he made during his career would come from
touring, not from record sales. In February 1935, he married his
girlfriend, Martha Promise, who came North from Louisiana to join him.
The month of February was spent recording his repertoire and those of other African Americans and interviews about his life with Alan Lomax for their forthcoming book, Negro Folk Songs As Sung by Lead Belly
(1936). Concert appearances were slow to materialize. In March 1935,
Lead Belly accompanied John Lomax on a previously scheduled two-week
lecture tour of colleges and universities in the Northeast, culminating
at Harvard.
At the end of the month, John Lomax decided he could no longer
work with Lead Belly and gave him and Martha money to go back to
Louisiana by bus. He gave Martha the money her husband had earned during
three months of performing, but in installments, on the pretext Lead
Belly would spend it all on drinking if given a lump sum. From
Louisiana, Lead Belly successfully sued Lomax for both the full amount
and release from his management contract. The quarrel was bitter, with
hard feelings on both sides. Curiously, in the midst of the legal
wrangling, Lead Belly wrote to Lomax proposing they team up again, but
it was not to be. Further, the book about Lead Belly published by the
Lomaxes in the fall of the following year proved a commercial failure.[citation needed] In January 1936, Lead Belly returned to New York on his own,
without John Lomax, in an attempted comeback. He performed twice a day
at Harlem's Apollo Theater during the Easter season in a live dramatic recreation of the March of Time
newsreel (itself a recreation) about his prison encounter with John
Lomax, where he had worn stripes, though by this time he was no longer
associated with Lomax.
Leadbelly at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. between 1938 and 1948
Life
magazine ran a three-page article titled "Lead Belly: Bad Nigger Makes
Good Minstrel" in its issue of April 19, 1937. It included a full-page,
color (rare in those days) picture of him sitting on grain sacks playing
his guitar and singing.[14]
Also included was a striking picture of Martha Promise (identified in
the article as his manager); photos showing Lead Belly's hands playing
the guitar (with the caption "these hands once killed a man"); Texas
Governor Pat M. Neff;
and the "ramshackle" Texas State Penitentiary. The article attributes
both of his pardons to his singing of his petitions to the governors,
who were so moved that they pardoned him. The text of the article ends
with "he... may well be on the brink of a new and prosperous period."
Lead Belly failed to stir the enthusiasm of Harlem audiences. Instead, he attained success playing at concerts and benefits for an audience of leftist
folk music aficionados. He developed his own style of singing and
explaining his repertoire in the context of Southern black culture
having learned from his participation in Lomax's college lectures. He
was especially successful with his repertoire of children's game songs
(as a younger man in Louisiana he had sung regularly at children's
birthday parties in the black community). He was written about as a
heroic figure by the black novelist Richard Wright, then a member of the Communist Party, in the columns of the Daily Worker, of which Wright was the Harlem editor. The two men became personal friends, though some say Lead Belly himself was apolitical and, if anything, was a supporter of Wendell Willkie, the centristRepublican
candidate for President, for whom he wrote a campaign song. However, he
also wrote the song "Bourgeois Blues", which has radical or left-wing
lyrics.
In 1939, Lead Belly returned to prison. Alan Lomax, then 24, took
him under his wing and helped raise money for his legal expenses,
dropping out of graduate school to do so. After his release (in
1940–41), Lead Belly appeared as a regular on Alan Lomax and Nicholas Ray's groundbreaking CBS radio show Back Where I Come From, broadcast nationwide. He also appeared in nightclubs with Josh White, becoming a fixture in New York City's surging folk music scene and befriending the likes of Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Woody Guthrie, and a young Pete Seeger, all fellow performers on Back Where I Come From. During the first half of the decade, he recorded for RCA, the Library of Congress, and Moe Asch (future founder of Folkways Records) and in 1944 went to California, where he recorded strong sessions for Capitol Records.
He lodged with a studio guitar player on Merrywood Drive in Laurel
Canyon. Lead Belly was the first American country blues musician to
achieve success in Europe.[15] In 1949, Lead Belly had a regular radio show, Folk Songs of America, broadcast on station WNYC in New York, on Henrietta Yurchenco's show on Sunday nights. Later in the year he began his first European tour with a trip to France, but fell ill before its completion and was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig's disease (a motor neuron disease).[13] His final concert was at the University of Texas at Austin in a tribute to his former mentor, John Lomax, who had died the previous year. Martha also performed at that concert, singing spirituals with her husband.
Lead Belly died later that year in New York City and was buried in the Shiloh Baptist Church cemetery, in Mooringsport, Louisiana, 8 miles (13 km) west of Blanchard, in Caddo Parish.[3] He is honoured with a statue across from the Caddo Parish Courthouse, in Shreveport.
Legal issues
Huddie William Ledbetter in the foreground inside Angola Prison, July 1934
Lead Belly was imprisoned multiple times beginning in 1915 when he
was convicted of carrying a pistol and sentenced to time on the Harrison
County chain gang. He later escaped and found work in nearby Bowie County under the assumed name of Walter Boyd. Later, in January 1918, he was imprisoned at the Imperial Farm (now Central Unit)[16] in Sugar Land, Texas,
after killing one of his relatives, Will Stafford, in a fight over a
woman. During his second prison term, another inmate stabbed him in the
neck (leaving him with a fearsome scar he subsequently covered with a
bandana); Ledbetter nearly killed his attacker with his own knife.[15] In 1925 he was pardoned and released after writing a song to Governor Pat Morris Neff
seeking his freedom, having served the minimum seven years of a
7-to-35-year sentence. Combined with his good behavior, which included
entertaining the guards and fellow prisoners, his appeal to Neff's
strong religious beliefs proved sufficient. It was a testament to his
persuasive powers, as Neff had run for governor on a pledge not to issue
pardons (the only recourse for prisoners, since in most Southern
prisons there was no provision for parole).[17] According to Charles K. Wolfe and Kip Lornell in their book The Life and Legend of Leadbelly (1999), Neff had regularly brought guests to the prison on Sunday picnics to hear Ledbetter perform.
In 1930, Ledbetter was sentenced to Louisiana State Penitentiary after a summary trial for attempted homicide for stabbing a man in a fight. In 1939, Lead Belly served his final jail term for assault after stabbing a man in a fight in Manhattan.
Nicknamed "Lead Belly"
Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly) and Martha Promise Ledbetter, Wilton, Connecticut, February 1935
There are several conflicting stories about how Ledbetter acquired
the nickname "Lead Belly", but he probably acquired it while in prison.
Some claim his fellow inmates called him "Lead Belly" as a play on his
family name and his physical toughness. Others say he earned the name
after being wounded in the stomach with buckshot.[15] Another theory is that the name refers to his ability to drink moonshine, the homemade liquor that Southern farmers, black and white, made to supplement their incomes.
Blues singer Big Bill Broonzy
thought it came from a supposed tendency to lie about as if "with a
stomach weighted down by lead" in the shade when the chain gang was
supposed to be working.[18]
Yet another theory is that it may be a corruption of his last name
pronounced with a Southern accent. Whatever its origin, he adopted the
nickname as a pseudonym while performing.
Technique
Lead
Belly styled himself "King of the Twelve-String Guitar," and despite
his use of other instruments like the accordion, the most enduring image
of Lead Belly as a performer is wielding his unusually large Stella
twelve-string.[19]
This guitar had a slightly longer scale length than a standard guitar,
increasing the tension on the instrument, which, given the added tension
of the six extra strings, meant that a trapeze-style tailpiece helped
resist bridge lifting. It had slotted tuners and ladder bracing.
Lead Belly played with finger picks much of the time, using a
thumb pick to provide walking bass lines described as "tricky" and
"inventive"[20] and occasionally to strum.[citation needed]
This technique, combined with low tunings and heavy strings, gives many
of his recordings a piano-like sound. In fact, scholars have suggested
much of his guitar playing was inspired equally by barrelhouse piano and the Mexican Bajo sexto, an instrument he encountered in Texas and Louisiana.[21] Lead Belly's tunings are debated by both modern and contemporary
musicians and blues enthusiasts alike — exacerbated by the lack of film
footage of his performing rendering chord decoding difficult — but it
seems to be a down-tuned variant of standard tuning; it is likely that
he tuned his guitar strings relative to one another, so that the actual
notes shifted as the strings wore. Such down-tuning was a common
technique before the development of truss rods, and was intended to prevent the instrument's neck from warping. Lead Belly's playing style was popularized by Pete Seeger,
who adopted the twelve-string guitar in the 1950s and released an
instructional LP and book using Lead Belly as an exemplar of technique.
In some of the recordings in which Lead Belly accompanied
himself, he would make an unusual type of grunt between his verses,
sometimes described as "haah! " Songs such as "Looky Looky Yonder," "Take This Hammer,"[13]
"Linin' Track" and "Julie Ann Johnson" feature this unusual
vocalization. In "Take This Hammer," Lead Belly explained, "Every time
the men say, 'Haah,' the hammer falls. The hammer rings, and we swing,
and we sing."[22] The "haah" sound can be heard in work chants sung by Southern railroad section workers, "gandy dancers," in which it was used to coordinate work crews as they laid and maintained tracks.
In 1976, a biopic entitled Leadbelly was released, directed by Gordon Parks and featuring Roger E. Mosley as Lead Belly.
Kurt Cobain
promoted the legacy of Lead Belly, and some modern rock audiences often
owe their familiarity with Lead Belly to Nirvana's performance of "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" on a televised concert later released as MTV Unplugged in New York.[23] Cobain refers to his attempt to convince David Geffen to purchase Lead Belly's guitar for him in an interval before the song is played. In his notebooks, Cobain listed Lead Belly's Last Session Vol. 1 as one of the 50 albums most influential in the formation of Nirvana's sound.[24] It was included in NME's "The 100 Greatest Albums You've Never Heard list".[25] Bob Dylan credits Lead Belly for getting him into Folk music. In his Nobel Prize Lecture, Dylan said "somebody – somebody I’d never seen before – handed me a Lead Belly record with the song "Cotton Fields"
on it. And that record changed my life right then and there.
Transported me into a world I’d never known. It was like an explosion
went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the
darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me. I must
have played that record a hundred times."[26] Dylan also pays homage to him in "Song to Woody" on his self-titled debut album.
Lonnie Donegan's recording of "Rock Island Line", released as a single in late 1955, signalled the start of the UK skiffle craze. George Harrison of The Beatles
was quoted as saying, “if there was no Lead Belly, there would have
been no Lonnie Donegan; no Lonnie Donegan, no Beatles. Therefore no Lead
Belly, no Beatles.”[27] In a BBC tribute in 1999, which marked the 50th anniversary of Lead Belly’s death, Van Morrison — while sitting alongside Ronnie Wood of The Rolling Stones
— claimed that the British popular music scene of the 1960s wouldn’t
have happened if it weren’t for Lead Belly’s influence. “I’d put my
money on that,” he said. Wood concurred.[28] George Ezra
developed his singing style from trying to sing like Lead Belly. "On
the back of the record, it said his voice was so big, you had to turn
your record player down," Ezra says. "I liked the idea of singing with a
big voice, so I tried it, and I could."[29] In 2015, in celebration Lead Belly's 125th birthday, several events were held. The Kennedy Center, in collaboration with the Grammy Museum held Lead Belly at 125: A Tribute to an American Songster, a musical event featuring Robert Plant, Alison Krauss, and Buddy Miller with Viktor Krauss as headliners and Dom Flemons as host, with special appearances by Lucinda Williams, Alvin Youngblood Hart, Billy Hector, Valerie June, Shannon McNally, Josh White Jr., and Dan Zanes, among others [30] Also in Washington, D.C., Bourgeois Town: Lead Belly in Washington DC by the Library of Congress
was held where Todd Harvey interviewed Lead Belly family members about
their relative, his contributions to American culture and world music
and an overview of the significant Lead Belly materials in the Center's
archive [31] In London, England, the Royal Albert Hall held, Lead Belly Fest, a musical event featuring Van Morrison, Eric Burdon, Jools Holland, Billy Bragg, Paul Jones, and more.[32]
The Titanic
Influenced by the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912, Ledbetter wrote the song "The Titanic",[33]
his first composition on the twelve-string guitar, which later became
his signature instrument. Initially played when performing with Blind Lemon Jefferson (1893–1929) in and around Dallas, Texas, the song is about champion African-American boxer Jack Johnson's being denied passage on the Titanic. Johnson had in fact been denied passage on a ship for being black, but it was not the Titanic.[34]
Still, the song includes the lyric "Jack Johnson tried to get on board.
The Captain, he says, 'I ain't haulin' no coal!' Fare thee, Titanic! Fare thee well!" Ledbetter later noted he had to leave out this passage when playing in front of white audiences.[35]
Private Party November 21, 1948 (2000, Document Records), containing Lead Belly's intimate performance at a private party in late 1948 in Minneapolis
Take This Hammer, When the Sun Goes Down series, vol. 5 (2003, RCA Victor/Bluebird Jazz), CD collection of all 26 songs Lead Belly recorded for Victor Records in 1940, half of which feature the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet (a 1968 LP released by RCA Victor included about half of these recordings)
A Leadbelly Memorial, Vol II (1963, Stinson Records, SLP 19), red vinyl pressing
The Definitive Lead Belly (2008, Not Now Music), a 50-song retrospective on two CDs
Leadbelly - American Folk & Blues Anthology (2013, Not Now Music), 75 songs on three CDs
References
Eagle, Bob; LeBlanc, Eric S. (2013). Blues - A Regional Experience. Santa Barbara: Praeger Publishers. p. 301. ISBN978-0313344237.
Snyder, Jared (Summer 1994). "Leadbelly and His Windjammer: Examining the African American Button Accordion Tradition". American Music. 12 (2): 148–166. JSTOR3052520.
Huddie Ledbetter, better known to the music world as “Lead Belly” was
born January 20, 1889, in Mooringsport, Louisiana (near Shreveport).
Lead Belly was the only child of Wesley and Sally Ledbetter. Lead Belly
first tried his hand at playing music when he was only two years old. As
a young man he was introduced to the guitar by his Uncle Terrell
Ledbetter and from that moment on he was electrified by the guitar. He
mastered that instrument and just about any instrument he laid his hands
on. He learned to play the accordion, mandolin and piano. Which gave
him a wide knowledge of various musical instruments and rhythm. It has
been said that one day Lead Belly witnessed a Mexican guitarist playing
the twelve string guitar which struck his interest in mastering the
unusal instrument. After the 8th grade, he quit school and, by the time he was 14 years
old, he was a popular musician and singer in the weekend “sukey jumps”
and “juke joints.” He later became known as the king of the
twelve-string guitar and “Stella” as he affectionately called his guitar
became his ticket to life and his freedom. Leadbelly was passionate
about his love of music. It was his way of expressing what was written
on his heart and soul. This love of music led him to leave his father’s
farm at an early age to pursue his music. Huddie traveled the southwest
playing his guitar and working as a laborer when he had to.
Huddie was legendary for picking a 1,000 lbs of cotton a day, and lining the railroad tracks. Lead Belly once said, "When I play, the women would come around to
listen and their men would get angry." In 1918, he fought and killed a
man in Dallas and was sentenced to thirty years to be served in the
state prison in Huntsville, Texas. In 1925, he wrote a song asking
Governor Pat Neff for a pardon. Neff, who had promised at his election
never to pardon a prisoner, broke his promise and set Huddie Ledbetter
free. Back on the road with many new songs he had learned or written at
Huntsville, Huddie again found enthusiastic audiences throughout the
south. But, as the center of admiring crowds, he was again the target of
envy and jealousy. In 1930, after a fight at a party, which was normal
in the Jim Crow south he was sentenced to another prison term in the
infamous Angola Farm prison plantation in Louisiana. In a way, this was a
stroke of luck, because he was discovered by folklorists John and Alan
Lomax, who were recording prison songs for the Library of Congress. John
Lomax and his son Allen, who brought him to New York where he played on
college campuses like Harvard, Priceton, NYU and the list goes on. He
was received with great acclaim. Shortly thereafter Lead Belly relocated to New York, where he forged a
reputation on the folk circuit, making personal appearances, recording
for a variety of labels and doing radio work. In the early 40s he
performed with Josh White, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee and Woody
Guthrie. In 1948 Lead Belly cut, with the aid of the newly invented long
playing record, what would later become known as his Last Sessions, a
definitive document of The Life and Music of the King of the
Twelve-String Guitar. Lead Belly enjoyed national recognition as a blues
and folk musician and singer. Lead Belly felt his music and talent were
gifts from God. His songs could not be put into one category. He wrote
children’s songs, field songs, ballads, square dance songs, prison
songs, folk songs, and blues. Lead Belly was a man whose life, like that of any other man, had its ups
and downs. Good or bad, Lead Belly told the world about those things
through his songs. Lead Belly’s fame and success continued to increase
until he fell ill while on a European Tour. Tests revealed that he
suffered from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease) in
1949. This disease destroyed all the muscles in his body giving him
little opportunity to fully play the guitar without pain. He died on
December 6,1949 and never got to fully enjoy the fruits of his music. In
which Lead Belly's song catalog is consisted of well over 500 songs.
The most famous were Midnight Special, Cotton Fields, Boll Weevil,
Kisses Sweeter than Wine, Rock Island Line, and many, many more. After Lead Belly’s death, the Weavers, a folk quartet sent “Good Night,
Irene” to #1 on the charts, which became the most famous song in his
repertoire. That song sold a million copies and was recorded also six
months later by Pete Seeger. His music still has a great influence on
some of the greatest artists both black and white. Artists like The
Beetles, The Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Little Richard,have all
expressed their early studies of music to Lead Belly's records. Today Lead Belly is remembered not only as a musical giant but a legend
in his own right throughout the world. He is remembered as the “King of
the 12-String Guitar.” Many of his songs can be found in the Library of
Congress, where generations to come can listen and enjoy them.
Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection,
the first career-spanning box set dedicated to the American music icon,
is a 5 CD, 140-page, large-format book featuring 5 hours of music with
16 unreleased tracks. The limited-edition poster and t-shirt package has
sold out. Lead Belly is “the hard name of a harder man,” said Woody Guthrie of
his friend and fellow American music icon who was born Huddie Ledbetter
(c. 1888–1949). From the swamplands of Louisiana, the prisons of Texas,
and the streets of New York City, Lead Belly and his music became
cornerstones of American folk music and touchstones of African American
cultural legacy. With his 12-string Stella guitar, he sang out a cornucopia of songs
that included his classics “The Midnight Special,” “Irene,” “The
Bourgeois Blues,” and many more, which in turn have been covered by
musical notables such as the Beach Boys, Creedence Clearwater Revival,
Van Morrison, Nirvana, Odetta, Little Richard, Pete Seeger, Frank
Sinatra and Tom Waits. Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection
brings us the story of the man as well as the musician. 5 Discs, 108
tracks (16 unreleased), 5 hours of music, historic photos, extensive
notes, and 140-page book.
Limited-Edition Poster and T-Shirt
Designed by Fritz Klaetke (Visual Dialogue), GRAMMY-winning art director for Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection,
this unframed, 16” x 20” poster is individually numbered out of 300 and
printed on high-quality paper with matte finish. The unisex t-shirt is
printed on 100% cotton.
This project was produced in coordination with the Lead Belly Estate, The John Reynolds Collection/Lead Belly Society, and the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
In the years since John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax met Huddie Ledbetter
at Angola Prison in Louisiana, a series of dramatic stories and
anecdotes about the extent and nature of their meeting and subsequent
collaboration have arisen time and again, giving the episode a
mythological dimension. Particularly in folk music circles, the Lead
Belly-Lomax story became a focus for anger and guilt over racism and the
desire to compensate for black exclusion and exploitation. It produced
its own folklore and stereotypes, which stemmed in part from
misinformation and the tendency to apply contemporary assumptions and
expectations to a different place and time.
The FAQ and Chronology represent an attempt to disentangle questions
that still perturb the families of the protagonists, as well as the
musicians, scholars, journalists, and folk music enthusiasts who care
about these matters and the larger questions they raise. John A. Lomax was born two years after the end of the Civil War. He grew
up in a South still adjusting to the abolition of slavery. Lomax
recorded and published African-American folk music and advocated an
appreciation of it that ran counter to the prevailing views and
prejudices.During the Depression John A., then in his
sixties, found himself jobless and a widower with children. John Lomax
Jr. urged his father to resume collecting and to begin a new series of
lecture tours with himself as personal assistant, a job later assumed by
Alan Lomax, Huddie Ledbetter, and Ruby Terrill Lomax, successively. The
talented and independent Huddie Leadbetter, who was also a product of
the nineteenth century, was subject to the secondary status forced upon
African-Americans, but it was his steadfast ambition to make a
successful career in music. The youthful Alan Lomax respected his
father’s work, but they clashed on issues of social and cultural
politics. The association between Lead Belly and the elder Lomax lasted
only six months and ended on bad terms, though Lead Belly later
attempted to reconcile. Lead Belly and Alan Lomax, however, remained
friends and continued to collaborate for the rest of Lead Belly’s life.
Before the twentieth century there were no audio recordings, and the
documentation and publishing of music was done entirely on paper. The
Lomaxes were among the first folklorists to make audio documents of
rural artists; and this at a time when the laws and standards pertaining
to recording and music publishing deals were in their infancy and the
intellectual property rights of traditional singers in folk songs were
considered highly questionable or non-existent.
Both independently and in collaboration, John A. Lomax, Huddie
Ledbetter, and Alan Lomax left an enduring legacy that helped to bring
African-American folk song into the musical and cultural fabric of our
lives. The fact that their relationship is sometimes characterized by
villainy or victimization says more about our ongoing collective
struggle to deal with a history of racial injustice than it does about
these people and their actions.
Sources:
Correspondence between John A. Lomax, Huddie Ledbetter, Alan Lomax,
Elizabeth Harold, Martha Ledbetter, and Howard S. Richmond, the Richmond
Organization and its subsidiaries; eyewitness accounts; contracts
between John Lomax, Lead Belly, Macmillan Publishers, Alan Lomax, and
the Richmond Organization; birth and death records; Accurint; Social
Security Death Index; Genealogy Records; and books and articles written
over the years. We are especially indebted to the biographies on John A.
