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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.
“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.
