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| Per the saying, build the statue |
They turned Lead Belly’s life-story into a newsreel back in 1935 - according to Open Culture, the site that posted it, said newsreel “is the earliest celluloid document of American folklore.” Both Lead Belly and John Lomax, the famous musicologist and folklorist who recorded him at Louisiana’s Angola state penitentiary, appear in it, each playing himself. It's more artifact than art - i.e., a film short starring two men who can't act chewing stiff dialogue - and it's a white-savior narrative on top of that. Fascinating as it is to see the real Lomax and Lead Belly interacting, it elides and sanitizes too much of the story, not to mention their actual relationship, to work as actual history. Now, here’s my stab at the same.
“When he give it to me,’ Ledbetter recalled, ‘glory to God, I was gone some.’”
- Lead Belly, remembering getting his first guitar from his father
As with most blues artists, and most Black Americans in the Jim Crow South, some uncertainty surrounds Lead Belly’s actual date of birth, but nearly all place it either in 1888 or 1889. All sources agree he was born Huddie (“hew-die”) William Ledbetter and on a plantation near Mooringsport, Louisiana, a town in that state’s northwest corner. While he took an early interest in music - an uncle gave him his first accordion around the age of five and he played the church organ as well; that first guitar came later - Ledbetter married somewhere around 1908, held a day-job, and, for a while, didn't take any clear steps on the path that led to becoming Lead Belly.
There appears to be some overlap between those two lives: most sources have him playing Shreveport, Louisiana’s red-light district (suggestively named St. Paul’s Bottom) by age 15 (circa 1903), but the closest any source I read comes to naming the moment he left the straight life behind comes from Wikipedia, which went with his early 20s. He spent enough time in and around St. Paul’s Bottom that people now refer to it as Ledbetter Heights, but few details from that period go beyond montage-esque placeholders like “He began to develop his own style of music after exposure to various musical influences.” Ledbetter continued to work throughout this time, mostly as a laborer and a good one; as noted in the bio posted on the Lead Belly Foundation’s website “he was legendary for picking 1,000 pounds of cotton a day.”
When he played, Ledbetter played in rough rooms - e.g., the juke joints and “sukey jumps” (phrase lifted from the Lead Belly Foundation bio) of the South - something that mixed fatefully with his reported short temper. He picked up his first conviction in 1915 on charges of carrying a pistol. He escaped, even lived and worked under the surname Walter Boyd for a while, only to run violently afoul of the law in 1918 when he killed a relative, Will Stafford, in a fight over a woman somewhere in Dallas. [Ed. - Just to note it, some sources speak to Lead Belly’s criminal past more directly than others.] The state handed down a 30-year sentence and sent Ledbetter to either Imperial Farm, a prison near Sugar Land, TX (now called Central Unit), or some unnamed prison in Huntsville, TX, which may or may not have been where he killed a fellow inmate in self-defense (Wikipedia’s phrasing is loose). That incident left him with a scar on his neck, which he took to concealing with a scarf or bandana.
He also picked up the nickname “Lead Belly” in prison, though no one knows exactly how it came about - e.g., was it a Southern-fried corruption of Ledbetter, a tribute to his physical toughness, a belly full of buckshot from another scrap, his ability to stomach moonshine? The nickname stuck, in any case, and ultimately became the name most people would use.
About seven years into his first prison term, Ledbetter wrote a song to ask Texas Governor, Pat Neff, for a pardon. It was a longshot - on getting elected, Neff promised to never release a prisoner - but the song won him over and got Ledbetter out of jail. In a “stranger-than-fiction” comic twist, Ledbetter tried the same thing during his term at Angola in the mid-1930s. but the mix of truth and legend is complicated in both cases. In the first case, Neff had actually met him in 1924, a year before his release; further, he both knew and admired Ledbetter’s music - to a point where he would invite guests to watch him perform at picnics held at the prison. He also handed down the pardon on his way out of office, which erased the risk of getting voted out for breaking his promise. As for the second case, e.g., his release from Angola prison, a site called Biography noted this:
“Budget issues caused by the Great Depression allowed him to apply for early release, which he did, and the sitting governor approved the application in 1934. (He also sang a song to this governor, pleading for release.).”
