Saturday, March 28, 2020

Leadbelly (1888-1949): Legendary, iconic, and innovative musician, composer, singer, songwriter, arranger, ensemble leader, producer, and teacher

SOUND PROJECTIONS




AN ONLINE QUARTERLY MUSIC MAGAZINE




EDITOR:  KOFI NATAMBU




WINTER, 2020

 

 


VOLUME EIGHT  NUMBER TWO

 
HERBIE HANCOCK

Featuring the Musics and Aesthetic Visions of:

RICHARD DAVIS
(February 22-28)

JAKI BYARD
(February 29-March 6)

CHARLES LLOYD
(March 7-13)

CHICO HAMILTON  
(March 14-20)

JOHNNY HODGES
(March 21-27)

LEADBELLY
(March 28-April 3)

SIDNEY BECHET
(April 4-April 10)

DON BYAS
(April 11-17)

FLETCHER HENDERSON
(April 18-24)

JIMMY LUNCEFORD
(April 25-May 1)

KING OLIVER
(May 2-8)

WAR
(May 9-15)


https://www.allmusic.com/artist/lead-belly-mn0000124390/biography 







Leadbelly 

(1888-1949)

Artist Biography by

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.

Midnight Special: The Library of Congress Recordings, Vol. 1
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.
King of the 12-String Guitar
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.

Alabama Bound [RCA]
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).
Huddie Ledbetter's Best (His Guitar His Voice His Piano)
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. 

https://musicians.allaboutjazz.com/leadbelly



Leadbelly Leadbelly



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. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_Belly

Lead Belly


From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Lead Belly with a melodeon c. 1942

Huddie William Ledbetter (/ˈhjdi/; 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 Time newsreels 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 centrist Republican 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. 


Legacy

 

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]

Discography


"THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL" 1940 Lead Belly Victor Record

American Record Corporation recordings


Victor Records


The Library of Congress recordings

The Library of Congress recordings, made by John and Alan Lomax from 1934 to 1943, were released in a six-volume series by Rounder Records:

  • Midnight Special (1991)
  • Gwine Dig a Hole to Put the Devil In (1991)
  • Let It Shine on Me (1991)
  • The Titanic (1994)
  • Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen (1994)
  • Go Down Old Hannah (1995)

Cover of the album "Negro Sinful Songs" (78 rpm disc) Released in 1939 on the Musicraft label.

Folkways recordings

The Folkways recordings, done for Moses Asch from 1941 to 1947, were released in a three-volume series by Smithsonian Folkways:

  • Where Did You Sleep Last Night, Lead Belly Legacy, Vol. 1 (1996)
  • Bourgeois Blues, Lead Belly Legacy, Vol. 2 (1997)
  • Shout On, Lead Belly Legacy, Vol. 3 (1998)

Smithsonian Folkways has released several other collections of his recordings:

Live recordings

  • Leadbelly Recorded in Concert, University of Texas, Austin, June 15, 1949 (1973, Playboy Records PB 119)

 

Other compilations

 

  • Huddie Ledbetter's Best (1989, BGO Records), containing recordings made for Capitol Records in 1944 in California
  • King of the 12-String Guitar (1991, Sony/Legacy Records), a collection of blues songs and prison ballads recorded in 1935 in New York City for the American Record Company, including previously unreleased alternate takes
  • 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

 


  1. Eagle, Bob; LeBlanc, Eric S. (2013). Blues - A Regional Experience. Santa Barbara: Praeger Publishers. p. 301. ISBN 978-0313344237.

  2. Snyder, Jared (Summer 1994). "Leadbelly and His Windjammer: Examining the African American Button Accordion Tradition". American Music. 12 (2): 148–166. JSTOR 3052520.

  3. Huddie William "Lead Belly" Ledbetter at Find a Grave

  4. "Delta Blues.net". Archived from the original on September 19, 2010. Retrieved September 22, 2010.

  5. "Lead Belly Foundation". LeadBelly.org. Archived from the original on January 23, 2010. Retrieved September 22, 2010.

  6. Epstein, Lawrence J. (2010). Political Folk Music in America from Its Origins to Bob Dylan. p. 57.

  7. "Lead Belly Sings for Children". Spotify.

  8. Laberge, Yves (2006). Komara, Edward (ed.). The Blues Encyclopedia. Routledge. pp. 586–587. ISBN 0-415-92699-8.

  9. ["About Lead Belly", The Lead Belly Foundation. Retrieved 8 March 2020

  10. Edward Komara (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the Blues, p.586

  11. Wolfe, Charles K; Lornell, Kip (1999). The Life and Legend of Leadbelly. Da Capo Press. p. 28. ISBN 0-306-80896-X.

  12. Lomax, Alan, ed. Folk Song USA. New American Library.

  13. Gilliland, John (May 18, 1969). "Show 18 – Blowin' in the Wind: Pop Discovers Folk Music. Part 1". Pop Chronicles. UNT Digital Library, University of North Texas, Digital.library.unt.edu. Retrieved September 22, 2010.