Lomax by Nolan Porterfield and on Huddie Ledbetter by Kip Lornell and
Charles Wolfe, but where possible have rechecked the facts for
ourselves. Most primary sources came from the Alan Lomax Archive and the
Library of Congress. There we have found information about the
publishing previously unknown to us or to anyone, as well as a few
sources that were misquoted by mistake, or perhaps for effect, in other
works.
Frequently Asked Questions
“Alan and I were looking particularly for the song of the Negro
laborer, the words of which sometimes reflect the tragedies of
imprisonment, cold, hunger, heat, the injustice of the white man.”1
How is Lead Belly’s name pronounced and spelled?
Huddie is pronounced with a long “u”: Hugh-dee. His nickname “Lead
Belly,” denoting toughness, was probably acquired during his six-year
stint at Sugarland Penitentiary in Texas. It was originally spelled as
two words, but with the modern tendency to spell compound nouns as one
word, the one-word spelling became prevalent and was used by his
biographers, Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell in The Life and Legend of Leadbelly (Harper
Collins, 1992 and Da Capo Press, 1999). Both are considered correct.
Recently there has been a trend towards using the original Lead Belly,
which his family prefers and is on his tombstone.
Who was John Avery Lomax and what was his background?
John Avery Lomax was born in 1867 shortly after the end of the Civil
War, in Goodman, Mississippi. His father, then in his fifties, had been
conscripted to do forced labor as a shoemaker on the Confederate side
during the Civil War. When he was two, the Lomax family traveled by ox
cart to become pioneer farmers on the frontier in Meridian, Bosque
County, Texas, near a branch of the old Chisholm Trail. John Lomax’s
early passion for folk music was nourished by the African-American and
cowboy songs he heard in his childhood, and as a teenager he began
writing them down. At age 21 he left home to pursue his education,
having fulfilled his legal obligation to help his father on the farm
with manual labor. He attended a Methodist normal school, taught English
for a few years in a business school and in 1895 enrolled in the
University of Texas. His professors were dismissive when he showed them
the cowboy songs he had collected and, in his mortification, he burned
them. At the age of thirty, Lomax completed his B.A. in English
literature at the University of Texas in two years instead of four.
After graduation he worked at the University of Texas as registrar,
manager of the men’s dorm, and personal secretary to the president of
the University. In 1903, he became an English teacher at Texas A&M
University, but he did not give up his interest in scholarship and folk
songs and continued to take graduate courses in the summer at the
University of Chicago and at Harvard, where he was awarded an M.A.
degree in English.
What was Lead Belly’s background and education?
Huddie Ledbetter was born in either 1885 or 1888 (according to census
records), the only son of Sallie (who was half Native American) and Wes
Ledbetter, a hardworking couple, originally sharecroppers, who operated
their own farm. His was a loving nuclear family, and there was also
large extended family of cousins and uncles. Lead Belly attended school
until eighth grade. He was an eager pupil who didn’t mind the two-mile
walk to school. A relative recalled him as “a pretty good student [who]
sometimes rode a horse. He’d come down the road, singing, on his
beautiful pony, black, with a star on his face.”2 He later took courses,
probably at high school level, at Bishop College in Marshall, Texas.
Lead Belly’s childhood was not without shadows: providing for a family
on the rural frontier was tough, and sometimes Wes vented his
frustrations on his wife. Lead Belly told the Lomaxes that as he got
older he would go over by the door where he could reach the shotgun and
stand there “looking and listening” to make them stop fighting.3
What were John A. Lomax and Lead Belly’s social status?
John A. Lomax’s background as one of many children of a small
homesteader was fairly modest, although his family appears to have had
more books than his neighbors. As a child he excelled at spelling bees.
His schooling, however, was irregular and was subordinate to manual
labor on the farm. Lomax was able to alter his condition through the
sustained efforts he made in his twenties and thirties to catch up in
his schooling. Lomax belonged to two cultural traditions: he was a
himself a participant in the vernacular oral culture that he documented —
people remember his skills as a raconteur and even as a folk singer—
but he also became a learned man, and was self-conscious in straddling
his two roles.4For example, in Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly,
when using the word “nigger” in a chapter heading “The ‘Worldly
Nigger,’” he puts the phrase in quotation marks and adds a
semi-exculpatory footnote: “This pronunciation, ‘nigger,’ is almost
universal among Negro laborers in the Southern states. Lead Belly
invariably thus referred to himself and other blacks.”
Like John A. Lomax, Lead Belly also grew up on the frontier in a family
of relatively prosperous and stable small farmers who owned their own
land. His childhood coincided with a brief window of time before the
hardening of the racist Jim Crow system progressively closed off
opportunities for African Americans.5 Lead Belly’s background is not
atypical among folk artists whose skilled musicianship and unusually
broad repertoires lead them to be regarded in their communities as
tradition bearers.
What musical training did Lead Belly have?
As a child, Lead Belly showed a precocious musical ability. As a very
little boy he made his own fife and learned to play it. “He would sit in
his little rocking chair. His feet could not touch the ground, but he
could play tunes on the accordion and mandolin.”6 His mother led the
church choir and two of his uncles were songsters — semi-professional
musicians with wide repertoires, who played at dances, parties,
including children’s birthday parties, and church events. His first
instrument was the “windjammer” (accordion), and one of his uncles later
taught him to play guitar. He had some musical instruction at the Lake
Chapel School, where a teacher named George Summers organized a student
string band. Lead Belly could also play boogie-woogie piano.
Occasionally, as a young man, he played the organ at church services.
When in his twenties he sang on street corners and in sukey jumps
(informal parties) in Dallas, as part of a duo with Blind Lemon
Jefferson, and also did soft shoe dancing. He played music in winter and
farmed in summer. Lead Belly’s singing style, with its impressive
dynamic range and his varied repertoire (including songs for children’s
parties and folk adaptations of sentimental vaudeville songs), provides a
window into those pre-mass media, pre-microphone days.
How did John A. Lomax become an authority on folk music?
In 1907, at the age of forty, Lomax entered Harvard University as a
full-time graduate student. There he succeeded in interesting the
eminent scholars Barrett Wendell and George Lyman
Kittredge 7 (son-in-law of renowned ballad scholar Francis J. Child) in
vernacular music.8 Lomax convinced his professors that cowboy songs were
part of an authentic American musical and poetic phenomenon and with
their support received a Sheldon grant to research and collect them. He
published the results in 1910 as Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads with
an introduction by President Theodore Roosevelt, to critical and
popular acclaim. The book contained such celebrated songs as “The Old
Chisholm Trail,” “Git Along Little Doggies,” and “A Home on the Range,”
which Lomax had collected from an African-American cowboy trail cook in
1908.9 The publication of Cowboy Songs created nationwide
interest in American folk songs.10 Backed by Kittredge, Lomax was
elected to serve as the first president of the American Folklore
Society.
Encouraged by Wendell and Kittredge, John A. Lomax and Professor
Leonidas Payne of the University of Texas co-founded the Texas Folklore
Society. Among the founding or early members were Stith Thompson (author
of the six-volume Motif-Index of Folk-Literature,1932–37); folklorist, novelist, and scholar Dorothy Scarborough (On the Trail of Negro Folksongs [1925] and A Song Catcher in the Southern Mountains [1937]);
and celebrated Texas folklorist J. Frank Dobie. A key mission of the
society articulated by Lomax was documenting folklore of Texas and in
particular, the unexplored fields of African-American and Mexican
folklore before it disappeared, to preserve it for the analysis of later
scholars. The Society’s first official folklore publication was a
monograph by William H. Thomas entitled “Some Current Folk-Songs of the
Negro” (1912). The first volume of the Publications of the Texas Folklore Society, edited by Stith Thompson in 1916 and reissued in 1935 by J. Frank Dobie as Round the Levee,
contains an paper by Lomax on the “Unexplored Treasures of Texas
Folklore” urging his colleagues to place a higher value on the cultural
treasures to be found on their own doorstep, a theme that was to recur
in one form or another in his and Alan Lomax’s subsequent writings.
Lomax worked as an administrator at the University of Texas from 1910
to 1917, when he lost his job in a politically motivated mass firing by
Governor James Ferguson. The governor was subsequently impeached and
most of the faculty rehired, but Lomax, who had found work as a bond
salesman in a Chicago bank, did not return to college administration.
Instead, he divided his time during the next fifteen years between
banking jobs, working with the Texas Folklore Society and with
University of Texas alumni groups, corresponding and lecturing on folk
music, and teaching some Harvard classes for his former mentors. He was
assisted and supported in these endeavors by his wife Bess Brown Lomax
and their four children, Shirley, John Jr., Alan, and Bess. In the
nineteen twenties he sold bonds for the Republic National Bank in Dallas
but continued to envision writing a second and more inclusive book on
American folk music.
How did Lead Belly become the “King of the Twelve-String Guitar”?
Lead Belly played mandolin, harmonica, string bass, windjammer,
accordion, and piano, but he adopted the twelve-string guitar (invented
in Mexico, and which he first heard in 1910) as his signature
instrument. The volume of the twelve-string and Lead Belly’s resonant
voice enabled him to compete with the noise of the honky tonks where he
often played, and to attract attention on street corners. Lead Belly was
also captivated by the twelve-string’s distinctive metallic sound,
which he believed appealed to women. Interestingly, when he was in
California late in his career, he selected a dolceola, an unusual instrument a metallic zither-like quality, as one of the instruments to accompany a recording of his singing.
Did Lead Belly write “Goodnight, Irene”?
No, he learned it from his songster uncles. In 1940, John A. Lomax
recorded Lead Belly’s uncle Bob Ledbetter, singing the same version. The
song had undergone a transformation into a vernacular idiom, purging it
of its original flowery, literary elements, but ultimately it derives
from a sentimental waltz composed by Gussie Lord Davis, an
African-American Tin Pan Alley composer active in the 1890s, whose songs
were sold as sheet music and performed in minstrel shows. Lead Belly
seems to have learned it in 1908 or 1909 and to have adapted it to the
twelve-string guitar. It was his signature song and had a special
meaning for him. As a young man he is said to have loved to sing it for
his little niece, Irene Betts, who was so tiny as a baby she was put to
sleep on a pillow and whom he and his first wife, Lethe, fostered after
the death of Irene’s mother. Lead Belly was known for his special
rapport with children.
Why was Lead Belly in prison?
Lead Belly was an industrious, almost driven worker who, when not
earning money as a musician, farmed, drove a truck, worked in the oil
industry, and as a mechanic and gas station attendant. But a frontier
area like Texas was a violent place where the code duello was
the custom, and all classes of people carried pistols for self-defense.
When he turned sixteen, Lead Belly’s father presented him with his own
pistol. As a musician, he found himself in dangerous neighborhoods and
situations where there was a lot of drinking. Ellen Hawes remembers Lead
Belly explaining that when you worked in one of those dives you had to
position yourself in a corner or you could be attacked from all sides,
and that if he had not killed the men he did he would have been killed
himself.
Lead Belly’s legal problems stemmed from involvement in fights, often
over women, and usually while under the influence of alcohol. Since his
boyhood, he had been known for his quick temper, “He didn’t take
anything off of black or white. If you put your hand on his shoulder, he
just as soon, you know, knock it off or cut you,” a relative
recalled.11 The circumstances of Lead Belly’s first arrest at age 27 are
unclear. He was officially charged with carrying a pistol and sentenced
to do time on a chain gang, a punishment he found so intolerable that
he managed to escape to another county, where he lived under an assumed
name. In 1917 when he was 33 and living under the name of Walter Boyd, Lead
Belly was arrested a second time for the shooting death of an
acquaintance during a brawl, although he maintained that the other man
had drawn his pistol first and that he had acted in self-defense.
Although the evidence was only circumstantial, he was convicted after a
hasty trial and sentenced to a term of seven to twenty years. Though he
was later imprisoned for involvement in fighting, this was the only time
Lead Belly was ever convicted of murder. Lead Belly’s parents lost
their farm because of the expense of paying for a lawyer to defend their
son.
Lead Belly’s prison experiences proved an albatross he could never
shake. The publicity he got at the outset of the musical career he began
with John Lomax, and in his subsequent appearances in revues, depicted a
violent past and dwelled upon his status as a former convict and the
myth of providential release. As late as 1970, when Gordon Parks made a
movie based on Lead Belly’s life, he set the story in 1934, the year
Lead Belly was released from Angola.
Did Lead Belly’s musical talent win him a pardon from Texas Governor Neff?
Yes. During the first year of his imprisonment in Texas Lead Belly made
one more escape attempt, but upon his transfer to Sugarland he became an
exemplary inmate, who prided himself on working harder than anyone else
in a deliberate effort to win early release. Lead Belly’s musical
abilities became known and he was asked to entertain the guards and
other prisoners. When Governor Pat Neff visited the penitentiary, Lead
Belly sang a song for the occasion, comparing his own plight with the
biblical Paul and Silas who were set free after an earthquake, an
approach tailored to appeal to the Governor, a highly religious
Baptist. 12 Neff returned several times to hear Lead Belly perform,
bringing parties of guests with him to the prison. Though he was not one
to issue pardons frivolously — he had campaigned for office against the
selling of pardons and granted only five in his term — the governor
commuted Lead Belly’s sentence in 1925. Lead Belly had served all but a
few months of his seven-year minimum. Lead Belly prided himself on being active in shaping his own destiny
and was himself struck by the powerful effect of the song he had
fashioned. This episode was later conflated with the events surrounding
Lead Belly’s release from Angola, and the fairy-tale character of the
resulting story greatly appealed to the public.
Why was Lead Belly sentenced to Angola?
In 1930 Lead Belly was jailed in Louisiana charged with “assault with
intent to murder.” He told the Lomaxes that he had been in a fight with
six black men and had killed one of them, but this probably referred to a
different incident. Court records show that he sentenced to hard labor
at Angola, an 18,000-acre complex of converted antebellum plantations,
for pulling a knife on a white man during a fight in Shreveport. His
relatives explained that while Lead Belly was listening to a group of
Salvation Army musicians he began to do a soft-shoe dance and was
jostled by group of white men. Knives were drawn and Lead Belly, drawing
the penknife that he used to make slides on his guitar, cut one of the
men on the arm. He received a five-to ten-year prison term after a
one-day trial.
Why did John A. Lomax again take up folk song collecting in his sixties?
In 1931, Bess Brown Lomax died at the age of fifty, leaving four
children, the youngest age ten. Then the bank where Lomax worked failed
in the stock market crash. John A. Lomax, now in his mid-sixties, found
himself jobless and despondent during the depths of the Great
Depression. John Lomax Jr. urged his father to return to his old
passion, to begin collecting and lecturing again with himself as
personal assistant. This job was assumed by Alan Lomax in 1933, later by
Huddie Ledbetter, finally by Ruby Terrill Lomax. Their road trip included New York City where in June 1932 Lomax
successfully proposed a new and inclusive anthology of American folk
songs to the Macmillan Publishing Company. Lomax then went to Washington
to review the holdings in the Archive of American Folk Song at the
Library of Congress, where John Jr. had arranged a meeting for him with
its director, Robert Winslow Gordon, who was keenly interested in
expanding the folk song archive and in using up-to-date audio recording
technology to collect material, though there were no funds for this.
Lomax made an arrangement with Gordon and Carl Engel, chief of the Music
Division, whereby the Library would provide audio equipment and
recording blanks in exchange for which Lomax would travel the country
using his expertise to record songs to add to the Archive with financing
from private sources. Lomax obtained a grant from the Council of
Learned Societies to fund the trip. The Carnegie Corporation helped
cover expenses for further field trips.
Why did the Lomaxes record in prisons?13
Searching for traditional material among marginalized populations and in
remote localities was consistent with contemporary folklore theory and
practice. English ballads once common to all of the British Isles and
Ireland had survived in Scotland and Appalachia, in the Border districts
of England, and among the Travelers; French songs extinct on the
mainland occurred in Haiti, Louisiana, and Canada. In their book Negro Workaday Songs (1926),
folklorists Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson had written: “If one
wishes to obtain anything like and accurate picture of the workaday
Negro he will surely find much of his best setting in the chain gang,
prison, or in the situations of the ever-fleeing fugitive from
‘chaingang houn,’ high sheriff, or policeman” and Robert Winslow Gordon
had noted the same thing. (Ted Gioia, Work Songs, Durham: Duke
University Press, 2006, p. 205).14 Southern penitentiaries were a distinctive environment. David Oshinsky
them to an “American Siberia.” They were run as economically
self-sufficient tracts with “no walls and few fences,” in which convicts
performed forced labor whose fruits enriched the state and also private
farmers. Prisoners were often held for decades in these camps, where
parole was unknown and pardon often the only recourse. Radio and
commercial recordings scarcely penetrated them, and group work songs
were sung as they had been before the rise of sharecrop farming. Alan
Lomax observed that a visitor could hear the powerful sound of the work
crews singing from a mile away, a sound that “could almost take you off
your feet.”15 These work songs continued to evolve independently, shaped
by the exigencies of the prison environment. Lead Belly, knew this
repertoire as well as retaining performance styles and repertoires from
an earlier era
When did the John A. Lomax first hear Lead Belly?
John A. and Alan Lomax first heard Lead Belly in July 1933. As he had in
Texas, Lead Belly was acting as a trusty, entertaining the men on
weekends.16 When John A. Lomax returned to Angola the following year, he
noted that Lead Belly now wore stripes (either as a punishment for some
offence or because the uniform had recently been reintroduced in
Louisiana after having been abolished for a time). The image of Lead
Belly wearing stripes was to figure prominently in accounts of Lead
Belly’s subsequent career.
Did John A. Lomax get Lead Belly released from Angola?
No, though he did attempt to. During the Lomaxes’ visit to Angola in
July 1934, Lead Belly found an opportunity to urge them to get him
released. Lomax took a recording with a plea for pardon on one side and
“Irene” on the other to the office of Louisiana Governor O. K. Allen,
but the Governor was not in and Lomax left the disc with a secretary.
Both men at first believed that their recording had helped to secure
Lead Belly’s release, and both enjoyed and told that story, particularly
Lead Belly. Its theme of rescue and redemption, the stress on Lead
Belly’s active role as the author of his own destiny had wide appeal
and. In his account of the incident Lomax’s biographer Nolan Porterfield
loses his objectivity when he implies that John Lomax engaged in
deliberate deception in telling the pardon story.17 It was only after he
and Lead Belly were estranged, however, that John Lomax was informed in
a letter sent to him by the governor’s office of the true facts about
Lead Belly’s release.
What were the actual circumstances of Lead Belly’s release?
Lead Belly had repeatedly petitioned the authorities for release from
Angola, and in 1933 the Pardons Board notified him that if Governor O.K.
Allen signed his petition, he would be released for good time on June
26, 1934. Due to a bureaucratic delay or a minor infraction of the rules
on Lead Belly’s part, he was actually set free on August 1 with the
proviso that if he got into trouble again in Louisiana, he would have to
serve the remaining time of his sentence in addition to any new
penalty.
Why did Lead Belly seek work with John A. Lomax?
Upon his release from Angola, Lead Belly looked for work in the oil
refineries of Shreveport, but jobs were scarce during the Depression.
Probably with the hope of resuming a musical career also in mind, he
wrote to Lomax offering his services as a valet, cook, and driver. The
previous year Lead Belly had offered his services to the Lomaxes as a
way of obtaining early release (for which having a job was required):
“I’ll drive your car, cook your meals, wash your clothes, and be your
man as long as I live,” he is supposed to have said.18 He wrote to Lomax
on July 20, 1934, and again three times in August. Lead Belly was an
experienced driver and mechanic and with his talent and wide repertoire,
John Lomax believed he could encourage others to sing. Lomax decided to
accept Lead Belly’s offer and wired, “Come prepared to travel. Bring
guitar.”
Present day commentators have stressed that Lead Belly was employed
as Lomax’s “chauffeur,” implying that Lead Belly was given a demeaning
position as a servant. The fact is that Alan, by then John Lomax’s usual
companion and helper on field trips, was recuperating from an illness.
Lomax had just obtained a grant from the Carnegie Corporation for a
collecting trip in Arkansas but at age sixty- seven could not attempt
either the driving or the carrying and setting up of equipment unaided;
he also needed an assistant with collecting.
For the next two months the two men got to know each other. Lead
Belly, performed for the prisoners, demonstrating the kinds of songs
that Lomax wanted, and, as an experienced busker, passed his hat, to
which the prisoners often contributed pennies. Where possible they
stayed in the same hotel. It was also Lomax’s custom on his lecture
tours to camp by the side of the road to save money. They were joined by
Alan Lomax in late November of 1934.
How long did Lead Belly work for John A. Lomax?
Surprisingly, Lead Belly worked for John A. Lomax for a little over six
months, from September 1934 until March 1935. For the first months he
was simply Lomax’s assistant and driver. Only during the last three
months did the singer perform for the larger public, when he began
participating in Lomax’s lectures on folk music. His short association
with John A. Lomax stands out prominently in Lead Belly’s biography
because it was such a critical period in the formation of his
presentational style, his repertoire, and above all in the kind of
reputation and audience he established.
How did the sensational publicity about Lead Belly come about?
Lead Belly was catapulted into the public spotlight in late December of
1934, when he began performing during John A. Lomax’s lectures and
fundraising attempts, first in Washington and then at a
“smoker-cum-sing-along” at the Modern Language Association annual
meeting held that year in Philadelphia. The MLA billed the program as,
“Negro Folksongs and Ballads presented by John Lomax and Alan Lomax with
the assistance of a Negro minstrel from Louisiana.” Twenty-four years
earlier Lomax’s paper “Cowboy Songs of the Mexican Border,” illustrated
with his own singing, had created a sensation at the MLA’s 1909 annual
meeting at Cornell. When Lead Belly and the Lomaxes arrived in
Washington, they entertained a party of distinguished people assembled
to welcome John A. Lomax, who was then Honorary Curator of the Library
of Congress’s Archive of American Folk Song. The next morning Lead Belly
sang for two groups of newspaper reporters, and in Philadelphia, local
reporters gathered to interview the party again. An article ran in one
of the country’s leading Black newspapers, the Philadelphia Independent,
inaccurately headlined “Two-Time Dixie Murderer Sings Way to Freedom.”