Lomax, an interesting figure in his own right, was deeply involved in that second incident, if only half-wittingly. After many years of work, rejection and academic politics, Lomax had made a name for himself as a leading anthropologist of American folk music. It started when he published Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads in 1910. With that for a foundation, he spent the next two decades establishing “folklore societies” all over the Eastern half of the country and, when he could find the time and funding, traveling just as far and wide to find local musicians to make “field recordings.” When it came to blues, work songs, and ballads, they found most of those musicians where they found Lead Belly: in the prisons. That said, Ledbetter stood apart, perhaps for a couple reasons. From Lomax’s Wikipedia page:
“In July 1933, they acquired a state-of-the-art, 315 pounds (143 kg) phonograph uncoated-aluminum disk recorder. Installing it in the trunk of his Ford sedan, Lomax soon used it to record, at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, a twelve-string guitar player by the name of Huddie Ledbetter, better known as ‘Lead Belly,’ whom they considered one of their most significant finds.”
It was during the second, 1934 session where Ledbetter asked Lomax to take a recording of “Good Night, Irene” to Louisiana Governor, Oscar Allen. No one really knows whether or not Allen ever listened to the song, but, whatever happened - Ledbetter's good behavior, the state's need to trim expenses, or a simple love of music - Allen granted him another early release. Aged 46 and with a string of felonies in his past, Ledbetter offered (or, per some sources, begged) to work as a chauffeur and assistant for Lomax and...more or less as in the newsreel, Lomax accepted. Once teamed up, Lomax set Ledbetter to a December 1934 “smoker” (a group sing, apparently) at Pennsylvania’s Bryn Mawr College, which started his exposure to the wider world - white audiences, in particular. The Lomaxes continued the push with a tour of northeast colleges - including the Ivys - with some recordings and interviews for a book titled Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly for promotion.
That arrangement worked well until it didn't. The partnership came apart under a variety of pressures, some job-related and wholly justified - e.g., the Country Music Hall of Fame reports that Lomax asked Lead Belly to play in prisoner’s clothes, but other sources dispute that (Wikipedia, directly) - but most involved money. When the split came in 1935, Lomax offered to pay for Lead Belly’s and his wife's return to Louisiana, and with pay for three months’ worth of (sporadic) performances. The deal came undone for a couple reasons - paying Ledbetter through his wife, Martha Promise, and in installments among them (Lomax worried he'd drink it away had he received a lump sum) - and ended in a lawsuit. After arriving in Louisiana, Ledbetter sued Lomax both for a full, lump-sum payment and release from his management contract - and he won.
His ties to Lomax cut (somewhat), Ledbetter attempted turn a reputation into a career in music. He recorded just over 50 songs with American Recording Corporation while still connected to the Lomaxes, but none of the three 78s they released achieved the kind of sales that would support him. Lead Belly tried Harlem - he even won the support of Richard Wright, who praised him in columns for The Daily Worker - but ne never broke through there as he would with the white audiences associated with the folk music revival. The seas hardly parted for him - he was convicted of another stabbing, 1939 in Manhattan - but Alan Lomax worked to get him out and then made him a regular on Back Where I Come From, a radio show the younger Lomax ran with a guy named Nicholas Ray. Ledbetter started playing Manhattan as well, places where he’d meet and befriend major figures in the growing folk scene like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie (as well as less familiar figures like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee).
More recording offers, and better ones, started to roll in. The first came in 1940 for the RCA-Victor label, who paired him with the Golden Gate Quartet for The Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs. With well-recorded material and competent advertising for the first time in his career, and an introduction through mutual friends to Moses “Moe” Asch, Ledbetter moved to Asch Recordings from 1941-44. His big break came at a tricky time - e.g., the end and aftermath of World War II - but Lead Belly’s music still traveled across the Atlantic, thereby making him (per Wikipedia) the first American country blues to achieve success in Europe. That led to arrangements for a 1949 European tour that Lead Belly started, but couldn’t finish. He was playing in France when he was diagnosed with ALS, aka, Lou Gehrig’s Disease. He performed several times after that - notably at a University of Texas at Austin tribute to John Lomax - but he would be dead before the year ended.
No matter how much the sessions improved and his reputation grew, Lead Belly never recorded a hit - at least not during his lifetime. Still, six months after his death, a group called The Weavers released a cover of “Good Night Irene” that gave him a first, if posthumous hit - which suggests how close he got (at least until you listen to The Weavers).