  14. LIFE - Google Boeken. Retrieved December 30, 2011.

  15. The Mudcat Cafe. Leadbelly – King of the 12 String Guitar Archived January 2, 2016, at the Wayback Machine Retrieved on January 30, 2007

  16. Perkinson, Robert (2010). Texas Tough: The Rise of America's Prison Empire. Metropolitan Books. 184. ISBN 978-0-8050-8069-8.

  17. "Today in Masonic History". MASONRYTODAY.com. November 26, 2017. Retrieved October 31, 2019.

  18. Terkel, Studs (2005). And They All Sang. New Press.

  19. Ohara, Marcus (November 22, 2009). "The Unique Guitar Blog: The Stella 12 String Guitar".

  20. Turner 2017-02-23T17:39:36Z, Dale. "12-String King:Lead Belly's Big-Bottom Blues". Guitarworld.com. Retrieved January 6, 2020.

  21. Edward M. Komara. Encyclopedia of the Blues. 2006, Psychology Press, p. 434

  22. Lead Belly singing "Take This Hammer" on YouTube. Retrieved January 30, 2008.

  23. "Where Did You Sleep Last Night". YouTube. January 10, 2011.

  24. "Top 50 by Nirvana". Archived from the original on October 18, 2014. Retrieved May 8, 2013.

  25. "The 100 Greatest Albums You've Never Heard". NME. Retrieved October 11, 2018.

  26. "The Nobel Prize in Literature 2016". NobelPrize.org.

  27. Catlin, Roger. "The Incomparable Legacy of Lead Belly". Smithsonian.

  28. "Lead Belly has inspired a music generation". Irishexaminer.com. June 10, 2015.

  29. "On the Verge: George Ezra arrives by way of 'Budapest'". Usatoday.com.

  30. "Lead Belly at 125: A Tribute to an American Songster | GRAMMY Museum". Grammymuseum.org.

  31. "Bourgeois Town: Lead Belly in Washington DC". Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. 20540 USA.

  32. "Lead Belly Fest | Royal Albert Hall". Royal Albert Hall.

  33. "The Titanic" by Leadbelly on YouTube

  34. Dinerstein, Joel (April 1, 2003). Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture. Univ of Massachusetts Press. p. 124. Retrieved November 18, 2011. Jack Johnson denied access on Titanic.

  35. Lead Belly's Last Sessions, disc 2, track 15, "The Titanic". Smithsonian Folkways.

  36. Leadbelly's Last Sessions, vol. 1. Folkways Records (FP 241) U.S.

  37. Mazor, Barry (February 25, 2015). "Going From Prison Zero to Folk Hero". Wall Street Journal. p. D5.

    1. The Smithsonian Folkways Collection, 2015 remastered compilation. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings (SFW 40201) U.S.

     

    Sources

     

    1. White, Gary; Stuart, David; Aviva, Elyn (2001). Music in Our World. p. 196. ISBN 0-07-027212-3.
    2. Lornell, Kip; Wolfe, Charles (1999). The Life and Legend of Leadbelly. Da Capo Press.

     

    External links

     

    1. The Lead Belly Foundation
    2. The Official Lead Belly Website
    3. Leadbelly at the Encyclopædia Britannica
    4. "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" MP3 file on The Internet Archive
    5. "Ledbetter, Huddie (Leadbelly)" in the Handbook of Texas Online
    6. Leadbelly (1976) on IMDb
    7. AllMusic
    8. Lead Belly discography at Discogs Edit this at Wikidata
    9. Discography for Lead Belly on Folkways
    10. Recording of Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie live on WNYC Radio, Dec. 1940, with commentary by WNYC radio producer Henrietta Yurchenco
    11. Leadbelly and Lomax Together at the American Music Festival on WNYC
    12. Lead Belly And The Lomaxes: Myths and Realities A FAQ and Timeline Lead Belly's relationship with John and Alan Lomax
    13. Louisiana Music Hall of Fame Induction Page
    14. Lead Belly: Entries|KnowLA, Encyclopedia of Louisiana

https://www.leadbelly.org/leadbelly.html





About Lead Belly

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. 

https://folkways.si.edu/leadbelly


Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection




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.

Limited-Edition Poster and T-Shirt
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.

http://www.culturalequity.org/alan-lomax/friends/ledbetter

Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly)




Researched and written by Ellen Harold and Don Fleming

(See the entire chronology here)

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 SongsNegro 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.

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 PoploreFolk 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 Bronxaround 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



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


'That Blew My Mind': Raiding The Lead Belly Vault




https://64parishes.org/the-far-reaching-legacy-of-lead-belly

The Far-Reaching Legacy of Lead Belly


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.”
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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.

(from LCV Spring 2015 Sound Advice)