Lead Belly’s interview is significant in that it indicates how he
presented himself to a Black audience, depicting his situation with
imagery drawn from a common cultural fund:
Asked what inspired him to sing to attract the attention
of Governor Pat Neff, Lead Belly said he thought of the Biblical Paul
and Silas in prison. He reviewed how they both sang and prayed at the
midnight hour … and how the earth trembled and the walls of the prison
shook, the locks on the cell doors fell and they walked out free. Lead
Belly visioned [sic] the Biblical miracle and it seemed as if the very
locks on the prison cell were dropping. But they weren’t. Then he sang a
song he had composed himself. He waited until Governor Neff made his
regular visit to the prison and then serenaded the Texas chief executive
with the lines, “If I had you, Hon. Governor Neff, where you got me,
I’d wake up in the morning and set you free.”19
Lead Belly’s eloquent use of biblical language and references, sure
to strike home for Southern audiences, black and white, is illustrative
of his ability to adapt his self-presentation to his audience, evident
also in his later involvement with the folk song revival movement. The
archetypal motif of winning redemption through talismanic song also
contributed to the fascination of the Lead Belly legend.
But other factors were also at play. John A. and Alan Lomax’s book, American Ballads and Folk Songs, had just been published (c. October 1934). The movie, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang,
in which Paul Muni wore stripes, had been released in 1932 and had
drawn attention to the injustice of the Southern prison system. Finally,
and most importantly, people were struck by the total novelty of a
recently imprisoned African-American performing for an audience of white
professors, authors, politicians, and other prominent people in such
venues as the MLA conference, Ivy League colleges, and the Library of
Congress.
What was the article that made Lead Belly famous?
An article in the New York Herald Tribune on January 3, 1935
established Lead Belly’s fame. Its account of his meeting with the
Lomaxes was substantially the same as that in John Lomax’s book,
reporting that “Lead Belly made a tremendous hit when he sang before the
Modern Language Association in Philadelphia last Friday. He is
scheduled to sing next week at Yale and a few days later at Harvard
University, where Mr. Lomax is to lecture on his work.”The Lomaxes were
appalled, however, by the article’s grotesque headlines: “Lomax Arrives
with Lead Belly, Negro Minstrel. Sweet Singer of the Swamplands Here to
Do a Few Tunes Between Homicides,” reflective of the knee-jerk racism of
the time. (Headlines are usually the work of the newspaper editor, not
the reporter who writes the story.) It was ironic that on this occasion
and often in the future publicity about Lead Belly and the Lomaxes was
marred with lurid accounts of violence on Lead Belly’s part or charges
of racism and exploitation on John Lomax’s. Such distortions of Lead
Belly’s story, in one form or another, by the media and various
journalists have haunted the Ledbetters and the Lomaxes for decades.
A contributory factor was that on the morning of the interview Lomax
was upset because Lead Belly had been out all night in Harlem, where he
had lodged alone the previous night because no hotel would accept their
racially mixed party. The singer had shown up the next day intoxicated,
making them late for an appointment with Macmillan, where they were
scheduled to discuss book contracts. According to John A. Lomax, Lead
Belly boasted that he was a better singer than Cab Calloway, saying
that, “If I wasn’t so drunk I could make a million dollars today” before
being escorted to bed to sleep it off.20 The exasperated Lomax
apparently either unloaded on or tried to excuse Lead Belly’s
over-the-top behavior to the Tribune reporter and was quoted as
saying: “Lead Belly… is a natural,” with “no idea of money, law or
ethics, and who was possessed of virtually no self-restraint.” If this
indirect quote was indeed reported accurately, it represents the most
negative thing Lomax said publicly about the Lead Belly. The incident
points up the culture clash between the straight-laced, Victorian and
the singer who had honed his repertoire in tough neighborhoods and
dives. That week Lomax wrote an anguished letter to his wife in Austin
about Lead Belly’s “dreadful debauch,” and his worries that the city
would soon destroy singer’s naturalness and sincerity. Such fears played
a part in his decision, at the age of sixty-eight, to become Lead
Belly’s manager.
How did John A. Lomax introduce Lead Belly at his first public concert?
Lead Belly’s first New York concert was at the Montclair Hotel on
January 4, 1935, at a meeting of the New York Chapter of the University
of Texas Alumni Society, of which John A. Lomax was the founding member.
He introduced the singer this way: “Northern people hear Negroes
playing and singing beautiful spirituals, which are too refined and are
unlike the true Southern spirituals. Or else they hear men and women on
the stage and radio, burlesquing their own songs. Whether or not it
sounds foolish to you, he plays with absolute sincerity. I’ve heard his
songs a hundred times, but I always get a thrill. To me his music is
real music.”
When did John Lomax become Lead Belly’s manager?
Lomax presented Lead Belly with a management contract on January 5,
1935, on the day after their joint appearance at a Texas Exes concert.
After the concert Lead Belly had received what Lomax believed were
dubious offers. He was anxious to protect Lead Belly from the
temptations of the big city, but he was also concerned about his own
career and the book he had agreed to write about Lead Belly —
apparently, John A. had planned to write about Negro music even before
his book on cowboy songs.
What were the terms of the management contract and who signed it?
The contract stipulated that Lomax represented the singer as “exclusive
manager, personal representative, and advisor” for a period of five
years. Lead Belly was to give Lomax fifty percent of his earnings, which
was a common commission at that time.21 Lomax was empowered to receive
funds and deduct expensesbefore turning them over to the singer.Some
weeks later Alan Lomax’s name was added to the contract as an equal
partner and Lead Belly’s share was reduced to a third. This would be
unacceptable under most circumstances today, however, from John A.
Lomax’s point of view, he and Alan not only arranged bookings for Lead
Belly and provided him with accommodations but also supplied him with
some of his material and were producers and performers in his act.
Moreover, Alan, who got along well with Lead Belly, was doing most of
the work interviewing him for the book. From John A. Lomax’s point of
view the three were participants in a joint enterprise. The subsequent
recording contract with the American Recording Company was signed by
John Lomax alone, as was customary in those days with blues and country
singers. Later that year, Lead Belly used the fact that he had not
signed the contract as a way to get out of it.
How did John Lomax’s reputation as a lecturer affect Lead Belly?
John Lomax’s role as an interpreter of Lead Belly’s material played a
crucial part in the latter’s early success. Lomax was an established
speaker with many contacts. He and Lead Belly appeared together on the
stage as a joint act in the same venues where John A. Lomax had
previously appeared alone. Alan Lomax recalled of these early programs
that his father “introduced Lead Belly, interpreted his utterly novel
material, made it understandable, just as do modern [folk festival]
presenters, but with far more charm.”22 John A. Lomax’s colorful,
provocative way with words, honed by decades of lecturing before
somnolent academics audiences, made him a more effective publicist than
he perhaps intended. Yet the sensationalism of headline writers
notwithstanding, Lomax introduced Lead Belly to audiences and into
circles where he was taken seriously as an artist and where he could
become an admired and respected representative of African-American
culture and of American vernacular culture as a whole.
How did Lead Belly forge what would become his signature performing style?
After the MLA concert Lead Belly expressed surprise that audiences
couldn’t understand his accent and didn’t know what his songs were
about. Alan Lomax, who transcribed the singer’s life story in early 1935
and later recorded his repertoire, encouraged him to add spoken
introductions and explanations to his songs. Lead Belly readily
cooperated. Alan Lomax told Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell, “It was one
of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen done. He actually remade all
of his songs from the time we were at the MLA conference to the time we
were in Wilton... He created these chante-fables in a month. For me that was the most remarkable thing he ever did.”23
Did John A. Lomax make Lead Belly perform in stripes?
Legend has it that John A. Lomax forced Lead Belly to perform in
stripes. Lomax himself refers to Lead Belly as performing in his prison
clothes, that is, the clothes he wore when he was released, these would
have been overalls such as farmers wore, not stripes. All descriptions
of Lead Belly’s performances for John A. Lomax refer to him as wearing
overalls with a bandana around his neck to disguise a scar. The
publicity photo that appeared on the cover of the Lomaxes’ book, Negro Songs as Sung by Lead Belly,
showed him in this outfit, barefoot, sitting on a bale of hay. Country
blues and country and hillbilly music was marketed in this way, with
white performers presented in overalls as well, even as late as the
1960s TV show “Hee Haw.” In his later career, Lead Belly, who was always
an elegant dresser, established a new image for folksingers by
performing while wearing a suit. Lead Belly’s own stationary in later
times, after he had become estranged from John A. Lomax, shows two
photos of the performer, one on the left, in overalls and the other on
the right, wearing a tuxedo and top hat. The image of Lead Belly in
prison stripes was diffused through a newsreel film made by Time magazine
and by a theater piece that Lead Belly had arranged to appear in for
several weeks in Harlem after his association with John A. Lomax had
ended.
What is the source of the prison stripes story?
On January 8, 1935, John Lomax and Lead Belly appeared on Time magazine’s March of Time radio
show featuring reenacted news (news was not yet be recorded in real
time.) The radio dramatization told how Lead Belly was released from
prison and featured some of his songs. It was broadcast nationwide and
heard in millions of homes. Soon after, Time initiated
production of filmed newsreels, also consisting of reenacted stories, to
be shown in movie theaters. The story of Lomax’s discovery of Lead
Belly was the second one of these, and was made over a two-day period in
February 1935. John A. Lomax is credited with assisting in writing the
screenplay — though Alan Lomax actually wrote a first version which was
overridden — and both John A. and Lead Belly appeared in it. In the
first scene, Lead Belly wore stripes to dramatize the occasion of their
meeting in Angola. This scene was to be balanced with depiction of Lead
Belly’s marriage to Martha Promise (in which the singer is shown wearing
a suit) and his singing of “Goodnight, Irene.” The final scene featured
an orchestra playing “Goodnight, Irene” in the background as Lead
Belly’s songs are deposited in the Library of Congress along with the
Declaration of Independence, a copy of which was shown.
John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax’s purpose in collaborating on this film
was to convey that music created by the Black working people of the
United States was an unjustly neglected national treasure, as important
to our heritage as our founding documents. Unfortunately, the final
movie was edited in a way that focused on the sensational part of the
story and deemphasized the final scenes. Shown in theaters nationwide,
the newsreel made Lead Belly a celebrity, and it was through it that the
image of the singer wearing stripes was imprinted on the public mind.
Though the film was not under the Lomaxes’ control — Alan Lomax in fact
hated it and it had been a huge mistake for them to entrust themselves
to mass media —it has been cited as evidence of John A. Lomax’s
degradation of Lead Belly. On the other hand, however, the film was
significant in presenting Lead Belly as an artist whose work was
valuable and relevant to American audiences of every ethnicity in an age
when Jim Crow and racist market segmentation were the norm.
How did Lead Belly get his first recording contract?
John A. Lomax got Lead Belly a recording contract with the American
Recording Company (ARC) through his friend and fellow UT alumnus Tex
Ritter, who had a role on a radio show as a singing cowboy and who later
became a Hollywood star. (Tex Ritter also was to help Lead Belly make
connections during the latter’s sojourn in Hollywood in the 1940s.) As
was then the practice with black artists, ARC marketed Lead Belly as
“race” music and recorded primarily his blues repertoire as having the
best commercial potential. Lead Belly made 40 sides for an advance of
$250 against royalties. Several records were issued but did not sell,
and the company did not release the rest, writing the project off as a
loss. Ironically, among the recordings that ARC did not introduce was
Lead Belly’s signature song “Irene,” which became a mass market hit
after Lead Belly’s death.
In arranging for Lead Belly to perform folk music for white
college audiences did John A. Lomax prevent Lead Belly from having a
commercial career?
Lomax believed in Lead Belly’s talent and thought both could make money
from his singing, but advised him to be faithful to his repertoire of
folk material. The commercial record company that recorded Lead Belly,
however, packaged him as a country blues singer and tried to market him
exclusively to the race music audience. Despite all the publicity, these
commercial recordings did not sell. Lomax and Lead Belly both perhaps
underestimated the entrenched racism of the entertainment industry; it
was also the Depression and disposable income to buy records was scarce.
Given the segregation and stereotyping of the music industry and of
Hollywood at the time, it is hard to imagine how Lead Belly could have
made it as a cross-over artist, much less as a black cowboy singer,
which is how he saw himself. In the popular media African-Americans were
allowed to appear only as servants or step-and-fetch-it characters and
only in segregated productions. It was not until the 1950s that black
artists were heard on “white radio,” and those that made it (such as
Sammy Davis, Jr., Nat King Cole, or Johnny Mathis) sounded almost
indistinguishable from white artists. The college, school, and camp
audiences where Lead Belly performed with John A. Lomax and later on his
own were among the few venues prepared to accept an interracial roster
of artists. As it turned out, Lead Belly’s music attained huge
commercial success, but only when mediated by white singers such as the
Weavers and Lonnie Donegan, both of whom made his music conform to
conventional pop musical expectations.
What is the story of Lead Belly’s biography published by Macmillan?
In January 1935, Lead Belly and the Lomaxes had given a lecture/concert
for the employees of Macmillan and as a result obtained a contract for a
new book about Lead Belly’s life and repertoire. This became Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly,
which would be published in November 1936 after being delayed a year by
lawsuits. Mostly in February and March 1935, the Lomaxes took down Lead
Belly’s repertoire and life story while the three men and Martha
Ledbetter were staying in Wilton, Connecticut, in a rental cottage owned
by Margaret Conklin, Lomax’s reader at Macmillan, and her roommate,
Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, a professor at NYU and later a benefactor of
Lead Belly’s.
The book is noteworthy as the first in-depth autobiographical account
of a folk singer from his/her point of view. Lead Belly’s story as told
by himself, his songs, and his explanations of them are transcribed
faithfully and constitute a valuable historical document. The tone of
John A. Lomax’s introductory section, describing his meeting with and
the breakup of his relationship Lead Belly would not be acceptable
today, however. A further drawback is the use of dialect spelling, which
is difficult to read and emphasizes Lead Belly’s exotic “otherness”;
this, however, was current practice, though fading, employed also by
such writers as Zora Neale Hurston. Reviews were tepid, although one reviewer called it “one of the most
amazing autobiographical accounts ever printed in America.”24 The
publicity surrounding the book boosted Lead Belly’s career at a time
when he was trying to make it on his own as a performer in New York
City, but it must have been galling to the singer because again it was
couched in racist stereotypes. For a 1937 review in Life magazine
the headline writer wrote: “Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel.” The body
of the article, however, was not inaccurate, noting that Martha
Ledbetter, not John A. Lomax, was acting as Lead Belly’s manager at that
time.
Did the book make money for the Lomaxes?
No. Like the records, the Lead Belly book was a commercial failure. John
A. Lomax’s cash payment to Lead Belly in settlement of their lawsuit
amounted to his share of the advance. In a letter to Alan Lomax, he
remarked bitterly, “Thus far Lead Belly has received $333.39 from the
book, more probably than you and I will ever get from it” (letter March
28, 1937).25
Why did Lead Belly and his family dislike the book Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly?
The book was written and published after the estrangement of John A.
Lomax and Lead Belly when there was considerable bitterness on both
sides. Most importantly, Lead Belly and his family didn’t want the
singer’s past to be publicly aired and emphasized in the way that it was
in the book; although Lead Belly himself had confided to the Lomaxes
and to others that he had killed several people in self-defense, such
aspects of the singer’s history should not have been dramatized. The
Ledbetters also doubtless objected to the self-righteous, patronizing
tone of John Lomax’s writing in the book, which no doubt reflected the
anger and disappointment he felt about his dealings with Lead Belly.
When they had first met, Lead Belly had told Lomax that he planned to
return to the small farm that his parents had owned. John A. Lomax,
himself an escapee from the grind of small farm life, appears to have
seen independent farming by black people as the solution of the race
problem and he set about unilaterally helping Lead Belly to accomplish
this goal.26 Once in New York, Lead Belly and Martha realized that the
risks of a career in entertainment in a big Northern city were
preferable to subsistence farming in the Jim Crow South. John A. Lomax
viewed the city as a place of destructive influences for someone like
Lead Belly and lamented what he saw as the Ledbetters’ ingratitude for
what he had done for them, obtusely refusing to see things from any
other viewpoint.
What was Alan Lomax’s opinion of the book?
Alan Lomax, who had done most of the interviewing, transcribing, and writing of the song notes in Negro Songs as Sung by Lead Belly,
did not share his father’s views. He came to feel that the book had
been misconceived and tried to distance himself from it. In Mister Jelly Roll (his Jelly Roll Morton biography) and The Rainbow Sign (based
on the life stories of Vera Hall and Dock Reed), Alan applied the
lessons learned from the mistakes of the Lead Belly book.
What were some of the tensions between John A. Lomax and Lead Belly?
John A. Lomax was autocratic and had the certainty of a Victorian pater familiasin
the rightness of his way of doing things with his own family and other
intimates, which would include the Ledbetters. Lead Belly was proud and
volatile and had a well-grounded confidence in his own talent. Lomax’s
insistence on handling all the money, including what Lead Belly earned
from passing his hat after performances, and later doling it out, must
have been infuriating. To help keep him on an even keel, Lomax arranged
for Lead Belly’s girl friend, Martha Promise, to come north and marry
him. During the wedding he announced to the press that he planned to
give all the money that Lead Belly made to Martha, whom he considered a
religious (and therefore more stable) person, so that the couple could
buy a farm with pigs and cattle similar to the one Lead Belly’s parents
had had.
The immediate cause of the quarrel is murky. There had been
intimations of trouble in mid-February 1935 when Lead Belly upset the
thrifty Lomax by outfitting the Lomax family car with new wheels, tires,
and hubcaps while John was away at a conference (Alan Lomax, in fact,
believed that Lead Belly’s dissatisfaction with John A. Lomax was
primarily motivated by his desire for a new car of his own27). John A.
Lomax blamed friendships Lead Belly and Martha had made during
automobile trips to a black community near Wilton: “His Norwalk
[Connecticut] intimates flattered his vanity, furnished him drink, and,
according to his own story, offered him contracts that would bring money
rolling in.”28 In any case, the seeds of conflict had already been sown
before the two embarked on their lecture trip.29
Why did John A. Lomax and Lead Belly part ways?
In March 1935, John A. Lomax and Lead Belly undertook a lecture/concert
tour of New England, culminating in two triumphant concerts at Harvard,
the first of which was sponsored by the Poetry Society of Cambridge and
the second by Dean Kenneth Murdoch. This was attended by George Lyman
Kittredge, the preeminent English professor and ballad scholar of the
day and Lomax’s former professor. By the time they reached Buffalo,
N.Y., however, John A. Lomax realized that he and Lead Belly could not
continue working together. Lead Belly entered the room in the Grosvenor
Library where Lomax was working, displayed his knife and demanded money,
causing Lomax to believe that his life was at risk.30 On Sunday, March
24, John A. Lomax parted from Lead Belly and Martha at the station as
they left New York for Shreveport. During the first three months of 1935
Lead Belly sang at many parties and other functions at which he
appeared with John A. Lomax, but, although folklore has it that the two
toured together for “a couple of years,” their joint lecture tour had
lasted slightly less than three weeks.31
Why did Lead Belly sue John Lomax and what was the outcome?
When John A. Lomax and Lead Belly parted, John A. gave Martha Ledbetter
$298 in three checks for $50 each and the balance in cash, without
informing Lead Belly that he had postdated the checks. He explained
later that he had arranged this with Martha to prevent Lead Belly from
spending the money all at once. When he discovered this, Lead Belly was
upset and sought legal aid. Their lawyer persuaded Lomax to send Lead
Belly all his money, which he did. Lead Belly then consulted two other
lawyers to look into the ARC contract, which had been signed by Lomax
alone. With race and hillbilly records it was common for the company to
pay royalties to an agent and for the agent to then pay lump sums to the
performer. Lead Belly’s lawyer wrote and requested that royalties be
paid directly to Lead Belly. This proved a moot point since there were
no royalties. Next, Huddie and Martha denied that they had signed the
performance contract, or would not have signed it if they had understood
it, and they threatened to sue. Macmillan urged Lomax to settle with
the Ledbetters, threatening to cancel publication of the forthcoming
book unless an agreement could be reached.
They reached a settlement on September 12, 1935. The New York
management contract was cancelled and Lead Belly agreed to give Lomax
one third of the ARC royalties.32 He accepted a cash payment from Lomax
and agreed to assign publication and other rights to Lomax for use in
the book. Ironically, during this period of litigation, Lead Belly, who
was having difficultly finding work in Shreveport, was still writing to
Lomax, hoping in vain to renew their performing partnership and assuring
him that he harbored no hard feelings.
Did John A. Lomax or Alan Lomax manage other artists?
No. Neither John A. nor Alan Lomax entered into formal management
agreements with any other artists they worked with. The contract with
Lead Belly was an aberration, apparently the result of the public uproar
caused by Lead Belly’s appearances in Philadelphia and New York City in
the winter of 1934–35.
Was John A. Lomax a racist who exploited Lead Belly for personal gain?
John A. Lomax would probably never have become a successful lecturer or
college administrator if he had maintained public views that differed
markedly from those of his contemporaries, few of whom acknowledged the
implications of segregation, lynching, or restrictive covenants, much
less spoke out against institutionalized racism. Before the 1920s, the
word “nigger” was in common use by both blacks and whites, especially in
private conversation, though this began to change, decade by decade,
arguably due in no small part to activism by people like Lead Belly,
Paul Robeson, Sterling Brown, and others. John A. Lomax’s sporadic
condescension toward African Americans may be considered at best
paternalistic and at worst racist; however, he was not a white
supremacist such as poet Allan Tate, who refused to shake the hand of
Langston Hughes. His attitudes were those of a moderatewhite Southerner
of the day, who believed that African-Americans needed to pull
themselves up by their bootstraps before they could be “ready” for full
equality. He spoke of Booker T. Washington, who accepted segregation, as
a “wise leader of his people.” However, on Election Day he would escort
African Americans to the polls as a statement that they ought to be
allowed to vote. He also admired the novels of Zora Neale Hurston.