To finally turn to Lead Belly’s music, he did not “write” many original songs. As the Country Music Hall of Fame notes, he “[borrowed] from earlier blues and folk music,” but he would make the songs his own by rearranging the words, tempo and melody. He adopted the 12-string guitar as his instrument of choice - after seeing a Mexican guitarist playing one according to The Lead Belly Foundation - and he named his favorite “Stella.” Lead Belly also did something unique with the tuning. From Wikipedia:
“[Lead Belly’s] 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.”
Also:
“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.” [ed. - nice call-back.]
That, combined with a considerable repertoire of songs, was what made Lead Belly’s career and the parts of his legend that didn’t involve the Lomaxes or prison time. Going the other way, would the Lomaxes have even found Lead Belly had he not gone to prison? Given how badly The Great Depression derailed most recording careers, would he have thrived like Tampa Red, or would he have dropped in and out of the business like Lonnie Johnson? Fame and financial successes eluded him in life, and a legacy only pays the bills for the people who survive you, but Lead Belly’s left a massive one, inspiring everyone from Van Morrison to George Harrison to Kurt Cobain. How many of people get that along with a neighborhood in Shreveport bearing his name?
About the Sampler
Because Lead Belly had so virtually no successful recordings during his lifetime, it was hard to lace them into his history. I did, however, make the conscious choice to include all the songs that appeared on The Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs: “Midnight Special,” of course, but also “Pick a Bale of Cotton,” “Alabama Bound,” “Ham An’ Eggs,” “Grey Goose,” and “Stewball,” the last of which adds Billy Childish as another inspiree.
The rest of the sampler, which I left at 22 songs for some damn reason, includes a mix of song later made more famous - e.g., “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” (aka, “In the Pines”) and “Black Betty” - plus songs various sources called his more famous tunes, e.g., “Packing Trunk Blues” (his first recording, I believe), “Good Night Irene,” “Roberta,” “Rock Island Line,” “Pretty Flower in Your Backyard,” and “National Defense Blues.” After that, it’s mostly songs I liked for one reason or another. In no particular order: “Easy Rider,” “Pigmeat,” “Leaving Blues,” “Sail on, Little Girl,” “Yellow Gal,” “Out on the Western Plains,” “Eagle Rock Rag” and “Good Morning Blues.”
Because it laid the foundation for so much of what came after it - in blues, rock ‘n’ roll and rock, when it came around - Lead Belly won’t confuse modern ears too much. The structure, even the narrative style, echoes loudly into music from the late 1950s to the present. That makes the bar of entry fairly low, but you’ll get even more out of him if you give it more time.
“When he give it to me,’ Ledbetter recalled, ‘glory to God, I was gone some.’”
- Lead Belly, remembering getting his first guitar from his father
As with most blues artists, and most Black Americans in the Jim Crow South, some uncertainty surrounds Lead Belly’s actual date of birth, but nearly all place it either in 1888 or 1889. All sources agree he was born Huddie (“hew-die”) William Ledbetter and on a plantation near Mooringsport, Louisiana, a town in that state’s northwest corner. While he took an early interest in music - an uncle gave him his first accordion around the age of five and he played the church organ as well; that first guitar came later - Ledbetter married somewhere around 1908, held a day-job, and, for a while, didn't take any clear steps on the path that led to becoming Lead Belly.
There appears to be some overlap between those two lives: most sources have him playing Shreveport, Louisiana’s red-light district (suggestively named St. Paul’s Bottom) by age 15 (circa 1903), but the closest any source I read comes to naming the moment he left the straight life behind comes from Wikipedia, which went with his early 20s. He spent enough time in and around St. Paul’s Bottom that people now refer to it as Ledbetter Heights, but few details from that period go beyond montage-esque placeholders like “He began to develop his own style of music after exposure to various musical influences.” Ledbetter continued to work throughout this time, mostly as a laborer and a good one; as noted in the bio posted on the Lead Belly Foundation’s website “he was legendary for picking 1,000 pounds of cotton a day.”
When he played, Ledbetter played in rough rooms - e.g., the juke joints and “sukey jumps” (phrase lifted from the Lead Belly Foundation bio) of the South - something that mixed fatefully with his reported short temper. He picked up his first conviction in 1915 on charges of carrying a pistol. He escaped, even lived and worked under the surname Walter Boyd for a while, only to run violently afoul of the law in 1918 when he killed a relative, Will Stafford, in a fight over a woman somewhere in Dallas. [Ed. - Just to note it, some sources speak to Lead Belly’s criminal past more directly than others.] The state handed down a 30-year sentence and sent Ledbetter to either Imperial Farm, a prison near Sugar Land, TX (now called Central Unit), or some unnamed prison in Huntsville, TX, which may or may not have been where he killed a fellow inmate in self-defense (Wikipedia’s phrasing is loose). That incident left him with a scar on his neck, which he took to concealing with a scarf or bandana.
He also picked up the nickname “Lead Belly” in prison, though no one knows exactly how it came about - e.g., was it a Southern-fried corruption of Ledbetter, a tribute to his physical toughness, a belly full of buckshot from another scrap, his ability to stomach moonshine? The nickname stuck, in any case, and ultimately became the name most people would use.
About seven years into his first prison term, Ledbetter wrote a song to ask Texas Governor, Pat Neff, for a pardon. It was a longshot - on getting elected, Neff promised to never release a prisoner - but the song won him over and got Ledbetter out of jail. In a “stranger-than-fiction” comic twist, Ledbetter tried the same thing during his term at Angola in the mid-1930s. but the mix of truth and legend is complicated in both cases. In the first case, Neff had actually met him in 1924, a year before his release; further, he both knew and admired Ledbetter’s music - to a point where he would invite guests to watch him perform at picnics held at the prison. He also handed down the pardon on his way out of office, which erased the risk of getting voted out for breaking his promise. As for the second case, e.g., his release from Angola prison, a site called Biography noted this:
“Budget issues caused by the Great Depression allowed him to apply for early release, which he did, and the sitting governor approved the application in 1934. (He also sang a song to this governor, pleading for release.).”
Lomax, an interesting figure in his own right, was deeply involved in that second incident, if only half-wittingly. After many years of work, rejection and academic politics, Lomax had made a name for himself as a leading anthropologist of American folk music. It started when he published Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads in 1910. With that for a foundation, he spent the next two decades establishing “folklore societies” all over the Eastern half of the country and, when he could find the time and funding, traveling just as far and wide to find local musicians to make “field recordings.” When it came to blues, work songs, and ballads, they found most of those musicians where they found Lead Belly: in the prisons. That said, Ledbetter stood apart, perhaps for a couple reasons. From Lomax’s Wikipedia page:
“In July 1933, they acquired a state-of-the-art, 315 pounds (143 kg) phonograph uncoated-aluminum disk recorder. Installing it in the trunk of his Ford sedan, Lomax soon used it to record, at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, a twelve-string guitar player by the name of Huddie Ledbetter, better known as ‘Lead Belly,’ whom they considered one of their most significant finds.”
It was during the second, 1934 session where Ledbetter asked Lomax to take a recording of “Good Night, Irene” to Louisiana Governor, Oscar Allen. No one really knows whether or not Allen ever listened to the song, but, whatever happened - Ledbetter's good behavior, the state's need to trim expenses, or a simple love of music - Allen granted him another early release. Aged 46 and with a string of felonies in his past, Ledbetter offered (or, per some sources, begged) to work as a chauffeur and assistant for Lomax and...more or less as in the newsreel, Lomax accepted. Once teamed up, Lomax set Ledbetter to a December 1934 “smoker” (a group sing, apparently) at Pennsylvania’s Bryn Mawr College, which started his exposure to the wider world - white audiences, in particular. The Lomaxes continued the push with a tour of northeast colleges - including the Ivys - with some recordings and interviews for a book titled Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly for promotion.
That arrangement worked well until it didn't. The partnership came apart under a variety of pressures, some job-related and wholly justified - e.g., the Country Music Hall of Fame reports that Lomax asked Lead Belly to play in prisoner’s clothes, but other sources dispute that (Wikipedia, directly) - but most involved money. When the split came in 1935, Lomax offered to pay for Lead Belly’s and his wife's return to Louisiana, and with pay for three months’ worth of (sporadic) performances. The deal came undone for a couple reasons - paying Ledbetter through his wife, Martha Promise, and in installments among them (Lomax worried he'd drink it away had he received a lump sum) - and ended in a lawsuit. After arriving in Louisiana, Ledbetter sued Lomax both for a full, lump-sum payment and release from his management contract - and he won.