Overall, he did not deny that injustices occurred but believed that it
was up to individuals, not governments, to remedy them.
Lomax deeply respected people whose racial and political attitudes
differed markedly from his own, such as, for example, the progressive
Carl Sandburg, who was a close friend. A life-long admirer of strong,
intellectual women, he was hurt that the progressive professor Mary
Elizabeth Barnicle shunned him because of his reactionary politics.
Throughout his life he personally went out of his way to help people,
financially and otherwise, and his actions regarding Lead Belly, however
misconceived, were part of this pattern.33 His racial attitudes,
although patriarchal, were contradictory and complex. He wrote that as a
boy one of his most significant relationships had been with a black
youth, Nat, who had worked for his father and whom he had taught to
read. He invited an African student, whom he referred to in his
autobiography as an African prince, to stay at his house as his guest.
He also asked Professor Kittredge to preach in a black church in Texas. Negro Folk Songs, while portraying Lead Belly as an “other,”compares his creative powers to those of Mozart and Michelangelo.
The fact is that, as Jerrold Hirsch points out in his study of John
A. Lomax and Lead Belly, there was a deep disconnect in the egalitarian
message of folk music and the actual situation of black Americans in the
United States, the implications of which were clear even if John A.
Lomax himself stopped short of articulating them.34 The songs of the
cowboy, homesteader, and manual laborer were held up as the embodiment
of the American ideals of equality and freedom. Teddy Roosevelt and Owen
Wister had been committed to the notion that Americans were as equal
around the cowboys’ campfire as King Arthur’s knights had been at the
Round Table. The conclusion was inescapable: as artists whom, as Lomax
had pointed out, had created some of the best American music of any
kind, not excluding cowboy songs, African-Americans were entitled to a
place at the table. The contradiction is epitomized in Alan Lomax’s
script for March of Time newsreel, with its juxtaposition of
the images of Lead Belly the convict and creator and the Declaration of
Independence, which proclaims that all men are created equal. When the
Weavers recorded “Goodnight, Irene” in 1950, they felt that the very
fact that they had chosen to sing a song by a black man who had been a
convict was a political statement in itself.
Did John A. Lomax’s racial and political attitudes ever evolve?
Not really. As someone who championed African American folk music, who
wrote an academic thesis on the English novelist George Meredith (who
wrote about “the new woman” at the turn of the twentieth century), Lomax
could have considered himself politically and socially progressive. By
the 1940s, however, his individualist politics looked increasingly
anachronistic and even reactionary. His hatred of Franklin Roosevelt’s
policies was almost obsessive. Lomax’s racial attitudes did not really evolve, though his expression of them may have. In his 1934 introduction to American Ballads and Folk Songs he
stated that he never witnessed mistreatment of inmates in Southern
penitentiaries. In subsequent books written with Alan Lomax he refrains
from such apparent endorsements of the Southern system. On a recording
trip to South Carolina in 1939, he and Ruby Terrill Lomax encountered
more than 100 convicts chained together in the broiling sun. They wrote
to Governor Burnet Maybank protesting that they had never seen anything
so “unnecessarily inhuman” and requested that he intervene. In making
his complaint Lomax emphasized his credentials as a Southerner, stating
that his father had been born in South Carolina and his mother in
Alabama: “By inheritance, I hold dear the righteous ideals of a Southern
man.” It is not known if Lomax’s appeal had any effect. Did Lead Belly try to advance a commercial performing career after his split with John A. Lomax?
After reaching a settlement with Lomax and Macmillan, Lead Belly
attempted a comeback in New York with a new manager. While in
Shreveport, he had gotten a job at a filling station earning 10 cents a
day. His boss, filling station owner John W. Townsend, had seen the March of Time newsreel
film and decided to give management a try. Townsend and his mother sold
their gas station and rented their home to raise money for the trip.
The foursome (including Martha Ledbetter) arrived in New York on March
2, 1936. The same Herald Tribune reporter who had written up
Lead Belly the year before, now wrote another story that the editors
headlined even more offensively than the previous one: “Ain’t It a Pity?
But Lead Belly Jingles Into City. Ebony Shufflin’Anthology of Swampland
Folksong Inhales Gin, Exhales Rhyme.”
Townsend’s money ran out and he returned home, but Lead Belly secured
a booking at the Lafayette Theater in Harlem, managed by Frank
Schiffman, a former New York City schoolteacher. Schiffman also got Lead
Belly a booking in a revue at the Apollo Theater in Harlem, where he
headlined for Cab Calloway. The Amsterdam News announced that
“Lead Belly, the pardoned killer,” “whose glorious voice and
heart-touching songs won him a pardon from the Governor of Texas!” would
be heading a revue supported by a cast of 65, black and white, but the
show was unfavorably reviewed and Harlem audiences stayed away.
Did Lead Belly perform in prison stripes while on his own?
Yes, Lead Belly did perform on stage while wearing stripes, but not
while touring with John A. Lomax. This happened in 1936, while Lead
Belly was attempting to make a New York comeback on his own. According
to Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell, Frank Schiffman, the white
owner-impresario of the Lafayette and Apollo Theaters in Harlem, devised
a skit for Lead Belly based on the previous year's March of
Time newsreel with its Orpheus-like story of Lead Belly singing himself
out of jail. In an interview with Wolfe and Lornell, Schiffman recalled
that Lead Belly appeared (costumed in stripes) thirty-one times a week
several times a day at the Lafayette Theater and was a "great success."
Other sources say that by 1936, Schiffman had converted the Lafayette
into movie theater, so it is likely that Lead Belly's performances took
place at his and Leo Brecher's celebrated Apollo Theater. An ad in the
April 1936 Amsterdam News announced that Lead Belly, "whose glorious
voice and heart-touching songs won him a pardon from the Governor of
Texas!" was headlining at the Apollo during Easter Week. The Apollo's
notoriously vocal audiences were not kind, apparently, and Lead Belly's
stage performance was also unfavorably reviewed in the New York Age, a
black paper (Lornell and Wolfe note that it was perhaps the only
unfavorable review of Lead Belly's entire career.) 35 In the late 1940s,
when John A. Lomax's autobiography, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter, was
optioned by Hollywood, Lead Belly offered to appear in stripes once
again, playing the role of himself opposite Bing Crosby, who was slated
to appear as Lomax. The film was never made, however.
How did Lead Belly become active as a folk singer in progressive circles in the 1930s and ’40s?
Alan Lomax and Mary Elizabeth Barnicle were instrumental in getting Lead
Belly work as a folk singer. Following his difficulties initiating a
commercial career, Lead Belly did odd jobs for Barnicle, at whose
weekend home Connecticut he had stayed with the Lomaxes. After
quarreling with John A. Lomax over money matters she had grown to
dislike the old man’s reactionary politics and Victorian manner, but had
become a close friend of Alan’s. A medievalist and folklorist, Barnicle
often brought folk performers into her classes at NYU. Through her,
Alan, and union organizer Tillman Cadle (later Barnicle’s husband), Lead
Belly got gigs performing in front of left-wing groups, where he put
his improvisatory talents to good use in creating topical songs. Friends
helped publicize Lead Belly in the pages of the Daily Worker and the New Masses as
the type of “people’s artist.” One of his compositions, “The Bourgeois
Blues,” inspired by his and Alan’s experience of Jim Crow while looking
for lodging in Washington, D.C., become widely popular. For a time he
starred in his own weekly 15-minute radio show on WNYC produced by
Henrietta Yurchenco, who recalls that “Woody Guthrie was constantly
saying that ‘We are learning everything from him.’”36 As an older man,
Lead Belly became a role model for younger folk musicians, and his and
Martha’s Second Avenue apartment became a place where folk musicians,
black and white, were welcomed and nurtured in both body and spirit.
Where did Lead Belly stand politically?
Although Lead Belly became part of a circle of activist singers who
included Aunt Molly Jackson (whom Woody Guthrie later called “a female
Lead Belly”), Josh White, Burl Ives, and Pete Seeger, it was acceptance
and recognition from the dominant culture that he primarily sought
rather than social change. Like many black people at the time, he
distrusted unions, since they often acted as enforcers of Jim Crow. One
political issue that did deeply engage him was civil rights, and he
composed a campaign song for Wendell Wilkie, when the Republican
candidate ran on a civil rights program. Apart from his keen interest in
this issue, it likely that Lead Belly substantially shared John A.
Lomax’s ideology of “bootstraps” individualism.
What other sources contributed to myths about Lead Belly?
Paralleling the racist stereotypes and distortions that appeared about
Lead Belly in the mainstream press, the alternative press disseminated
rhetorical inaccuracies about Lead Belly’s story, characterizing John A.
Lomax’s part in Lead Belly’s career as exploitative and racist and
Lomax as a type of Southern planter with a slave-owning bent. In late
1934, before Lomax and Lead Belly even arrived in New York, Lawrence
Gellert, a Hungarian-born folklorist and student of black music, used
the case of the Scottsboro boys to unleash a polemic in the New Masses attacking
John A. Lomax and accusing him of having bribed prison guards to get
songs. In particular, Lead Belly’s pardon story evoked his ire:
He [Lomax] had the “right connections.” Could go straight
to the Governor of Louisiana with a phonograph record by Lead Belly —
and presto — a pardon! Between gentlemen — a “nigger’s” lifetime — a
matter of a song! But imagine…. Governor Miller of Alabama with a record
sung by nine Scottsboro boys in chorus.37
In 1937 the author Richard Wright wrote a portrait of Lead Belly for the Daily Worker,
for which he was Harlem correspondent. He and Lead Belly had struck up a
friendship and become drinking partners. Wright was the son of
sharecroppers from Mississippi but had grown up in Memphis and Chicago.
His portrayal of Lead Belly, although psychologically more astute than
that of Gellert, was also somewhat fictionalized, and in some respects
prefigures his later characterization of Bigger Thomas. Wright described
Lead Belly as a strong black man who frightened white people with “his
fists and bitter songs” and his “inability to take injustice and like
it.” Wright also went after John A. Lomax, whom he termed a “Southern
landlord.” He portrayed the latter’s discovery of Lead Belly as a form
of cultural colonization, calling it “one of the great cultural swindles
in history.” Wright imaginatively accused John A. Lomax of having
“beguiled the singer with sugary promises, telling him that if he helped
him to gather folk songs from other Negro prisoners in other prisons,
he would make him rich.”38
Did Lead Belly ever again get in trouble with the law while living in New York?
Yes. On March 5, 1939, he was arrested for felonious assault. It is not
clear what happened, but there is speculation that the incident might
have involved an unwanted suitor who had been bothering Martha
Ledbetter; Huddie apparently stabbed an intruder numerous times. Lead
Belly didn’t have to serve his full sentence since, quite
coincidentally, while out on bond, he prevented a robbery in a liquor
store, tackling and holding the robber till the police arrived. He did
serve eight months, however.
In what ways did Alan Lomax assist Lead Belly?
Alan Lomax arranged for Lead Belly’s bail, and dropped the graduate
courses he was pursuing in ethnomusicology at Columbia University in
Spring 1939 to raise money for legal expenses and financial assistance
for Martha Ledbetter. At that time he also arranged for Lead Belly to
record a series of twelve-inch discs for Musicraft, a new label that had
been founded to record Baroque and pre-Bach organ music but which also
had embraced black folk music. These were the first recordings of folk
music ever to be issued in this format, and to contain a set of
explanatory notes and a biography of the singer. In 1998, Lead Belly
received a posthumous Grammy Award for this album. As Assistant in
Charge of the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song, Alan
Lomax recorded virtually all of Lead Belly’s repertoire as well as
stories about his early life for the Library. He also set up commercial
recording sessions for Lead Belly with RCA Victor and Musicraft, and
invited him to appear on network radio in the 1940s.
How successful was Lead Belly?
Lead Belly became a revered figure as a folksinger, but died before
achieving commercial success commensurate with his fame during his
lifetime. He had arrived in New York City at the age of 47, at a time
when jobs were scarce, having spent years in prison and out of touch
with the popular tastes. Nor did he have a family network to fall back
on in New York as many bluesmen did in other cities. During the late
thirties, Lead Belly and Martha had to rely on public assistance and
what Martha could make cleaning houses. Nevertheless, by the mid-to-late
1940s Lead Belly had started to earn decent fees performing on the
school and college concert circuit. In 1949, he traveled to Paris, where
tragically, the fatal illness that was to kill him first manifested
itself. Ironically, it was only in 1950, after his and John A. Lomax’s
deaths, that “Goodnight, Irene” became a big commercial hit, as
performed by the Weavers and other groups. But if Lead Belly had reason
for disappointment, he could also look on the accomplishments of his
life with satisfaction. His artistry not only helped to bring folk music
to wide audiences, but also accrued for Lead Belly an immense measure
of personal respect. Lornell and Wolfe quote an anecdote that Lead Belly
told toward the end of his life after a performance in Dallas, where he
had once roamed the streets with Blind Lemon Jefferson and which was
still part of the solid, pre-civil rights South:
I was sitting out in the back during intermission.
Sitting there resting, playing the guitar, and a boy, maybe ten years
old came up to me. He looked at me playing the guitar. Listened to me,
looked at me. After a while he says,” Boy, you got some pretty good
stuff.” I looked at him and I say, “Thank you, son. I been trying for
almost sixty years.” That boy looked at me. He didn’t say nothing, just
listened for a while. When he was about ready to go, he said, “Goodbye,
Mr. Ledbetter. I hope you come back next year.” You know, when a white
boy in Dallas call a nigga “Mister,” he’s just learned something.39
When did “Goodnight, Irene” become a hit?
In 1950, six months after Lead Belly’s death, “Goodnight, Irene” was
issued as the flipside of the Weavers’ first single, “Tzena, Tzena,”
with the label stating that the song was “by [band leader] Gordon
Jenkins and the Weavers.” Pete Seeger recalled that it was through
Jenkins’ enthusiastic insistence that they recorded it.40 Even though
the song’s arrangement featured string orchestra and choral
accompaniment (as a gesture to the pop music audience’s expectations),
the energy and fervor of the Weavers’ performance effectively evoked the
memory of Lead Belly’s driving vitality, which contrasted markedly with
the complacency of more usual popular fare. “Goodnight, Irene” became
the surprise best seller of 1950, selling more than two million copies.
(“I’ll kiss you in my dreams,” Lead Belly’s refrain, as transcribed in Negro Songs as Sung by Lead Belly was
changed in the Weavers’ version to “I’ll see you in my dreams”; he had
originally sung it for John A. Lomax in 1934 as “I’ll get you in my
dreams.”) According to Ron Cohen, Time Magazine (sister publication of Life,
which had earlier called Lead Belly a “bad nigger”) blessed the
Weavers, “with a glowing piece in mid-August [1950]. The piece focused
on ‘the murderous old Minstrel Lead Belly’ and his singing of ‘Irene,’
‘his coal-black face gleaming fiercely and his horny hands scratching
his twelve-string guitar... Last week the old minstrel’s old song,
prettied and cut in half, was fifth place on the hit parade.’”41 In
September, Time reported that folk music had “come out of its
corner” and was now no longer limited to what it called (with a
typically triangulating turn of phrase) “long-haired purists.” Yet the
enthusiasts who had produced and promoted “Good Night Irene,” had hardly
been “long-haired purists,” but were rather fans located in the very
heart of the commercial music industry, confirming the perennial appeal
of the genre (until recently termed the “music of the common man”),
which, through its links to the past and to a wide range of human
experiences, intersected with and nourished multiple forms of musical
expression. Among the performers who recorded “Goodnight, Irene” were
Gene Autry, Johnny Cash, Nat King Cole, Ry Cooder, Floyd Cramer, Dennis
Day, Dr. John, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mississippi John Hurt, the Kingston
Trio, Les Paul and Mary Ford, Jerry Lee Lewis, Little Richard, Odetta,
Leon Russell, Frank Sinatra, Jo Stafford, and Ernest Tubb.
What specific circumstances led to the publishing of “Goodnight, Irene”?
Harold Leventhal and Pete Kameron, who represented the Weavers,
submitted an agreement to Martha Ledbetter and Alan Lomax in June of
1950 to assign the rights to the song to their publishing company, World
Wide Music. Martha Ledbetter, who represented Huddie’s estate, and Alan
Lomax, on behalf of John’s, agreed to a credit for the song as being
“written and arranged by Huddie Ledbetter and John A. Lomax.” Alan
discussed this agreement in detail with his family, Pete Seeger, and
others. Alan Lomax originally thought that the Macmillan Publishing
Company’s copyright on Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly would
protect the arrangement credits for the individual songs in the book.
But Macmillan, with little expertise in the music publishing business,
and little interest in a book that had been out of print for over ten
years, was unwilling and unable to administer rights to the song. In
September of 1951, Macmillan allowed the rights of the book to revert
back to the authors, John A. and Alan Lomax.
The publishing agreement with World Wide Music assigned Huddie Ledbetter
and John A. Lomax, as writer/arrangers of the Lead Belly version of the
song, 50% of the publishing monies that would be collected for the
Weavers new hit, allotting the other 50% to World Wide. Additionally,
the agreement stipulated that of the writers share, the Ledbetter and
Lomax estates would each only get a third, giving the other third to
World Wide Music, a claim that they made on behalf of the members of the
Weavers. The extra third claimed by World Wide Music would be withdrawn
after September 1, 1951 — basically enough time for the royalties from
the Weavers version to run their course. Alan knew that if the
Ledbetter/Lomax estates didn’t accede to this proposal the Weavers could
claim the song as their own version of a traditional song, and it was
only due to Alan’s personal relationship with Seeger and the rest of the
band, and the fact that everyone knew they had based the song on
Ledbetter’s version, that this agreement was made at all. The Huddie
Ledbetter/John A. Lomax credit, which has so often incensed those who
have read into it an exploitation of Ledbetter by John A. Lomax, was
created after both men died, as a direct reaction to the popularity of
the Weavers’ version. The Weavers’ management/publishers initially
received 66.6% (50% as publishers, and 16.6% for the members of the
Weavers) of the publishing money. The Ledbetter and Lomax estates each
received 16.6%, until September 1951, at which point their royalty
splits increased to 25% each. Why are a number of Lead Belly’s songs credited to Huddie
Ledbetter and John A. Lomax; Huddie Ledbetter and Alan Lomax; or Huddie
Ledbetter, John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax?
New arrangements of traditional songs are eligible to be registered as
new copyrights and are afforded the same protection as writing an
original composition. In the case of the Ledbetter/Lomax registrations,
most were derived from John A. and Alan Lomax’s Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly,
a book based on particular and composite versions of songs that Lead
Belly had sung to them over the course of six months, and published by
the Macmillan Company in 1936. There are many traditional songs attributed to Huddie Ledbetter that
he didn’t write but that he legitimately published as his own versions.
There are many Lead Belly songs recorded by the Lomaxes for which they
did not receive arrangement credit. Some of the songs that were shown to
Ledbetter by Alan Lomax included “Black Betty,” “Take This Hammer,”
“Duncan and Brady,” “Ham and Eggs,” and “Stew Ball.” Ledbetter has
versions of these songs published in his name alone based on his
recorded versions. The Lomaxes have published versions of these same
songs based on their arrangements in American Ballads and Folk Songs and Our Singing Country. Many
other performers have published arrangements of these same songs. Of
the 223 or so songs published in the name of Huddie Ledbetter, the
Lomaxes have a shared arrangement credit on 84 of them. This represents
some, but not all, of the songs they collected from, and arranged with,
Huddie Ledbetter. In the specific case of “Goodnight, Irene” neither man wrote the
song. Ledbetter sang versions of the song that he had learned from his
uncle, Bob Ledbetter, and John A. Lomax documented the new arrangement.
The song itself traces back to a version from 1886 by Gussie L. Davies. The “Goodnight, Irene” case was the first example of what was to
become a perplexing matter for Alan. It was the first time that he had
to deal with the ramifications of a song that he had an interest in
becoming a “hit.” He basically ignored the subject for six more years
and focused his attention on field trips in the UK and Europe. In 1957,
as a result of the popularity of the “Skiffle” craze, many more of his
arrangements were suddenly being published in new singers names. It was then, some twenty-three years after the first book had been
released, that he secured a music publishing deal, with Harry Richmond’s
Ludlow Publishing, Inc., that afforded some level of protection to the
songs he and his father had collected, made arrangements of, and
published in their books. The arrangements of traditional songs
published by the Lomaxes were credited in their names, instead of the
source singers, over Alan’s objections. In a letter to an attorney,
dating from November 5, 1962, Alan is still trying to resolve some of
the basic problems that have arisen from this publishing deal: “From the beginning I have asked Richmond for a publishing company of
my own so that my name would not have to appear as co-author. At first
he demurred because he said he felt that, only by using my name could he
protect the songs at all.
“In doing so, my reputation has suffered severely but, at
the same time, I have established it in the minds of at least some of
the decent people in the field that the collector as well as the source
should get at least some of the royalties now commonly paid by recording
companies for versions of folk songs.”
How did songs Lead Belly learned while working with the Lomaxes get into the mainstream market?
Alan Lomax spent the 1950s in the British Isles recording music and
spreading word of the traditional music of the United States. From 1953
to 1955 he made extensive field trips to Spain and Italy. He returned to
England in 1955 to find a new musical craze unfolding called “Skiffle,”
which culminated in 1956 with Lonnie Donegan’s huge hit, “Rock Island
Line,” reaching number eight on both the U.S. and UK charts. Although
Donegan’s version was based on a Lead Belly recording, Lead Belly’s
version of the song was based on a song composed by Kelly Pace that
Huddie Ledbetter had learned while traveling with and assisting John
Lomax in October of 1934 at Cummins State Farm in Gould, Arkansas,
shortly after going to work for John in September. Alan first recorded
Lead Belly performing the song on Saturday, June 22, 1937, in Washington
D.C. Lead Belly later recorded it for RCA Victor, Capitol, and
Folkways. Donegan had published the song in his own name through a company in
the UK called Essex, which was a subsidiary of the American company
TRO/Richmond. Pete Kameron’s World Wide Publishing had meanwhile become
Folkways Publishing Company, and was in fact now also a subsidiary of
TRO/Richmond. Next Donegan recorded and claimed “Stewball,” a song that
Alan had actually taught to Lead Belly for their New York recording
session with the Victor Company. Donegan then had another hit with yet
another Lead Belly song, “Bring Me a Little Water, Silvy,” which had
first been published in the Lomaxes’ book Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly.