His ties to Lomax cut (somewhat), Ledbetter attempted turn a reputation into a career in music. He recorded just over 50 songs with American Recording Corporation while still connected to the Lomaxes, but none of the three 78s they released achieved the kind of sales that would support him. Lead Belly tried Harlem - he even won the support of Richard Wright, who praised him in columns for The Daily Worker - but ne never broke through there as he would with the white audiences associated with the folk music revival. The seas hardly parted for him - he was convicted of another stabbing, 1939 in Manhattan - but Alan Lomax worked to get him out and then made him a regular on Back Where I Come From, a radio show the younger Lomax ran with a guy named Nicholas Ray. Ledbetter started playing Manhattan as well, places where he’d meet and befriend major figures in the growing folk scene like Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie (as well as less familiar figures like Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee).
More recording offers, and better ones, started to roll in. The first came in 1940 for the RCA-Victor label, who paired him with the Golden Gate Quartet for The Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs. With well-recorded material and competent advertising for the first time in his career, and an introduction through mutual friends to Moses “Moe” Asch, Ledbetter moved to Asch Recordings from 1941-44. His big break came at a tricky time - e.g., the end and aftermath of World War II - but Lead Belly’s music still traveled across the Atlantic, thereby making him (per Wikipedia) the first American country blues to achieve success in Europe. That led to arrangements for a 1949 European tour that Lead Belly started, but couldn’t finish. He was playing in France when he was diagnosed with ALS, aka, Lou Gehrig’s Disease. He performed several times after that - notably at a University of Texas at Austin tribute to John Lomax - but he would be dead before the year ended.
No matter how much the sessions improved and his reputation grew, Lead Belly never recorded a hit - at least not during his lifetime. Still, six months after his death, a group called The Weavers released a cover of “Good Night Irene” that gave him a first, if posthumous hit - which suggests how close he got (at least until you listen to The Weavers).
To finally turn to Lead Belly’s music, he did not “write” many original songs. As the Country Music Hall of Fame notes, he “[borrowed] from earlier blues and folk music,” but he would make the songs his own by rearranging the words, tempo and melody. He adopted the 12-string guitar as his instrument of choice - after seeing a Mexican guitarist playing one according to The Lead Belly Foundation - and he named his favorite “Stella.” Lead Belly also did something unique with the tuning. From Wikipedia:
“[Lead Belly’s] 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.”
Also:
“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.” [ed. - nice call-back.]
That, combined with a considerable repertoire of songs, was what made Lead Belly’s career and the parts of his legend that didn’t involve the Lomaxes or prison time. Going the other way, would the Lomaxes have even found Lead Belly had he not gone to prison? Given how badly The Great Depression derailed most recording careers, would he have thrived like Tampa Red, or would he have dropped in and out of the business like Lonnie Johnson? Fame and financial successes eluded him in life, and a legacy only pays the bills for the people who survive you, but Lead Belly’s left a massive one, inspiring everyone from Van Morrison to George Harrison to Kurt Cobain. How many of people get that along with a neighborhood in Shreveport bearing his name?
About the Sampler
Because Lead Belly had so virtually no successful recordings during his lifetime, it was hard to lace them into his history. I did, however, make the conscious choice to include all the songs that appeared on The Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs: “Midnight Special,” of course, but also “Pick a Bale of Cotton,” “Alabama Bound,” “Ham An’ Eggs,” “Grey Goose,” and “Stewball,” the last of which adds Billy Childish as another inspiree.
The rest of the sampler, which I left at 22 songs for some damn reason, includes a mix of song later made more famous - e.g., “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” (aka, “In the Pines”) and “Black Betty” - plus songs various sources called his more famous tunes, e.g., “Packing Trunk Blues” (his first recording, I believe), “Good Night Irene,” “Roberta,” “Rock Island Line,” “Pretty Flower in Your Backyard,” and “National Defense Blues.” After that, it’s mostly songs I liked for one reason or another. In no particular order: “Easy Rider,” “Pigmeat,” “Leaving Blues,” “Sail on, Little Girl,” “Yellow Gal,” “Out on the Western Plains,” “Eagle Rock Rag” and “Good Morning Blues.”
Because it laid the foundation for so much of what came after it - in blues, rock ‘n’ roll and rock, when it came around - Lead Belly won’t confuse modern ears too much. The structure, even the narrative style, echoes loudly into music from the late 1950s to the present. That makes the bar of entry fairly low, but you’ll get even more out of him if you give it more time.
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