Alan wrote to Martha Ledbetter to advise her that these songs had been
released without due credit to Huddie, but, to his surprise discovered
that Pete Kameron had already negotiated a deal with Martha, allowing
him to publish many songs from the Lead Belly catalog, including those
originally printed in Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly.
Alan was quite hurt by this, especially considering that it was his
agreement to turn “Goodnight, Irene” over to Kameron that had given
Kameron’s the leverage to negotiate his deal with TRO/Richmond. Why did Alan Lomax sign a publishing agreement with Richmond Organization?
Alan realized that Macmillan and other book publishers had not
understood the workings of the music business and failed to protect any
rights to the Lomax’s published versions of songs, not only those in the
Lead Belly catalog but also the songs in American Ballads and Folk Songs and Our Singing Country. On
the other hand, Howard Richmond, the titan behind a growing publishing
empire including the subsidiaries Ludlow, Folkways, Songways, TRO, and
Essex, had worked very successfully with catalogs of traditional songs.
Alan also discovered that Richmond was quickly acquiring multiple
copyrights to many of the songs that the Lomaxes had worked to document
and promote. Initially, Alan wanted to fight these claims but ultimately
realized that he did not have the resources to do so, and so he took a
similar course to the one he had taken with “Goodnight, Irene,” offering
Richmond the entire Lomax catalog. They made an agreement in 1958 for
all of the songs from American Ballads and Folk Songs, Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, Our Singing Country, Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads,and Folk Song: USA. How did John A. and Alan Lomax come to be included as writers on so many of the songs that they recorded?
The Richmond Organization would not give Alan Lomax a subsidiary
publishing company, such as Kameron and others had, that would credit
the artists as writers instead of the Lomaxes. Richmond insisted that
the Lomaxes be listed as writers because the copyrights were based on
their authorship of the books in which the songs first appeared. It was a
technicality that would have long-lasting ill consequences. The Lomax
catalog of songs at Richmond represents the incredible achievement of
the earliest of the Lomaxes’ field trips through the United States in
the 1930s and 1940s; the depictions of source singers in their books are
wondrous, heroic, and inspiring. The impression that John and Alan
claimed to have written any of these songs is understandable but false,
and contrary to what they intended when they wrote the books, which
celebrated the singers as well as the songs.
What were Lead Belly’s posthumous awards and honors?
Lead Belly was inducted into the Austin Music Awards Hall of Fame
(2004), and into the Grammy Hall of Fame for the 1936 Library of
Congress recording of “Goodnight, Irene” and the 1940 Victor album Midnight Special (2002).
He received the American Folklife Center Lifetime Achievement Award
(1998), and was honored with a United States Postal Service 32-cent Lead
Belly stamp (June 26, 1998). He was inducted into the Grammy Hall of
Fame for the 1939 Musicraft album Negro Sinful Songs (1998);
into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame for Best Traditional Folk
Recording (1989); into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with the
Beatles, the Drifters, the Beach Boys, and Woody Guthrie (1988). The
State of Louisiana erected a historical marker at Lead Belly’s gravesite
at Shiloh Baptist Church, north of Shreveport (1988). He was inducted
into the Blues Foundation’s Hall of Fame (1986), and was a Grammy
nominee for Lead Belly (Live in Concert) and Lead Belly as
Best Ethnic or Traditional Recording (1973). He was inducted into the
Songwriters Hall of Fame (1970) and was a Grammy nominee for Lead Belly as Best Folk Recording (1966). Who controls the songs of Lead Belly and use of Lead Belly’s
Right-of-Publicity (image, likeness, and any other visual or aural
representations)?
Primarily Ludlow Music, Inc., and Folkways Music Publishers, Inc., now
Smithsonian Folkways, publish the songs of Huddie Ledbetter. To
determine the administration of a specific Ledbetter song, go to the BMI website. There are presently 224 songs credited to Ledbetter. The estate of Huddie Ledbetter is administered by Martha Ledbetter’s
niece, Queen “Tiny” Robinson. Right-of-Publicity issues are handled by
Jay B. Ross and Associates, P.C., at (312) 633-9000, Music_ Law@email.msn.com.
1 John A. and Alan Lomax, Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly (New York: Macmillan, 1936), p. ix.
2 Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell, The Life and Legend of Leadbelly (New York: HarperCollins, 1992 and Da Capo Press, 1999),p. 9.
3 Negro Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, p. 4.
4 According to Peter Burke, it was not unusual for people whose own
lives involved a change in social status to become successful as
mediators between popular oral and learned cultural traditions. The case
of John A. Lomax recalls that of certain Europeans and whose lives and
works offer insights into the popular culture of their day, Peter Burke
writes: “Particularly valuable [in for the study and understanding
popular traditions] is the testimony of men who were born craftsmen or
peasants and rose socially afterwards. Some of them wrote their
autobiographies, men such as Benvenuto Cellini or Giulio Cesare Croce,
John Bunyan or Samuel Bamford, and texts like these bring the historian
as close to this vanished world as he will ever get.” See Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), p. 79. 5 As African Americans who owned their own farms only to later lose
them because of debt, Lead Belly’s parents were not unique: according to
John M. Barry, in 1900 two thirds of Mississippi delta farms were owned
by African Americans (Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America [New
York: Touchstone, 1997], p. 123.). By the late thirties, systemic
injustice combined with natural and economic disasters had reduced the
percentage of independent black farmers to twelve percent. 6 Sandra Cuson, “A Marshall Lullaby,” Shreveport Times, August 3, 1975, quoted in Life and Legend, p. 14. 7 Wendell and Kittredge enthusiastically supported Lomax in his folk
song collecting and urged him to use Edison cylinders. Franklin
Roosevelt, a lifelong folk song aficionado, also had Kittredge and
Wendell as his professors while at Harvard. 8 Child (1825–1896) was the first holder of a Harvard professorship
in English literature, perhaps the first in the world (until then, Greek
and Latin authors had been used to teach rhetoric, and English did not
exist as a field of academic study). Like John A. Lomax, Child came from
a modest background — his father was a sail maker — but unlike Lomax,
he was able to go straight from a comprehensive school to Harvard thanks
to a generous patron. He received several honorary doctorates from
German universities but never wrote a dissertation. His successor and
son-in-law Kittredge also rose through scholarships from a relatively
modest background. 9 In 1935, William and Mary Goodman of Arizona sued the National
Broadcasting Company and Warner Brothers for half-million dollars,
claiming to have written “Home on the Range” and copyrighted it in 1905.
The Goodmans lost the suit when it was discovered that the lyrics were
based on a poem, “The Western Home,” by Dr. Brewster Higley, published
in a Kansas newspaper in 1873. The original tune was by Dan Kelly, who
had been a bugler in the Civil War. Various versions with different
titles had proliferated, and the suit was thrown out because the song
was considered to be in the public domain. 10 Moe Asch told Gene Bluestein that in 1922, while studying overseas
at a technical school in Koblenz, Germany, he heard other foreign
students say that there was no folk music in America, “just a wilderness
with Indians in the streets.” But “while I was in Paris on vacation
from school . . . I came across the 1913 edition of John Lomax’s cowboy
ballads, and it had an introduction by Teddy Roosevelt which guided me
through life, because he said that folklore and folk songs were the real
expressions of a people’s culture. And when I got back to school I was
able to show the kids at school that there was uniqueness in our
[American] culture. Lomax showed that there was folklore in America. All
this stayed in the back of my mind.” During World War II, on the advice
of family friend Albert Einstein, Asch founded Disc and later Folkways
records to document and preserve European Jewish (then in dire peril)
and American folk music. See Gene Bluestein’s Poplore: Folk and Pop in American Culture(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994), pp. 105–120. 11 Lead Belly’s granddaughter Betty Baisly-Sorrell in an interview with Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell in Life and Legend, p. xiv. 12 The motif of Paul and Silas bound in chains (from Acts 16:23-28) was fairly common in African American religious songs. 13 “We propose to go,” the Lomaxes wrote, “where Negroes are almost
entirely isolated from the whites . . . where they are not only
preserving a great body of traditional songs but are also creating new
songs in the same idiom. These songs are, more often than not, epic
summaries of the attitudes, mores, institutions, and situations of the
great proletarian population who have helped to make the South
culturally and economically.” (Grant proposal to the Carnegie
Corporation, 1933, quoted in John A. Lomax, Adventures of a Ballad Hunter[New York: Macmillan], 1947, p. 129.) 14 See Ted Gioia, Work Songs (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), p. 205. 15 David M. Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996) and Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (New York: Pantheon, 2003 and New Press, 2002), p. 260. 16 “We found a Negro convict so skillful with his guitar and his
strong baritone voice that he had been made a ‘trusty’ and kept around
Camp A headquarters as laundryman, so as to be near at hand to sing and
play for visitors. Huddie Ledbetter... was unique in knowing a very
large number of songs, all of which he sang effectively while he twanged
his twelve-string guitar.” See Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, p. ix. 17 Nolan Porterfield, The Last Cavalier: The Life and Times of John A. Lomax, 1867–1948 (Urbana and Chicago, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1996, 1867–1948), p. 330. 18 Negro Folk Songs p. 31. 19 Kenton Jackson, Philadelphia Independent quoted in Life and Legend, p. 133. 20 Negro Folk Songs, p. 48. Interestingly, in later years,
when no longer working with John A. Lomax, Lead Belly was to become
known for professionalism and punctuality, as attested by Henrietta
Yurchinco of New York’s WNYC radio and others he worked with. 21 There are notable examples. Elvis gave his manager Tom Parker
fifty percent and never asked to reduce it, even after he hit it big;
and Dean Martin gave away percentages to so many people that at one
point it equaled over a hundred percent. These days, a manager receives
commission of between 15 and 25 percent of the artist’s gross earnings,
plus reimbursement for travel and other out-of-pocket expenses. Initial
terms are usually one to three years, plus options (which the manager
can exercise) to extend the term to a total of five years or the
duration of a recording agreement secured during the term, whichever is
longer. 22 Alan Lomax, April 16, 1992, in telephone interview with Wolfe and Lornell, quoted in Life and Legend, p. 146. 23 Life and Legend, p. 161. 24 James Weldon Johnson [sic] quoted in Porterfield, The Last Cavalier, p. 398. It is uncertain where this review originally appeared or who wrote it. In Adventures of a Ballad Hunter (p. 299), John A. Lomax attributes a favorable review in the New York Times to
Howard Odum Johnson — perhaps conflating the names of noted folklorist
and sociologists Howard W. Odum (1884–1954) and his collaborator Guy
Johnson, who together had written several important books on
African-American folk music. 25 Letter in Alan Lomax Archive. Nolan Porterfield (The Last Cavalier,
ff. p. 538) estimates that the Lomaxes made “a grand total of $13.83”
for their work on the book after they had paid back their share of the
$500.00 advance to offset Macmillan’s expenses. 26 Like other bien pensant whites at the turn of the
century, John A. Lomax appears to have believed that independent farm
ownership was the solution for African Americans to “do their own
uplifting” and improve their condition (See Barry, Rising Tide, cit).
Matthew Barton (in a telephone conversation) points out that in the
1930s John Lomax made a point of asking the African American singers he
recorded if they owned their own farms. 27 In a letter to “Mr. Flint” written circa 1958: “He wanted a few hundred dollars to buy a car” (from the Alan Lomax Archive). 28 Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, p. 55. 29 Zora Neale Hurston later attributed Lead Belly’s dissatisfaction
to the influence of their Wilton landlord, Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, who
took a violent dislike to the elder Lomax after a dispute over the terms
of the rental. In September of 1935, after having abruptly left her
joint folksong collecting trip with Alan and Barnicle, Hurston wrote a
letter to John A. Lomax accusing her Barnicle of trying to alienate his
Alan from his father. Hurston hinted that Barnicle had also been to
blame for the rift between him and Lead Belly six months before: “Miss
Barnicle is not the generous disinterested friend of yours that you think.
. . . She is trying to build herself a reputation as a folklorist thru
the name of Lomax.” “Lead Belly” she went on, “got no ideas of
persecution from the Negroes in the village as you supposed. He got them
right here in the house in Wilton. Why? She is attracted to him as a
man by her own admission. And next she, like all other Communists are
making a play of being the friend of the Negro at present and stopping
at nothing absolutely nothing to accomplish their ends, ” Zora Neale Hurston, Sept. 16, 1935, in Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters Carla Kaplan, Ed.(New York: Doubleday, 2002), p. 359. The rift between John A. and Lead Belly was by this time irreparable. 30 Nolan Porterfield’s rather flip interpretation of the incident
does a disservice to both men: “Lomax had convinced himself that by
taking up Lead Belly’s cause and ‘looking after him,’ he would somehow
transform the man — Lead Belly would be so amazed by Lomax’s largess and
so grateful for it that he would give up forever his violent ways and
revert to the faithful, obedient, shuffling darky that Lomax expected
him to be.” (see The Last Cavalier, p. 357) 31 For example, in an interview with Alan Lomax on the NPR show Fresh Air (Oct.
8, 1990), Terry Gross stated “When Lead Belly was released from prison
he traveled with your father for a couple of years [sic] and your father put on a lot of concerts with him.” The interview was reprinted in Sean Killeen’s Lead Belly Newsletter of
December 1995. Benjamin Filene has Lead Belly acting as John A. Lomax’s
chauffeur and servant for a period of eight months (referring to it as
“the first eight months,” with the implication that there were more). In
his biography of Woody GuthrieJoe Klein wrote that “Lead Belly left the
elder Lomax after a year.” 32Life and Legend, p. 184. 33 W. J. Cash described the blindness engendered by American
individualism: “Even at the best and fullest, the idea of social
responsibility which grew up in the South remained always a narrow and
purely personal one. . . . The Virginians themselves … never got beyond
that brutal individualism — and for all the Jeffersonian glorification
of the idea, it was brutal as it worked out in the plantation world —
which was the heritage of the frontier; that individualism which, while
willing enough to ameliorate the specific instance, relentlessly laid
down as its basic social postulate the doctrine that every man was
completely and wholly responsible for himself. … The individual outlook .
. . the whole paternalistic pattern, in fact, the complete
otherworldliness of religious feeling . . . all this, combining with
their natural unrealism of temperament, bred in [white Southerners] a
thoroughgoing satisfaction, the most complete blindness to the true
facts of their world.” He goes on to say, that “hardly any Southerner of
the master class every even slightly apprehended that the general
shiftlessness and degradation of the masses was a social product. Hardly
one, in truth, ever concerned himself about the systematic raising of
the economic and social level of these masses. And if occasional men
[would sponsor a school here and there, the same men] . . . would take
the lead in indignantly rejecting the Yankee idea of universal free
schools maintained at the public charge . . .” W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1941). 34 See Jerrold Hirsch, “Modernity, Nostalgia and Southern Folklore Studies,” Journal of American Folklore 105:1992.
In an atmosphere where it was taboo to mention race relations at all,
it was a political statement of sorts to present an entire book on Negro
folk songs, much of it told in the singers’ own words, flawed as
Lomax’s introduction might have been. The book was understood as such
and was read by progressives who were interested in civil rights. In a
published article on “Lead Belly, Lomax and Copyright” (1996), Israel
Young (formerly of the Folk Center in New York City) has this to say: “I
know little about John A. Lomax and his heritage ¾ but I surely
accepted it when I was young and read his and Alan’s Negro Songs as Sung by Lead Belly (1936). How else could I get close to the black mind and thinking as a teenager growing up in the Bronx, around
1947?” Young takes a blanket position against copyrighting folk songs
(as opposed to commercial songs), castigates the Lomaxes for
“exploiting” Lead Belly, and demands an explanation from Alan about the
copyright issue, but he makes a heartfelt plea for a reprinting of Negro Folk Songs, which he read in his youth. 35 Life and Legend, p. 188. 36 Quoted in Life and Legend, p. 215. 37 Quoted in Life and Legend, p. 194. 38 Quoted in Life and Legend, p. 201. 39Joe Brown, “Reflections on Lead Belly,” Folk Music 1 (June 1964): 35, quoted in Life and Legend, p. 266. 40 “Thanks to the enthusiasm of Gordon Jenkins, we’d recorded one of
the songs of Lead Belly, who’d died penniless the year before.
‘Goodnight, Irene’ sold more records than any other pop song since WWII.
In the summer of 1950 you couldn’t escape it. A waltz yet! In a
roadside diner we heard someone say, ‘Turn that jukebox off! I’ve heard
that song 50 times this week!’” Pete Seeger in Where Have All the Flowers Gone: A Musical Autobiography (Bethlehem, Pa.: Sing Out!,
1993) p. 64. Ronald Cohen writes: “As usual in the music industry, a
hit resulted from some combination of audience enthusiasm and commercial
hype. In this case, music publisher Howard S. Richmond mailed
promotional copies of ‘Goodnight Irene’ to fifteen hundred disc jockeys,
many of them personal acquaintances cultivated from when he was a press
agent for Dinah Shore and Frank Sinatra. The song got considerable
airplay, and during the first month Richmond sold 250,000 copies of the
sheet music, in addition to half a million records.”See Rainbow Quest: Folk Music Revival & American Society(Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), p. 69 41 See Rainbow Quest: Folk Music Revival & American Society (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), p. 69–70 and passim. Works Consulted Burke, Peter. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. New York: Harper and Row, 1978. Cohen, Ronald. Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival & American Society, 1940–1970. Amherst & Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002. Hirsch, Jerrold. “Modernity, Nostalgia and Southern Folklore Studies,” Journal of American Folklore 105: 1992. Lomax, John A. Adventures of a Ballad Hunter. New York: Macmillan, 1947. Lomax, John A. and Alan. Negro Songs as Sung by Lead Belly. New York: Macmillan, 1938. Lornell, Kip and Charles Wolfe. The Life and Legend of Lead Belly. New York: Da Capo Press, 1999 [first published New York: HarperCollins, 1992]. Oshinky, David M. “Worse Than Slavery”: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. Porterfield, Nolan. The Last Cavalier: The Life and Times of John A. Lomax, 1867–1948. Urbana and Chicago, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Wilgus, D. K. Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898. New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1959. Also consulted: Lead Belly file in the Library of Congress Lead Belly and John A. Lomax correspondence in the Alan Lomax Archive https://folklife.si.edu/legacy-honorees/lead-belly/smithsonian
Lead Belly
Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter (1888-1949) was one of the most
important folk musicians of the twentieth century. He was a seminal
figure in the development of Folkways Records, and his work played a
major role in the establishment of Folkways at the Smithsonian. Lead Belly’s name was, as Woody Guthrie wrote, “the hard name of a
hard man.” Lead Belly was born in Louisiana, self-taught in music,
jailed for murder, and freed to ultimately bring new, powerful
influences to broad public attention. In the 1940s he and Moses Asch
developed a fruitful relationship that led to numerous Folkways
recordings. Lead Belly learned hundreds of traditional songs traveling in the
Deep South. He was inspired to create his own compositions and
arrangements based on the dance tunes and work songs of Southern Blacks.
He learned hundreds more songs from fellow prisoners. While he had a
good, almost gentle voice, listeners were most amazed at his skilled
guitar playing. “I listened as he tuned up his twelve string Stella and
eased his fingers up and down along the neck in the same way that the
library and museum clerk touched the frame of the best painting in their
gallery,” Guthrie wrote. Lead Belly played with pure fighting power and
deep-felt passion. John and Alan Lomax met Lead Belly during one of their recording
trips for the Library of Congress. Lead Belly was then a prison inmate,
and the Lomaxes managed to secure his release. Lead Belly traveled with
them, eventually settling in New York City. Lead Belly’s repertoire included diverse African-American styles from
work songs, ring chants, cowboy songs, games, and Tin Pan Alley to the
Delta blues. His Folkways Records classic, the multi-volume Lead Belly’s Last Sessions,
reflects this diversity. Some of his best-known songs are “Midnight
Special,” “Rock Island Line,” and “Goodnight Irene.” In addition to
recordings for the Library of Congress, and Moe Asch’s companies—Asch,
Disc, and Folkways Records—Lead Belly also recorded for RCA, Capitol,
and Columbia Records. Asch was philosophically committed to artistic freedom, something
that prompted the independent-minded Lead Belly to record all types of
songs in his repertoire. This generated controversy when Asch issued a
record of Lead Belly singing children’s songs including “Skip to My Lou”
and “Pick a Bale of Cotton.” Famed journalist Walter Winchell railed
against the collection in the press, asking, “How could one issue a
children’s record by a convicted murderer?” Lead Belly was formal in dress and demeanor, and resented the various
humiliations he had to endure. He recorded songs of social protest,
among them “Bourgeois Blues,” a song that he composed after a visit to
Washington, D.C., when he had been refused accommodation in a rooming
house. While he performed with other social activist Folkways artists
Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, Sonny Terry, and Pete Seeger, Lead Belly
sought a career in the movie and entertainment industry, without great
personal success. His influence, however, was felt broadly after his death. The
Weavers, with Pete Seeger, covered Lead Belly’s songs and exposed his
music to wider audiences. “Goodnight Irene” became the number-one hit in
the United States, selling two million records in 1950. Lead Belly’s
rhythmic style of twelve-string guitar playing and his songs inspired a
whole new generation of performers as diverse as Creedence Clearwater
Revival and the Beach Boys. Lead Belly’s influence has been directly felt in the Center. His
songs, covered by Little Richard, Taj Mahal, Brian Wilson, and Sweet
Honey in the Rock, were featured on the benefit album, Folkways, A Vision Shared: A Tribute to Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly, that helped pay for the Smithsonian’s acquisition of Folkways and also won a Grammy Award. Smithsonian Folkways has reissued Lead Belly’s albums. A postage
stamp was issued in Lead Belly’s honor during a ceremony at the 1998
Smithsonian Folklife Festival. The largest existing collection of Lead
Belly’s recordings is now in the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and
Collections. https://www.npr.org/2015/02/21/387566023/that-blew-my-mind-raiding-the-lead-belly-vault
ARUN RATH, HOST: The story of Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter reads like a parody of
the brutal bluesman biography. Kill a man, go to prison - actually, do
to that twice - then appeal for a pardon in a song. According to the
legend, Lead Belly's undeniable talent convinced Texas Governor Pat Neff
to let him go. (SOUNDBITE OF ALBUM, "LEAD BELLY: THE SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS COLLECTION") HUDDIE LEDBETTER: (Singing) If I had you, Governor Neff like you
got me, I'd wake up in the morning, I would set you free. Where you
going? I'm going back to Mary. JEFF PLACE: The states all kind of got ticked off when that story
came out and said no, no, he really got out both times because his time
was up. RATH: Jeff Place sets the record straight. He's the archivist
behind a new box set of Lead Belly recordings from Smithsonian Folkways.
Place says the musicologist John Lomax really did discover Lead Belly
in the infamous Angola Prison in Louisiana. But Lomax carefully crafted
and exploited Lead Belly's image as a dangerous criminal. PLACE: He took Lead Belly up to the East and to New York to
present to a lot of the folklorists and scholars, you know, as a sort of
primitive savage, you know, from Louisiana. You know, the newspapers
cried out sweet savage from the swamp lands here to play a few concerts
for you between murders. And he dressed him up in like prison, like,
stripes on stage. He had him do this whole song and dance thing. He gave
Lead Belly a career. He probably would not have had a career, you know,
like that if Lomax hadn't discovered him. He probably might have stayed
in the South and never been known to any of us. But I discovered a letter in the family he had that he - where he
dictated to his niece his feelings about the matter. It's really never
even been published before. It's in the book, where, you know, he used
to say look, you know, yeah, I did some bad things and I paid my time. I
did really hard time for this stuff. It's over, let's put it behind me.
I don't want to talk about that anymore. (SOUNDBITE OF ALBUM, "LEAD BELLY: THE SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS COLLECTION") LEDBETTER: (Singing) I've been traveling, I've been traveling
from toe to toe. Everywhere I have been, I find some old Jim Crow. One
thing people I want everybody to know, you're going to find some Jim
Crow every place you go. RATH: You know, when we hear Lead Belly, we think blues. And we
think things like these prison songs, work songs or protest songs or
spirituals. But over these five CDs, there's an incredible range beyond
that. PLACE: That was, like, a great thing about Lead Belly, and also
kind of hurt him in some ways. If you - he wanted to play places on the
streets to make money by putting a hat out, he had to play, like,
current pop songs. And he'd play Hawaiian music and cowboy songs and
children's game songs and prison songs and - you name it. Any song he
heard, he would memorize it and play it. RATH: Historical songs about the Hindenburg or the Titanic. (SOUNDBITE OF ALBUM, "LEAD BELLY: THE SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS COLLECTION") LEDBETTER: (Singing) It was a midnight on the scenic valley
train. You are my God today. It was midnight on the scenic Valley train.
You're my God today. RATH: One of the real treasures on this set is you get to hear this show that he did in New York City on WNYC. (SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "FOLKSONGS OF AMERICA") UNIDENTIFIED RADIO HOST: Folksongs of America - another program
by that inimitable singer of America's own songs - Huddie Lead Belly
Ledbetter. PLACE: He had done some radio. Lomax got him on the radio a lot
in New York City. But, you know, most radio stations didn't really like
him on the air because of his heavy Louisiana accent. It was hard to
understand and the audience complained. (SOUNDBITE OF ALBUM, "LEAD BELLY: THE SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS COLLECTION") LEDBETTER: Now, this is a grey goose. The preacher went on
hunting down by my home on a Sunday when he was supposed to have been at
church. And he was a pastor of that church. And he went out to try and
kill a grey goose instead of being at church. PLACE: But there was an anthropologist named Henrietta Yurchenco
who had a show on WNYC for, like, a few years in the early '40s and
again in the late '40s called Folksongs of America. And she actually -
you know, Woody Guthrie helped encourage her to hire Lead Belly. So he
came in and was doing like, I think a weekly show. For 15 minutes, you
know, he would come on and sing a little bit of "Goodnight Irene." And
he'd, like, pick a topic or pick something or riff for 15 minutes on
songs and words then play a little snippet of "Goodnight Irene." And
that'd be the end of the show. (SOUNDBITE OF RADIO SHOW, "FOLKSONGS OF AMERICA") LEDBETTER: (Singing) Goodnight Irene. Good night Irene. I'll see you in my dreams. RATH: Jeff, you've spent so much time up close with this man's
music. You know, both the historical research and, you know, the
re-mastering kind of going through it almost note by note. Is there
anything in Lead Belly that still surprises you? PLACE: While I was working on this project, I was still finding
things I didn't know existed that were hiding, you know? This tape or -
Frederic Ramsey, who recorded him on reel-to-reel tape, which was really
important because when you record it directly to disk, before that they
could only be three, four minutes long, so you couldn't get any of his
wordplay. You can get that on a reel-to-reel tape. Ramsey recorded a lot
of stuff at his apartment of Lead Belly. And this one tape I found,
which I guess somehow we never listened to, which was simply the two of
them sitting around listening to Ramsey's record collection and, like,
commenting on like - oh, I like that song. Yeah, this is so-and-so... RATH: This is on the CD where you can hear them - they're listening to like Bessie Smith and commenting. PLACE: Exactly. They're playing Bessie Smith and Lead Belly's -
oh yeah, you know, Bessie Smith. And he starts singing this Bessie Smith
song. And Ramsey drops the needle on the Bessie Smith '78. And Lead
Belly starts singing in perfect pitch along with Bessie Smith as a duet.
And that was just like - blew my mind. And I said well, what's this
doing? I never knew this was here. (SOUNDBITE OF ALBUM, "LEAD BELLY: THE SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS COLLECTION") LEDBETTER: (Singing) I'll be with you down and out. RATH: That's Jeff Place. He's an archivist with Smithsonian
Folkways. Their new retrospective box set on blues musician Lead Belly
is out on Tuesday. Jeff, thanks very much. PLACE: You're very welcome. (SOUNDBITE OF ALBUM, "LEAD BELLY: THE SMITHSONIAN FOLKWAYS COLLECTION") LEDBETTER: (Singing) We're going to check into the town. We're
going to check into the town. We're going to check into the town some
day.
We at the Lead Belly Foundation aspire to expose the
world to many such influential artist through our scholarship
recipients, support to school music programs, community music institutes
and camps. It is our hope that future artist may one day change the way
we listen to music and attain honor of having their own music recorded
over and over again like a vast majority of famous musicians have done
with the music of Lead Belly.
The Lead Belly Foundation is a non profit
organization founded by Tiny Robinson, niece of Huddie Ledbetter to
preserve and promote the musical legacy of the "King of the 12-string
guitar".
The Lead Belly Foundation is a non profit organization
founded by Tiny Robinson, niece of Huddie Ledbetter to preserve and
promote the musical legacy of the “King of the 12-string guitar’.
Our Mission
The mission of the Lead Belly foundation is to
preserve and promote the historical legacy of Huddie Ledbetter to the
world and support young musicians through educational programs and
sponsorship.
Our Vision
We are committed to educate and promote the creative
life of Huddie Ledbetter through museum exhibitions, maintaining the
Lead belly archives, sponsoring music education to children and young
adults, and showcasing public programs to national and global audiences.
Through his music, Lead Belly rejected the stereotype that country
music was the domain of white artists, while blues music was reserved
for blacks.
Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives
Last month, Smithsonian Folkways released Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection,
a carefully curated collection of Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter’s
recordings that is – like the singer himself – breathtaking in its
muscular artistry.
Marketed by the Smithsonian Channel as “one of the most influential musicians you’ve never known,”
Lead Belly’s legacy can be heard in the grooves of Led Zeppelin III,
seen in Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged performance, or echoed in cavernous
ballparks, where Ram Jam’s “Black Betty” plays as a relief pitcher warms up. But beyond his influence on (mainly white) musical artists, the
collection is significant because it shows how Lead Belly defied the
racial categories of blues and country (as black music and white music,
respectively) – stereotypes established by the burgeoning record
industry of the Jim Crow era that persist today.
A black singer’s cowboy past
Born in 1888, Huddie Ledbetter was the son of landowning African
Americans in western Louisiana. He was considered a bright, if
undisciplined, student, and an expert horseman. Lead Belly was drawn to many kinds of music, and he loved riding and
breaking horses (later in life, he would even travel to Hollywood to try
to make it as a Roy Rogers-style singing movie cowboy). He gained
notoriety performing at local square dances and for church services in
rural Louisiana before his explosive temper brought an end to a tough
but nurturing home life. Lead Belly was arrested on charges of assault,
and escaped from a chain-gang to live in Texas under the alias “Walter
Boyd.” During these years, he performed extensively around Dallas with
legendary bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson before being arrested in 1917
on a homicide charge that landed him in the legendary Sugarland prison.
Released nearly seven years later, he was arrested again in 1930 – this
time on charges of assault with intent to kill – and was sentenced to
five to ten years in prison. As Lead Belly lingered in prison during the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s,
the nation was experiencing sweeping cultural and economic change.
Everyday life was transformed – through technology, through the arrival
and growing influence of immigrant Americans and through musical
recordings that surmounted the racial barriers of Jim Crow. Meanwhile, a
bifurcated view of American culture began to emerge. Many pined for the older, “authentic” America – as opposed to what they characterized as a culturally corrupt present. It’s a (misconceived) narrative that has played out perpetually in
American history, as one generation passes the torch to the next.
Jailed – and therefore ‘genuine’
Perhaps due to these perceived cultural changes, in the early 1930s
the Library of Congress tasked folklorists John and Alan Lomax with
finding and recording older, “authentic” forms of African-American music
as an act of preservation, celebration and scholarly inquiry. In 1933,
the father-son duo discovered Lead Belly in Angola, a maximum security
prison in Louisiana nicknamed “The Alcatraz of the South.” At Angola,
convicts sang as they picked cotton, chopped wood and crushed rocks
under the blazing Mississippi Delta sun. It was, to borrow a phrase from
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Douglas Blackmon, slavery by another name.
Slavery by another name: forced labor was commonplace at southern prisons like Angola.Wikimedia Commons
John and Alan Lomax viewed these southern prisons as cultural time
capsules, places where, due to the inmates’ isolation, older musical
styles endured untarnished. The Lomaxes recorded many talented singers,
but Lead Belly stood out
for his skill, his memory (his mind seemingly worked like a tape
recorder) and his gift as a “songster” whose repertoire encompassed the
pre-and-post blues world of the Gulf Coast. After Lead Belly’s final stint in prison, he went on to gain moderate
commercial success – but only as a singer of “authentic”
African-American music. Promoted as a “pure” relic of a fading past, he
toured the northeast performing before mainly white audiences. Though he
had an immense repertoire, he was urged to record and perform only
songs like “Pick A Bail of Cotton,” while songs considered “white,” like
“Silver Haired Daddy of Mine,” were either downplayed or cast aside. Here, we see how a singer like Lead Belly was constrained by a
commercial and cultural industry that wanted to present a certain
archetype of African-American music. Meanwhile, Lead Belly biographers speculate
that the artist failed to gain a following among northern African
Americans because they were largely disinterested in the older styles of
music that Lead Belly was encouraged to record and perform, preferring
instead the sounds of Cab Calloway or Count Basie. For this reason, Lead Belly – the supposed exemplar of
African-American musical authenticity – came to be a source musician for
a number of white musicians. Songs closely associated with Lead Belly
like “Goodnight Irene,” “Midnight Special,” “Cotton Fields,” “Rock
Island Line,” “Gallows Pole” and “Black Girl (Where Did You Sleep Last
Night)” gained widespread popularity in the hands of many white singers –
Pete Seeger, Ernest Tubb, Johnny Cash, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Led Zeppelin, Lonnie Donegan, Van Morrison and Nirvana, to name a few. We were left with an historical record that was misleading at best, inaccurate at worst.
Lead Belly’s ‘Gallows Pole’ would be covered by Led Zeppelin.
Folkways sets the record straight
Thankfully, Lead Belly’s Smithsonian Folkways Collection defies those
cultural reductionists who would suggest that firm racial categories of
blues and country ever truly existed, and that “traditional” singers
were uninterested in – or, worse, corrupted by – popular music. The
set’s 108 tracks may be a small sampling (Lead Belly claimed to be able
to sing 500 songs without repeating one – and he likely knew far more).
But a bi-cultural reality glimmers within the set’s five CDs. Though folklorists of the 1930s wanted to present “pure” culture (as
though such a thing existed), Lead Belly actually loved Gene Autry, and
the Folkways Collection includes the Autry cover “Springtime in the
Rockies.” Yes, Lead Belly sang blues, field hollers and spirituals. But
he also recorded songs more closely associated with “white” string band
traditions of old-time music (“Rattler,” “Julie Ann Johnson”) and
country music (“How Come You Do Me Like You Do?”). The set also addresses the tendency of early folklorists to omit
contemporary popular songs from their field recordings and – to
paraphrase historian Benjamin Filene – “romance the folk.”
Instead, the set includes covers of popular blues, gospel, and R&B
songs from the 1930s and 1940s (“Outskirts of Town,” “How Long, How
Long,” “Rock Me (Hide Me In Thy Bosom)”) alongside folk material (“John
Hardy,” “Pick a Bale of Cotton”).
The myth of authenticity
Nonetheless, we remain a nation of worriers, debating the merits of
what can and can’t be called “real.” In politics, President Obama gets
it from all sides – not American, not black, not Christian. And whether
we realize it or not, we spend an awful lot of time arguing about
authenticity and music. What is “real” country, jazz or hip-hop? Who
owns a genre’s culture, and who has the right to sing certain styles? Ultimately, a century of race-based marketing practices of record
companies influences our answers, which often fall along racial, class
and generational lines. Cultural historian Karl Hagstrom Miller has
argued that our tendency to “segregate sound” is baggage from blackface minstrelsy and the racist policies of the Jim Crow era. Embedded in this debate is the problematic idea that white recording
artists may borrow freely, while African-Americans must stick to “their
own” styles. The music industry built this quandry. In the pre-World War
II era, white musicians were allowed to move freely across musical
genres, while African-American musicians – Lead Belly, Robert Johnson,
Muddy Waters (who had all performed country music, alongside blues,
before African-American audiences) – were actively denied the option of
making commercial recordings of country music. Perhaps Lead Belly can remind us – 125 years after his birth – that
neither music, nor people, should be racially segregated. After all, as
his voice tells us from these archival recordings, “We’re all in the
same boat.”
“This is one of the most powerful exchanges between poetry and history that I have read.”—Toi Derricotte
A biography in poems, leadbelly
examines the life and times of the legendary blues musician from a
variety of intimate and historical perspectives, using a range of
innovative poetic forms. A collage of song, culture and circumstance,
alive and speaking.
National Poetry Series winner selected by Brigit Pegeen Kelly
Understanding the Multi-genre Influences to American Folk Music
The influence of African-American musicians on the evolution of folk music
has been immeasurable. Many of the songs that have come to be
synonymous with struggle, empowerment, human rights and perseverance
have come from the African-American community. From folk-blues singers
like Huddie Ledbetter (a.k.a. Leadbelly) to hip-hop artists like Common, Talib Kweli, and the Roots, the folk music of the African-American communities has embodied the struggle of marginalized people in America.
Slave Spirituals and Work Calls
As far back as African-American history stretches, it has been
accompanied by a soundtrack of incredible music. Some of the most
timeless songs of empowerment and perseverance come from the American
slave fields and communities of forced immigrants held in bondage
throughout the early country.
During this time, much of the music among the slaves was a series of
calls they would make to each other in the fields. It was the early
call-and-response hollers that would later be translated and echoed by
street peddlers (a.k.a. “criers”). These call-and-response "songs" were
as often aimed at spreading news or information, as they were about
passing the time while they worked. Other music of the time came from
religious ceremonies. Great songs that have become synonymous with the
plight of every community since then that has stood up for its own
rights include spiritual songs like “We Shall Overcome,” “I Shall Not Be
Moved” and “Amazing Grace.”
"I Try to Stay Here But My Blues Start Walkin"
After the Civil War ended with the Emancipation Proclamation and the
newly freed former slaves set off to northern cities like Chicago and
Detroit, others remained in their home states. They continued to sing
the songs of overcoming hardship, endurance and faith that have become
so integral to the history of America.
In the late 1800s, the African-American worker followed his job along
the railway line, building new railroads in the rural far-reaches of
the American West. He took jobs in the kitchens of new boomtowns and
peddling wares along city streets. He started singing about his newfound
freedom, but also about the ties he still had to his work. Blues music rose from this period.
However, the "blues" referred to during this period are called
"folk-blues" today. Many of the blues-folk singers of this time got jobs
touring with traveling entertainment groups, vaudeville troupes, and
medicine shows. Later, as country-western music became integrated into
the larger towns along the traveling routes, blues players began
adapting their sound to a more country-oriented blues style.
Folk-Blues and Leadbelly
Probably the most influential figure from this time was folk-blues
musician Huddie Ledbetter (a.k.a. Leadbelly). Leadbelly (1888-1949)
integrated old gospel tunes, blues, folk and country music into a sound
that was entirely his own. Born on a Louisiana plantation, Leadbelly
moved with his family to Texas when he was just five years old. There,
he learned how to play the guitar, which he would use as his tool for
telling the hard truth and, twice, would save him from a long prison
sentence.
The first time, he wrote a song for the Governor of Texas, which won
his pardon. The second time, he was discovered by musicologist Alan Lomax, who was touring the southern prisons looking for blues songs, spirituals, and work songs
to record. Leadbelly told Alan and his father John Lomax how he got
pardoned previously, and he wrote another song called “Goodnight Irene.”
Lomax took this song to the Governor of Louisiana. Once again, it
worked, and Leadbelly was pardoned and released.
From there, he was taken north by the Lomaxes, who helped make him
somewhat of a household name. To this day, artists in blues, folk, rock,
and hip-hop look to Leadbelly as an influence on all of those genres of
music.
Folk-Blues and the Advent of Rock & Roll
The most obvious, and often the most discussed, influence from the
African-American community is in the area of blues and, ultimately, rock
& roll. Blues vocalists like Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Memphis
Minnie helped to popularize the blues across the racial divides of the
time.
Other great blues legends like Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, and BB
King managed to take that work even further to directly influence the
burgeoning sounds of what would become rock & roll, an American
institution. These days, blues players like Keb Mo' and Taj Mahal blur
the lines between blues, rock, and folk with their raw, gorgeous,
infectious tunes that even occasionally flirt with the roots of
country-western.
But the influences don't stop with blues, by any stretch of the imagination.
Civil Rights Songs
During the 1950s and 60s, as African-Americans around the country
struggled for equal rights under the law, folk singers like Odetta,
Sweet Honey in the Rock, and others joined with Martin Luther King, Jr.,
to spread the word of direct action through non-violence. They stood
together with their neighbors and a community of white folksingers to
re-teach the songs of their forefathers and foremothers. Civil Rights songs like
“We Shall Overcome” and “Oh Freedom” were sung again and again in
protest and solidarity, helping to organize communities, and ultimately
to win the struggle for equal rights under the law.
Hip-Hop Emerges
By the 1970s, a new brand of folk music started to solidify in the
African-American communities of major cities like Chicago, New York
City, Los Angeles, and Detroit. Hip-hop borrowed
rhythms from across the musical spectrum – from ancient African drum
calls to contemporary dance music. Artists used these rhythms and the
art of spoken word to communicate the emotions – from celebration to
frustration – that characterized their community.
In the 80s, groups like NWA, Public Enemy, LL Cool J, and Run DMC participated
in what came to be an explosion in the popularity of hip-hop music.
These groups and others brought the folk music of their communities
fiercely into the public consciousness, rapping about racism, violence,
politics, and poverty. At the same time, they also addressed
relationships, work, and other aspects of day-to-day life.
Now, from contemporary singer/songwriters like Vance Gilbert to hip-hop superstars like Common,
African-American folk musicians continue to strongly influence the path
of not only American music, but politics, civil rights, education,
popular opinion, and the ever-evolving history of our nation.
Although
the eclectic North Louisiana musician known as Lead Belly (Huddie
Ledbetter, 1888–1949) is long gone, he still casts a long shadow of
influence on popular music. Renditions of songs that he wrote and/or
popularized—including “Cottonfields,” “The Midnight Special,”
“Goodnight, Irene,” “In The Pines,” and “Boll Weevil”—have scored hits
for a variety of artists during the past 65 years, and are still
recorded anew today. The stylistic breadth of these songs underscores
the fact that while Lead Belly is often designated as a blues
musician—implying a limited musical range—he actually personified the
far broader “songster” tradition, as previously discussed in this coumn
in the Fall 2014 issue.
Huddie Ledbetter grew up in rural Caddo Parish surrounded by a vast
wealth of traditional music. The sounds he heard there included blues;
African-retentive field hollers and work songs; gospel music and hymns;
children’s play songs; archaic British ballads, fiddle tunes, and folk
songs, brought to America by 17th and 18th-century immigrants; narrative
ballads of more recent vintage, such as “John Henry,” that were common
to both the black and white communities in the Ark-La-Tex region; and
lilting tresillo rhythms that suggest the possible
Afro-Caribbean influence of neighboring South Louisiana. In addition to
such folk-rooted material, Ledbetter also encountered and absorbed
then-modern sounds—including ragtime and Tin Pan Alley/vaudeville
compositions—in nearby Shreveport. He began performing there as a
teenager, working in the city’s rough-and-tumble bars. Years later
Ledbetter recounted this experience in one of his most evocative
original songs, the fatalistic “Fannin Street”: …My mama told me, my little sister too, women in Shreveport, son, gonna be the death of you. I told my mama, ‘mama you don’t know, women on Fannin Street kill me why don’t you let me go?’…
Ledbetter further burnished his skills during his mid-twenties by
playing in Texas with the great blues guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson.
With such estimable tutelage Ledbetter emerged as a dynamic and
versatile musician. Sometimes he sang a capella. More often he
accompanied his powerful vocals on twelve-string guitar, or
occasionally, on accordion. With his deft, dynamic and relentlessly
rhythmic playing—which at times presaged ‘60s funk by three
decades—Ledbetter projected more intensity with one acoustic guitar than
the cumulative affect of many five-piece amplified bands. With
attentive listening to Lead Belly’s guitar work—on songs such as “Fannin
Street,” for example—one can easily hear how acoustic-guitar leads
morphed into the electronically amplified guitar solos of rock and
R&B. As George Harrison of the Beatles once succinctly observed, “No
Lead Belly, no Beatles.” Many other rock artists concur. By his late twenties Ledbetter was incarcerated in Texas, but even
behind bars there, followed by another prison-farm sentence in
Louisiana, he continued to absorb new material. The comparative
isolation of these brutal penal plantations nurtured the survival of
antebellum traditions that were fast fading elsewhere—especially songs
used to set rhythms for group labor. Prison also provided Ledbetter with
the moniker that he used throughout his musical career. It is thought
to be a play on his last name combined with an acknowledgment of his
toughness and physical strength. (While this name appears in print as
both Lead Belly and Leadbelly, the latter spelling is now out of favor,
at the request of Ledetter’s heirs.) After leaving prison in 1933, Lead Belly further expanded his already
rich repertoire to include political and topical commentary (“The
Scottsboro Boys,” “The Hitler Song”); adaptations of popular hits
(“Springtime In The Rockies,” “Sweet Jenny Lee”) and strong new original
material (“Cotton Fields”). A newly released 5-CD/108 song compilation
offers an in-depth exploration of his remarkably diverse work, including
previously unreleased material. Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection
(Smithsonian Folkways) does not present his entire recorded oeuvre, but
it does illustrate the entire breadth of his life’s work. It also
includes some revealing spoken introductions that illuminate Lead
Belly’s personality and explain some of the traditions he represented.
One example is “Good Morning, Blues”: “… And now everybody have the blues. Sometimes, they don’t know what
it is. But when you lay down at night, turn from one side of the bed all
night to the other and you can’t sleep, what’s the matter? Blues has
got you. Or when you get up in the mornin’, sit on the side of the bed,
may have a mother or father, sister or brother, boyfriend or girlfriend,
husband or wife around. You don’t want no talk out of ’em. They ain’t
done you nothin’, you ain’t done them nothin’. What’s the matter, blues
got you. Well, you get up and shove your feet down under the table and
look down in your place, may have chicken and rice, take my advice, you
walk away and shake your head, you say, ‘Lord have mercy. I can’t eat. I
can’t sleep.’ What’s the matter? Why, the blues got you. They want to
talk to you. You got to tell ’em something.”
The anthology is accompanied by a handsome 140-page book profusely
illustrated with rare photos, telegrams, posters, and other such
ephemera. The book also features a lengthy, erudite essay by Jeff Place,
the archivist for the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural
Heritage, who co-produced this compilation along with Robert Santelli,
the executive director of the Grammy Museum. Such elaborate packaging
obviously entails significantly increased manufacturing costs and thus a
higher retail price. Even so, Place and Santelli decided that this
visually rich presentation was essential in today’s digital age. Now
that recordings of songs can be purchased individually online, the
trade-off for such convenient selectivity is the loss of vital
contextual information. “Downloading,” Place told New York Times
writer Alan Light, “means missing all of that [Lead Belly’s] story, so
we wanted to create a book that has CDs with it, rather than the other
way around—a museum exhibit in a coffee-table set.” The resulting
compilation does indeed suggest a museum-exhibit quality and, as such,
it makes a major cultural statement. (For a full-length biographical
study, the book The Life and Legend of Leadbelly by Kip Lornell and Charles M. Wolfe, also comes highly recommended.) The legendary stature with which Lead Belly is regarded today belies
the great frustrations that he experienced during his career. Spending
nearly twenty years in jail meant that Lead Belly missed the first great
surge of commercial recordings by fellow folk-rooted songsters in the
1920s and early ‘30s. These artists included Blind Lemon Jefferson, and
Blind Willie McTell—African-Americans who were both designated as blues
artists, for quick reference—and Jimmie Rodgers, and the Carter
Family—Anglo-Americans who, with similar over-simplification, were
categorized as “hillbilly” singers. Lead Belly, by contrast, made his
first recordings in prison, under the aegis of the Library of Congress,
when the folklorist John Lomax came to the Louisiana State Penitentiary
at Angola in 1933 on a song-collecting sojourn through the South. The
Lomax recordings were never released commercially, since their raison
d’etre was documentation. Had they been available, mediocre sound
quality and lack of production values might have discouraged sales. Upon his release from Angola, Lead Belly entered into a complex
business relationship with John Lomax, working as both his chauffeur and
as a musician whom the folklorist managed—in return for a hefty cut of
Lead Belly’s earnings. Lomax garnered lurid and shamelessly racist
publicity for Lead Belly’s performances by exploiting his status as a
convicted murderer, and tastelessly insisting that he perform at times
in prison garb. Not surprisingly, this relationship soon soured,
although Lead Belly maintained ties with John Lomax’s son, Alan, an
acclaimed folklorist in his own right. Lead Belly recorded for a subsidiary of Columbia Records in 1935, but
these sessions brought no success, possibly because they narrowly
focused on his blues material only. In somewhat similar fashion, in
1936, he did not win over the audience at New York’s Apollo Theater,
then the ultimate cutting-edge venue for African-American performers.
Compared to such popular urbane artists as Cab Calloway, Lead Belly
sounded old-fashioned and rustic. A newspaper critic trashed the show.
Had he moved back to Caddo Parish, Lead Belly’s rural sound might still
have resonated, but, after nearly two decades in Southern prisons, he
chose to live in New York. In ensuing years Alan Lomax made extensive documentary recordings of
Lead Belly for the Library of Congress and also set up commercial
sessions for him with the folk-revival producer Moses Asch. Prominent
presence in this milieu led to Lead Belly’s lionization in the
left-leaning music circles typified by such zealous admirers as Pete
Seeger and Woodie Guthrie. As a result Lead Belly was scrutinized for
possible links with the Communist Party, although his own views were
moderate. For the rest of his career Lead Belly performed primarily for
white, folk-revival audiences. He continued recording until his death,
in 1949, but nothing sold well. In 1950, however, a rendition of “Goodnight, Irene” became
one of the year’s best selling records—for a band called the Weavers,
whose members included Pete Seeger. Numerous successful cover versions
and adaptations followed, over the years, by the diverse likes of Bob
Dylan, British skiffle artist Lonnie Donegan, R&B singer Brook
Benton, British rockers Led Zeppelin, California’s Creedence Clearwater
Revival, the ‘90s grunge-rock band Nirvana, and singer Johnny Rivers,
who launched his career in Baton Rouge. Sadly, many great musicians
don’t live to receive their just due. From the perspective of history,
however, Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection stands as an appropriately monumental tribute to this iconic Louisianian. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Ben Sandmel is a New Orleans-based freelance writer,
folklorist, and producer and is the former drummer for the Hackberry
Ramblers. Learn more about his latest book, Ernie K-Doe: The R&B Emperor of New Orleans, by visiting erniekdoebook.com. The K-Doe biography was selected for the Kirkus Reviews list of best nonfiction books for 2012.
Lead Belly in his final days, circa 1949. Photograph: Richard S.
Blacher, Courtesy of Smithsonian Folkways and Lead Belly Estate.
Lead Belly Smithsonian Folkways, $99.98 (five CDs, cloth book)
Listening to Lead Belly uninterrupted for five hours, you get the
feel of zigzagging across a forgotten country in a 1947 De Soto, eyes
fixed on the landscape and fingers fiddling obsessively with the worn
radio dial. It is a ghost radio, inhabited almost entirely by one voice
and a singular-sounding twelve-string guitar. Every few mile markers
reveals another variation, another invention, one more set of melodic
lines that rolled out of the Louisiana bottoms and captured the
alternative culture of an age. “He wanted,” Woody Guthrie wrote, “to preach history, his own
history, his people’s story and everybody’s history. He wanted to be all
kinds of good names, a history speaker, a story teller, a talker, good
fast walker, a loud yeller, and the man that was all big tone.” Ghosts slip through the thick brown mesh of the single radio speaker.
Musical revenants wander down the blue highways, the broad avenues of
New York City, the narrow streets of Shreveport, the farm roads and
packed dirt paths of a country still devoid of interstates. There is
Silvy, with her endless pails of water, Texas Governor Pat Neff sitting
on the warden’s porch, an unexpected Wendell Wilkie, Sweet Jenny Lee,
Jean Harlow, Jack Johnson, Joe Louis, Queen Elizabeth, and Mr. Hitler,
years before the world succeeded in “tearing his playhouse down.” And
there, too, are all the anonymous singers that Lead Belly served time
with, the men who taught him the songs that would be recorded by another
generation and become part of our national soundtrack.
The Smithsonian’s in-house music label recently released its definitive compilation, Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection.It
is an impressively comprehensive box set spanning the most productive
years of a musician who arguably did more than any other to build the
canon of American folk song. Born in northwest Louisiana in the last days of Reconstruction, Lead
Belly, a.k.a. Huddie Ledbetter, became “one of the musical giants of the
20th century,” according to Jeff Place, the Smithsonian archivist and
prime mover behind the collection. No one familiar with the development
of folk, blues, and the music that emerged from them could disagree.
“Since his death, his songs have lived on,” Place writes in the 140-page
book accompanying the collection, five CDs featuring 108 tracks, some
never previously released. “Every self-respecting ‘American folksinger’
performs them.” The same is true of rock and rollers all over the world. There was an aura about the man. When Lead Belly performed, people listened. “He was what musical scholars call a ‘songster,’ able to dig into his
bag of tricks to entertain any audience,” Place writes. For the most
part, he played songs he learned from others, not his own compositions.
But all of it was his music. As the collection demonstrates, that music is various, encompassing
country blues, work songs, spirituals, prison laments, children’s songs,
and ancient Anglo broadsides. The subjects are just as diverse, ranging
from love and murder to disaster, frolic, injustice, topical issues,
and work so hard that it is past imagining. While Lead Belly was too curious, too peripatetic, to restrict
himself to a single genre, he could play the blues as well as his less
eclectic peers. Beginning in 1912, when he would have been about
twenty-four years old, he traveled through Texas with Blind Lemon
Jefferson for some years. He no doubt learned much of the country blues
vocabulary from the younger but more experienced musician. He continued
to play with blues musicians after parting ways with Jefferson: Sonny
Terry, Brownie McGhee, Pops Foster, and Willie “The Lion” Smith
accompany him on a number of songs from the Smithsonian archive. The book includes rare photographs of Lead Belly, extensive
biographical material, memorabilia, and correspondence from other
musicians, notably Guthrie. There are also illuminating passages from
Tiny Robinson, Lead Belly’s niece and founder of the Lead Belly
Foundation. For a bluesman, he made it to a ripe old age—sixty-one. It
was, Robinson writes, a “bad, good, hard, and easy life.”
In his essay for the collection, music historian and Grammy Museum
Executive Director Robert Santelli calls Lead Belly “a man of
contradiction and complexity.” Certainly, the musician’s relationship
with the folklorist John Lomax was as fruitful, troubled, and
complicated as could be. In 1933 Lomax “discovered” Lead Belly at Louisiana’s infamous Angola
prison and recorded the first acetates. Without Lomax’s recordings, an
invaluable part of America’s musical heritage would have been lost
forever. It took fortitude and courage to traverse the rural South
recording the imprisoned and disenfranchised. At the same time, Lomax—who was born in Mississippi just two years
after the conclusion of the Civil War—had a tendency to treat Lead Belly
as chattel. Lomax didn’t trust Lead Belly with money and often deprived
the artist of royalties. One time when he did pay overdue earnings, he
backdated checks to the songster’s wife, Martha. In his publications,
Lomax took credit for music and lyrics he had not created and was not
entitled to. Lomax proved insensitive, also, to the conditions in which Lead Belly and other prisoners lived. In his introduction to American Ballads and Folk Songs,
published in 1934, Lomax writes, perhaps to convince himself, that
despite the “forbidding iron bars, the stripes, the clank of occasional
shackles” and the “cruel-looking black bullwhip four feet long” at the
prison farms he visited, he saw “no evidence of cruel treatment.” He
seems nonplussed by the “hopelessness” and “melancholy” expressed in the
songs. One can only conclude that he was a better judge of musical
talent then he was of prisoner welfare. Among the hundreds of incarcerated musicians Lomax recorded, many
were talented choral and solo performers. But there was something about
Lead Belly’s music that he immediately recognized as unique. To begin
with, there was the instrument—Lead Belly accompanied himself primarily
on an acoustic twelve-string guitar. This instrument, rare then and not
all that common today, creates a very different sound than the generic
six-string. It is louder, fuller, often described as shimmering and
resonant. Place quotes the folk musician Fred Gerlach: “A discussion of
Lead Belly’s music is not complete until people understand the power,
raw and total, which Lead Belly unleashed in his 12-string play. Lead
Belly’s aura was considerable, it encompasses his song and falls upon
one’s ears and being.” He said the sound of the twelve-string reminded
him of a barrelhouse piano. Although he is identified with the
instrument, he was known to play piano, mandolin, and fiddle as well.
The collection includes three recordings of him on the “windjammer,” a
Cajun accordion. Lomax may also have recognized that Lead Belly’s music was less
provincial than that of his fellow inmates. He was familiar with work
songs, of course, and he often sang chronicles of prison hardships. But
he could learn a song and instantly change it as he saw fit. Even in the
first prison sessions, it was clear that his selection was more
wide-ranging than his peers’. Then there was the voice. Higher than you would expect from such an
imposing figure, it was perfectly suited to the range of his repertoire.
He had an uncanny ability to tailor the sound of his voice to the
subject of the song, encompassing the (almost) sweetness of “Goodnight
Irene,” the resigned sorrow of a traditional blues, the solemnity of a
childhood spiritual, and the unconcealed fury of “The Bourgeois Blues.” And as Gerlach said, there was an aura about the man as he performed.
It is an ineffable, indefinable quality, but common to great musicians.
When Lead Belly sang, people listened. It is unlikely that Lomax took all these qualities in at one or two
sittings, but the folklorist had an intuition that served him well for
decades. In 1935, shortly after they met, Lomax said of his prodigy:
Northern people hear Negroes playing and singing beautiful
spirituals, which are too refined and unlike the true southern
spirituals. Or else they hear men and women on the stage and radio,
burlesquing their own songs. Lead Belly doesn’t burlesque. He plays and
sings with absolute sincerity. Whether or not it sounds foolish to you,
he plays with absolute sincerity. I’ve heard his songs a hundred times,
but I always get a thrill. To me his music is real music.
Perversely, in his desire to publicize Lead Belly’s music and burnish
his own reputation, Lomax helped to market Lead Belly as a sort of
savage savant. His criminal past was vital to his legend; he grew famous
not only for recording classic songs but also for picking and singing
his way out of prison. Lead Belly’s first brush with the law came in 1915, when he wound up
on a chain gang for thirty days. But the real time began in 1918, in
Sugar Land, Texas. He was convicted of murder, though he claimed
self-defense. Governor Neff had a habit of visiting the prisons, and
when he stopped by Sugar Land in 1925, Lead Belly wrote and performed a
song for him. So moved was he that Neff promised to pardon Lead Belly on
the last day of his governorship, which he did. The Folkways text
reproduces a yellowed copy of the official pardon. In spite of the
documentation, the state took the formal position that Lead Belly had
been released after completing his minimum sentence. Then, in 1933, Lomax and Lead Belly had their fateful meeting at
Angola, where the musician was again incarcerated, this time on a
conviction for attempted murder. Once more, Lead Belly claimed he was
defending himself from men who had jumped him. He wrote another song,
for Louisiana governor O. K. Allen, and was released. The state
maintained that he was let out for “good behavior.” There is no evidence
that Allen heard the song, though Lomax apparently did deliver it to
his office. He could sing sacred songs with utter conviction and move right on to 'Pigmeat.' For Lomax and the press, these stories were, perhaps understandably,
too good not to capitalize on. The most egregious of these attempts was a
1935 reenactment from the March of Time newsreel series, purporting to describe Lead Belly’s release from Angola. In the newsreel, Lead Belly is presented as humble supplicant and
Lomax his noble savior. The footage opens with Lead Belly concluding a
version of “Good Night, Irene.”
Lomax: That’s fine, Lead Belly. You’re a fine songster. I never heard so many good nigra songs. Lead Belly: Thank you sir, boss. I sure hope you send Governor O. K.
Allen a record of that song I wrote about him. I believe he’ll turn me
loose.
Lomax, looking as exasperated as his feeble acting skills allow,
ensures Lead Belly that he will do what he can. The musician then asks
Lomax for a job, which Lomax reluctantly agrees to. Lead Belly swears
his undying affection and loyalty: “I came here to be your man,” he says
in the halting cadence of one unaccustomed to the camera, “I got to
work for you the rest of my life.” In a story about the arrival of Lomax and Lead Belly in New York, the New York Herald Tribune repeated
the tales of the two singing pardons as fact. “Sweet Singer of the
Swamplands Here To Do a Few Tunes Between Homicides,” the headline
read. Life’s Lead Belly headline was less alliterative but even more direct: “Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel.” For a short time, Lead Belly served primarily as Lomax’s chauffeur.
But they parted ways, acrimoniously, over a contract dispute involving
musical rights, and the singer returned to Louisiana. With the help of Alan Lomax—a folklorist like his father, but far
more attentive to what he called “cultural equity”—Lead Belly eventually
returned to New York and developed relationships with Guthrie, Pete
Seeger, and the nascent leftist folk community. While he performed and
socialized with them, Lead Belly was not particularly interested in
their politics. In fact, he wrote a campaign song for Wendell Wilkie, a
pro-business Republican and adversary of much of the New Deal. What
likely attracted Lead Belly to Wilkie was his progressive stance on race
relations. In a 1942 address to the NAACP, Wilkie criticized both major
parties for ignoring “the Negro question.” “The desire to deprive some
of our citizens of their rights—economic, civic, or political,” Wilkie
claimed, “has the same basic motivations as the Fascist mind when it
seeks to dominate whole peoples and nations.” Wilkie also worked with
the NAACP to change the portrayals of African Americans in movies. Lead
Belly, long an aficionado of cowboy songs and westerns, thought he might
benefit from that effort, once traveling to Hollywood to try for a
part. A younger man was hired in his stead. Perhaps he longed to play beside Gene Autry, the country singer and
star of more than a hundred formulaic westerns, whom he admired. Both
recorded the other’s songs. More importantly, what drew Lead Belly to
Autry was the same quality that fostered his affinity with
Wilkie—Autry’s support for racial equality. Autry had developed a set of
principles called the Cowboy Code, the fifth tenet of which held that
adherents “must not advocate or posses racially or religiously
intolerant ideas.” Mild words today, but striking from a
mid-twentieth-century country singer.
Lead Belly’s biography wouldn’t much matter had he not made
extraordinary music, and the handsome Folkways compilation is unique in
presenting the full scope of it. While the man is not an obscurity newly
brought to light, the collection nonetheless includes unexpected
pieces—the cowboy songs stand out, as do two 1941 WNYC radio shows,
particularly the second, in which Lead Belly is accompanied by the
delightful Oleander Quartet. Also included are a show tune, lesser-known work songs and murder
ballads, an account of the Hindenburg disaster, and the most unusual
take on the sunken Titanic you will ever hear. Many black
musicians sang ironic lamentations of the great ship, on which no blacks
died because none were allowed aboard. Lead Belly’s song is not ironic,
though. More like jubilant. Oddest of all, perhaps, is the previously
unreleased song he wrote for Queen Elizabeth’s nuptials with Prince
Phillip. As far as I can tell, Elizabeth and Phillip are the only
subjects of a Lead Belly composition still living. There is in addition the prescient “Been So Long (Bellevue Hospital
Blues),” describing Lead Belly’s stay in the hospital, which he recorded
some years before he would die in that institution of amyotrophic
lateral sclerosis. One of the most powerful blues songs in the collection is “Backwater
Blues,” a Bessie Smith number long thought to be—with Charley Patton’s
epic “High Water”—an account of the Mississippi flood of 1927, which
killed hundreds and inundated 27,000 square miles of largely
agricultural terrain. However, it now appears Smith was writing about a
similarly destructive Cumberland River flood, which had occurred several
months earlier. Whatever the case, Lead Belly’s traditional rendering
of the tragedy is as bold as Patton’s or Smith’s. These disasters altered blues music in significant ways. They not
only provided subjects for songwriters but also hastened the migration
of African Americans out of the Deep South. Those who settled in
Northern cities such as Chicago, Detroit, and New York developed a more
electrified and urbane sound. Meanwhile, interest in the country blues
that evolved in the Mississippi delta waned quickly. Like a lot of blues players, Lead Belly also sang spirituals. Several
are included in the Smithsonian compilation. Some, such as “We Shall
Walk Through the Valley” and “Didn’t Old John Cross the Water,” are
staples of the canon. There are two versions of the mysterious and
poignant “Ain’t Going Down to the Well No More,” which has also been
described as a field holler. The second version, which lasts a little
more than a minute, is an a cappella rendering containing the lyrics,
“I’m a true believer / I’m a true believer / And I ain’t going to the
well no more.” It is hard to say whether the song testifies to faith or
despair. American musicians from Skip James to Al Green have struggled with
the conflict between secular and sacred music. At points in his career,
Reverend Gary Davis, who came to prominence performing a Lead Belly
tribute concert, refused to play the blues at which he was so skilled
because he found it at odds with his Baptist beliefs. But Lead Belly
could sing the sacred songs, most of which he had learned as a child,
with utter conviction and move right on to “Pigmeat” and “Black Betty,”
which make the Folkways cut, or “I’m Gonna Hold It in Her While She’s
Young and Tender,” which doesn’t. He did not appear to suffer undue
torment from the contradictory impulses. That the sturdy, stern-looking ex-convict enjoyed recording
children’s songs is yet another testament to his versatility and
songster mentality. “Ha-Ha This a Way,” perhaps the best known of these
tunes, is included here. Lead Belly said he learned this song in school,
where it was sung to accompany a “ring game” played at recess. In notes to an earlier series of 78s Lead Belly recorded for
children, Place recounts the always-outraged Walter Winchell turning his
venom on the singer and wondering how “anybody could put out a record
for children sung by a murderer.” Moses Asch, the producer of that
record, took the comment in stride: “Well, Walter Winchell . . . gave me
full publicity on this thing,” he later said. “I got more publicity on
that than anything I’ve ever done since or ever.” As ever, bad publicity
was better than no publicity at all.
Lead Belly’s career was full of bad timing, shoddy management, and a
curious combination of poor judgment and perseverance. The split with
John Lomax left him adrift in New York for a time, which included
another prison stint, until he rebounded stronger than ever. Still, as
this encyclopedic set demonstrates, his ability to sing for everyone—to
conjure an entire country over decades—was a sort of musical miracle,
for which he was eventually celebrated. Listening to these five discs,
one is constantly reminded of the extraordinary range and depth of his
influence. It would be wasteful to list everyone who has recorded Lead
Belly’s songs; just take a look at your record collection. Better still,
listen to him perform them, which is that much easier to do thanks to
the Folkways set. Yet, for all the joy this superb collection will bring listeners, it
is important to remember that Lead Belly continued to sing in spite of
the mistakes he made, the oppression he endured, and the hardships that
never seemed to abate. In her idiosyncratic prose, Tiny Robinson
describes the difficulties Lead Belly—and countless other African
American musicians of his era—faced, powerfully and finally:
Some of the thing was; the environment, which he was, brought up
under. Don’t do this, don’t do that, be careful what you say, and where
you go, you have no right walking down that road where those folk live,
and stay on this side where you belong. He was connected with those
series of episode soon as he was able to walk a block by myself. I have
my people to sing about. The way they struggle and nothing seem to be
coming their way. Nothing was done to improve the matter. The violent
grasp was too strong for us to escape. So we had to sing about them.
With his 100th birthday, and the let’s not call it a depression because that’s depressing “economic downturn” there’s been a renewed interest in the music of folk legend Woody Guthrie this past year. But hardly anyone’s talking about one of Guthrie’s biggest influences and collaborators, Huddie Ledbetter. Better known to the world as that original punk rocker Lead Belly.
by Nathan Leigh
Each generation has their introduction to Lead Belly. For many of us it was Nirvana’s legendary performance of “In The Pines” (also known as “Black Girl” and “Where Did You Sleep Last Night”) on their Unplugged in New York. For our older siblings, it was Zeppelin’s re-interpretation of “Gallis Pole” as “Gallow’s Pole.” For our parents (or grandparents…I’m pretty sure at least half the people reading this were born in the 90s. You have no idea how old that makes me feel…) it was Pete Seeger’s band The Weaver’s hit with “Good Night Irene.” And though each of these versions are great in their own right, there is an unmistakeable irony in his legacy being tied to white artists profiting off his songs when that was the major struggle of his career.
Lead Belly was already 45 when the folklorist John Lomax and his son Alan came to the notorious Angola Prison Farm to record folk songs for the Library of Congress. Though they’re usually described as having “discovered” Lead Belly, he had been a popular working musician since his teen years at that point. But Lead Belly’s early career was punctuated by prison sentences. He was generally friendly and well-liked, but firebrand Lead Belly was never one to back away from a fight. He was imprisoned once for the dubious charge of “carrying a pistol,” but then a second time for the slaying of a relative during a fight over a woman, and a final time in 1930 for stabbing a white man in self-defense during a fight at a party.
Lead Belly’s reputation spread out from the prison. He gave weekly performances, mixing his own original songs with regional folk and blues songs he had learned from fellow prisoners. He would prepare two versions of his more politically charged songs. In his song about the sinking of the Titanic, Lead Belly would leave out the verse about African American boxer Jack Johnson being denied passage when he performed it for the white prison staff.
During his second sentence in Texas, Governor Pat Morris Neff—a frequent attendant of Lead Belly’s Sunday performances—was swayed to issue a pardon after Lead Belly wrote him a song appealing to mercy in 1925. The same story would play out again in 1934 when the Lomaxes brought a petition backed by a recording of Lead Belly’s signature song “Good Night Irene” to Louisiana Governor Oscar K. Allen. In addition to a reputation for being tough as lead (one of the many origin myths of his stage name. Other possible options include a gunshot wound to the stomach, his ability to drink large amounts of moonshine, or most boringly and most likely just a tweaking of his last name. There is no scholarly evidence to support my theory that he was some sort of robot made mostly out of lead.), Lead Belly was hyped as the convict who sang his way out of prison.
After his release from prison, Lead Belly went on the road with John Lomax continuing to collect folk songs. Lead Belly was hired initially as driver and primary assistant, while Alan stayed back sick, but later became a performing partner when John gave lectures on folk music. The relationship between Lead Belly and Lomax was a complicated one and the subject of a lot of debate.
It’s on a website run by Alan Lomax’s foundation, but it seems to handle the issue with a lot of detail and not much bias.
Financially, their relationship was pretty fair for the time (50/50 manager splits were the norm in the 30s because managers are bastards in every era regardless of race). But Lomax’s interest in Lead Belly was less as an artist and more as a living example of southern African American folk music. Though Lead Belly and Alan Lomax became close friends, John Lomax treated Lead Belly as an anthropological study. He was never flat-out racist, but he was paternalistic in everything.
During his second sentence in Texas, Governor Pat Morris Neff—a frequent attendant of Lead Belly’s Sunday performances—was swayed to issue a pardon after Lead Belly wrote him a song appealing to mercy in 1925. The same story would play out again in 1934 when the Lomaxes brought a petition backed by a recording of Lead Belly’s signature song “Good Night Irene” to Louisiana Governor Oscar K. Allen. In addition to a reputation for being tough as lead (one of the many origin myths of his stage name. Other possible options include a gunshot wound to the stomach, his ability to drink large amounts of moonshine, or most boringly and most likely just a tweaking of his last name. There is no scholarly evidence to support my theory that he was some sort of robot made mostly out of lead.), Lead Belly was hyped as the convict who sang his way out of prison.
After his release from prison, Lead Belly went on the road with John Lomax continuing to collect folk songs. Lead Belly was hired initially as driver and primary assistant, while Alan stayed back sick, but later became a performing partner when John gave lectures on folk music. The relationship between Lead Belly and Lomax was a complicated one and the subject of a lot of debate.
It’s on a website run by Alan Lomax’s foundation, but it seems to handle the issue with a lot of detail and not much bias.
Financially, their relationship was pretty fair for the time (50/50 manager splits were the norm in the 30s because managers are bastards in every era regardless of race). But Lomax’s interest in Lead Belly was less as an artist and more as a living example of southern African American folk music. Though Lead Belly and Alan Lomax became close friends, John Lomax treated Lead Belly as an anthropological study. He was never flat-out racist, but he was paternalistic in everything.
It was John who encouraged Lead Belly to perform in prison clothes, and John who suggested Lead Belly sprinkle his performances with historical context of his songs. As a result, Lead Belly became less blues artist and more novelty act during his partnership with John Lomax. His history as an ex-convict was used in promoting concerts. To the media of the day, Lead Belly wasn’t a brilliant artist with a unique voice, he was an example of how the prison system could successfully reform a killer. (declaring our massively flawed prison system to be effective is another timeless American classic…) John Lomax treated Lead Belly as a lecture tool, but what Lead Belly sought was artistic and commercial success.
After only 6 months, the partnership began to fall apart. John Lomax didn’t believe Lead Belly could be trusted with the money he earned. The meager royalties earned from his recordings for ARC and the more substantial performance fees (about $20,000 in today’s money) were controlled tightly by John Lomax and ultimately only paid out to Lead Belly’s girlfriend Martha after their marriage in installments. The frustrated Lead Belly resented his arrangement with Lomax and the lack of control he had over his own career. He neither wanted to be the performer Lomax marketed him as, nor did he want to run his career the way Lomax wanted it run. During a two week lecture / concert tour of New England tensions increased, until at a stop in Boston Lead Belly pulled a knife on Lomax, demanding his money. A bitter lawsuit followed with Lead Belly winning the few hundred dollars in royalties he was still owed paid in one lump sum.
The couple returned to Louisiana, but the money dried up quickly. Destitute, Lead Belly and Martha returned to New York in 1936. He became a regular fixture at the famed Apollo Theatre in Harlem, creating a massive stage revue featuring a cast of 65. The show flopped after bad reviews, but Lead Belly maintained aspirations of being a cross-over performer like his one-time opening act Cab Calloway. He continued to look for acting opportunities (because brilliant musicians always make brilliant actors. You know, like Prince in Purple Rain. Oh wait.) but his past as a convict proved an obstacle at every turn. In addition blues was quickly losing ground to jazz and swing in the pop markets. John Lomax’s insistence on playing up Lead Belly’s ex-convict-bluesman persona proved to be a major roadblock that would haunt his career. Throughout the rest of his career, Lead Belly would return on and off to that image; never fully able to shake it, and never fully sure if it was a good career move to do so.
Though mainstream success was always just out of reach, Lead Belly found a home in the leftist community in New York. Alan Lomax and Lead Belly had maintained their friendship, and Alan was quick to introduce Lead Belly to the progressive community. Lead Belly traded the ex-con image for a straight-laced suited pro. He became a regular in New York’s burgeoning folk scene. Starting in the late 30s, Lead Belly wrote some of his best protest songs. While he’d never shied away from addressing racial inequality in his songs, during Lead Belly’s protest era he mastered the art of articulating a social position through song. “Bourgeois Blues” is a masterpiece of social criticism about his treatment on a trip to D.C.
Following another stay in prison in 1939 for assault, Lead Belly befriended up and coming folk performers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger (who it’s sort of hard to picture as a young impressionable singer having met—and marched in protest with!!!!—Pete at age 92, but I digress…). Both would later go on to declare Lead Belly to be one of their main influences. Woody and Lead Belly in particular enjoyed a close partnership performing together and collaborating. Some of Lead Belly’s most famous recordings come from an interview Woody conducted in 1940.http://www.pigriver.com/woody-guthrie-inte
Throughout the 40’s, Lead Belly’s career stabilized to a degree. He never achieved the mainstream success he dreamed of, but he enjoyed a strong following, and was a successful regional live act. He continued recording new and old material through the decade cutting over a hundred sides for various labels. His final recording was in 1948. A set of 90 songs, some featuring his wife Martha, on the newly invented magnetic tape. The collection almost didn’t see light. Lead Belly died in 1949 of ALS (also known as Lou Gherig’s disease), and it wasn’t until after the Weavers hit with “Goodnight Irene” a year later, that Lead Belly finally achieved the mainstream success he had chased his whole life, and his final recordings were made public.
His legacy is hard to overstate. Nearly every artist of the last 60 years has covered a Lead Belly song at least once. Lead Belly’s trademarked 12-string guitar playing has influenced everything from modern country to metal. His vocal style has had a profound influence on Soul and RnB. His don’t-give-a-shit attitude lives on in punk. His criticisms of injustice and bitterness at the American prison system, are sadly as powerful and dangerous as they were 60 years ago. Though he spent the bulk of his career chasing a fame that never arrived, he is now regarded as one of the greatest American musicians of all time.
Tom B. Blocker liked to think that Texans who had the misfortune to
find themselves in New York City needed to stick together. This was
never more true than in 1935, the sixth year of the Depression, when
Texas dress and Texas food were anything but trendy, and when Dust Bowl
clouds rolled across the plains west of Dallas. Tom B. Blocker was
president of the New York chapter of Texas-Exes, an organization
composed mostly of University of Texas alumni. These misplaced men held
regular meetings to talk about old times, keep up with characters in
Lone Star politics, and maybe even hear a few cowboy songs. On Friday,
January 4, Blocker spent the morning putting the final touches on plans
for a special luncheon the group was having at the midtown Hotel
Montclair. For 75 cents admission the audience would be able to hear
Texas alumnus John Lomax and his “colored chauffeur” with the unlikely
name of Leadbelly, who would perform some songs from the prisons of
Louisiana.
The crowd gathered earlier than usual, and Blocker began to suspect
that what was planned as an easygoing, informal meeting was turning into
an event. He was not truly surprised. In the four days since he had
arrived in town, everyone had been talking about the man named Leadbelly
(real name Huddie Ledbetter). He had impressed in private some of the
city’s more influential people, including the board of the Rockefeller
Foundation and club owners up at Harlem–and supposedly had gotten an
offer from band leader Cab Calloway himself. The Herald Tribune had
run a major story on Leadbelly, describing how Lomax had discovered him
in a Louisiana prison and how he had sung an appeal to the governor
that had won him a pardon. SWEET SINGER OF THE SWAMPLANDS HERE TO DO A
FEW TUNES BETWEEN HOMICIDES read the headline, and people all over town
were talking about him. Many had seen Paul Muni’s horrifying film I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang with its portrait of life on a southern chain gang; here was the real thing. Reporters and photographers jostled the Texans for a place near the front of the room. A photographer from the New York Herald Tribune arrived first and the lead staff men from Time were soon in place, as were the Associated Press man and Lincoln Barnett from the Herald Tribune. Other
reporters, booking agents, promoters, and merely the curious crowded in
uninvited. After lunch, Blocker introduced John Avery Lomax, whom he
noted wasnot only an authority on American folk songs
but also one of the founders of Texas-Exes. Dressed in a conservative
suit and tie that did nothing to belie his banking background, Lomax
also wore his customary hat that allowed the remaining fringe of his
surprisingly dark hair to escape from underneath. He got up to talk
about the music the audience was about to hear. “Northern people,” he
said, “hear Negroes playing and singing beautiful spirituals, which are
too refined and are unlike the true southern spirituals. Or else they
hear men and women on the stage and radio, burlesquing their own songs.
Leadbelly doesn’t burlesque. He plays and sings with absolute sincerity.
Whether or not it sounds foolish to you, he plays with absolute
sincerity. I’ve heard his songs a hundred times, but I always get a
thrill. To me his music is real music.” Nervous about a hangover his singer was sporting from a night out in
Harlem, Lomax had had the performer wait in a coat room. Now he motioned
him in. Huddie Ledbetter walked forward. He was only about
five-foot-eight, but he was stocky, around 160 pounds, and obviously
strong, with muscles hardened from years of manual labor. He was not a
young man (they would learn later he was in his late forties), and he
walked with energy and confidence of a seasoned old-time performer, and
dressed the part, too. He wore a rough blue work shirt over a yellow
one, and old-fashioned high-bib overalls; around his neck was a red
bandanna, and on his head perched a small brimmed hat, worn high up on
the back. He was holding a battered old Stella twelve-string guitar,
painted green and partly held together with string. It was different
from the guitars most of the audience had seen before; it was large,
tightly strung, and, they learned as he started to play, loud. Leadbelly had no problem making himself heard by all. His big voice
carried across the room, high and clear, honed in an age before
microphones or sound systems. His speech contained an accent so powerful
and dense that the non-Texans in the room had to strain to make it out.
It was really a language with phrases, pronunciations, and nuances
shaped by years as a black man living in the Deep South. Moreover,
Leadbelly didn’t sing the kind of blues played by jazz bands heard in
clubs or on the radio. It was a much older music that predated both
blues and jazz. There was “When I Was a Cowboy” (a story about the
western plains) and the work song called “Bring Me Li’l’ Water, Silvy.”
“Whoa, Back Buck,”based on commands shouted at oxen,
was followed by an old blues Leadbelly learned from a group of
levee-camp workers before the turn of the century, “I’m All Out and
Down.” As he warmed to the occasion, Leadbelly loosened up and fed off
the applause and shouts. He performed “Take a Whiff on Me,” a song about
cocaine. He ended with a version of his song to Governor Pat Neff, the
Texas executive who had pardoned him and released him from Sugarland
Prison back in 1925, nearly ten years earlier. It was a lively,
complicated song, and as he sang it, people stood up to see what he was
doing with his feet: Leadbelly tapped his left foot in a steady beat,
while his right foot rapped out a complex, lively rhythm in syncopation.
“If you don’t think that’s hard, try it yourself,” Lomax would remark
later.
THE MUSIC OF LEADBELLY: AN EXTENSIVE VIDEO OVERVIEW, A CROSS SECTION OF RECORDINGS, MUSICAL ANALYSIS AND COMMENTARY, PLUS VARIOUS INTERVIEWS WITH LEADBELLY:
A year passed without any action being taken on Lead Belly's petition for early release. John and Alan Lomax returned to Angola in the summer of 1934, and they recorded another session with Lead Belly. A few of these recordings were released commercially by Elektra Records in 1966 in a box set called The Library of Congress Recordings and were reissued in 1991 by Rounder Records on a CD called Midnight Special. As that title indicates, among the songs was "Midnight Special," a song Lead Belly
first heard during his incarceration in Texas in the early 1920s and
which he adapted. The session also included "Governor O.K. Allen," a
song Lead Belly had written to encourage the governor to sign his petition of release. The Lomaxes
took a record of the song to the governor's office, though there is no
evidence that he actually listened to it. But on July 25, 1934, he
signed Lead Belly's petition, commuting his sentence to three to ten years, and since Lead Belly
had already served four and a half years, he was released on August 1,
1934. In later years, the state of Louisiana repeatedly denied the
legend that Lead Belly had sung his way out of prison for a second time.
Upon his release, Lead Belly initially moved to Shreveport, but in the fall of 1934 he sought out John Lomax,
who was living in Texas, and went to work for him, acting as his
chauffeur and assistant on further trips to prisons in search of songs.
At the Cummins Prison Farm in Arkansas, Lead Belly
first heard a prisoner perform "Rock Island Line," a song he added to
his repertoire and altered extensively. In the winter of 1934-1935, he
accompanied Lomax
north, where they made a series of appearances at academic and
scholarly gatherings such as the annual meeting of the Modern Language
Association (MLA) in Philadelphia and lecture-performances at Yale and
Harvard. They attracted considerable media attention, including articles
in major newspapers and appearances on radio and newsreel versions of
Time Marches On. Lead Belly signed a management agreement with Lomax
and was in turn signed for a series of recordings by the American
Record Corporation (ARC), which issued records on a variety of
low-priced labels and also owned the venerable Columbia Records label.
The ARC recordings, 40 sides, were made in January, February, and March
1935, though ARC only released two singles at the time, with a third
issued the following year. Viewing Lead Belly
as a blues artist, ARC emphasized that aspect of his large repertoire,
but the records did not sell well in the blues market and most of the
recordings remained unissued for decades. The first extensive release of
them came with the Columbia Records LP Includes Legendary Performances Never Before Released in 1970, and more of them appeared on Columbia/Legacy's King of the 12-String Guitar in 1991. During this period, Lead Belly
also made more recordings for the Library of Congress, some of which
appeared on the 1966 Elektra LP and on the 1991 Rounder albums Midnight Special and Gwine Dig a Hole to Put the Devil In.
![Alabama Bound [RCA]](https://rovimusic.rovicorp.com/image.jpg?c=mzHdB25s5S64AjecQyoNbB_TZlp6n_cq-Emr2zx15tU=&f=3)
The singer was busy in 1940, appearing on the
network radio series Folk Music of America and Back Where I Come From
and launching his own weekly 15-minute program on local WNYC, a show
that ran for a year. He also undertook his third set of commercial
recordings in June, this time for RCA Victor and accompanied on some
tracks by the Golden Gate Quartet.
These sessions resulted in an album called The Midnight Special and
Other Southern Prison Songs, released on RCA's Bluebird imprint. A 1964
compilation of the material on RCA was called Midnight Special, there was a 1989 collection called Alabama Bound, and in 2003, as part of its Secret History of Rock & Roll series, Bluebird issued When the Sun Goes Down, Vol. 5: Take This Hammer, a compilation containing all 26 tracks that were recorded. In August 1940, Lead Belly
also returned to recording for the Library of Congress, and some of
these tracks have turned up on the previously mentioned Elektra set as
well as on the Rounder albums Gwine Dig a Hole to Put the Devil In and Let It Shine on Me (1991).
In May 1941, Lead Belly recorded his first session for Asch Records, a tiny independent label run by Moses Asch. Lead Belly
went on to record extensively for Asch and its successors, Disc and
Folkways, this material later reissued both by Smithsonian/Folkways
(from the 1990s on) and by various small labels that acquired rights to
it. In 1944, he moved to the West Coast, where he remained for the
better part of two years. While there, he signed to Capitol Records and
did three sessions for the label in October 1944 that resulted in a
series of singles. Later, Capitol issued such compilation albums as
Classics in Jazz (1953) and Leadbelly: Huddie Ledbetter's Best (1962), drawn from these sessions. Back in New York from 1946 on, Lead Belly continued to record for Folkways, his 1948 recordings later turning up on a series of LPs called Leadbelly's Last Sessions and gathered together into a four-CD box set by Smithsonian/Folkways in 1994.
The Lead Belly Foundation is a non profit
organization founded by Tiny Robinson, niece of Huddie Ledbetter to
preserve and promote the musical legacy of the "King of the 12-string
guitar".
The anthology is accompanied by a handsome 140-page book profusely
illustrated with rare photos, telegrams, posters, and other such
ephemera. The book also features a lengthy, erudite essay by Jeff Place,
the archivist for the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural
Heritage, who co-produced this compilation along with Robert Santelli,
the executive director of the Grammy Museum. Such elaborate packaging
obviously entails significantly increased manufacturing costs and thus a
higher retail price. Even so, Place and Santelli decided that this
visually rich presentation was essential in today’s digital age. Now
that recordings of songs can be purchased individually online, the
trade-off for such convenient selectivity is the loss of vital
contextual information. “Downloading,” Place told New York Times
writer Alan Light, “means missing all of that [Lead Belly’s] story, so
we wanted to create a book that has CDs with it, rather than the other
way around—a museum exhibit in a coffee-table set.” The resulting
compilation does indeed suggest a museum-exhibit quality and, as such,
it makes a major cultural statement. (For a full-length biographical
study, the book The Life and Legend of Leadbelly by Kip Lornell and Charles M. Wolfe, also comes highly recommended.)
Leadbelly 
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