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Leadbelly (1888-1949) - born Huddie Ledbetter; alias Walter Boyd |
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American blues singer, "King of The Twelve-String Guitar," who
twice
sang himself out of jails. Huddie Ledbetter was made famous by the
ethnomusicologist, writer, and producer Alan Lomax. Ledbetter helped to
inspire the folk and
blues revivals of the Fifties and Sixties and he was one of the first
traditional folk musicians to perform for a city audience. His
perseverance and power earned him the nickname "Lead Belly." I asked your mother for you, Huddie Ledbetter (Leadbelly) was born on 15 January (in some sources on Jan. 21), 1888, by Caddo Lake near Shreveport, Louisiana. The region was rural and densely populated; "there were no white people for twenty miles around," Ledbetter later said. (Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism by Paige A. McGinley, Durham: Duke University Press, 2014, p. 85) Both of his parents were middle-aged when he was born; Huddie was their only living son. John Wesley Ledbetter, his father, worked at that time on a farm known as the Jeter Plantation, a few miles from the Shiloh Baptist Church. It was said that Sallie Pugh, Ledbetter's mother, had Cherokee blood in her. In 1982 they adopted a girl, Australia Carr Ledbetter. Ledbetter grew up in Louisiana and Texas, where his family moved when he was five. By the early 1900's, John Wesley had enough money to buy some land for a farm in Harrison County, Texas. At home Ledbelly's uncle Bob taught him to play the guitar, and his father taught him accordion. By the time he was fourteen, he had made his name locally for his guitar playing and singing. Travelling around in his early teens, Ledbelly picked up music that dated back to slave days. He absorbed all kinds of music he heard and made it his own. His mother sang spirituals and children's play songs, from wandering piano players he adopted the bass figurations of boogie woogie, and in prison he heard old folk ballads and prayers that came straight from the heart. First Ledbetter had an eight-string and later 12-string guitar, which was to become his trademark instrument. Also many other blues singers, notably Blind Willie McTell and Lonnie Johnson on some of his earliest records, used the 12-string Stella. At the age of sixteen Ledbetter was married, but instead of settling down with his wife Aletha, or simply Lethe, he played and drank all night. "When I was growing up I used to hear how bad he was," his granddaughter recalled. "He didn't take anything off of black or white. If you put your hand on his shoulder, he'd just as soon, you know, knock it off or cut you." (The Life And Legend Of Leadbelly by Charles K. Wolfe and Kip Lornell, New York, NY: HarperCollins Publishers, 1999, p. xiv) At eighteen Ledbetter went to Texas where he picked cotton (he could pick 1,000 pounds a day), and had many other jobs, too. From the plantation workers Ledbetter adopted hollers, which can be heard in several records. In Dallas in 1910 he heard a jazz band playing for the first time. There he also met Blind Lemon Jefferson, who taught him many songs. With his quick temper Ledbetter lived violently and he had trouble with "the truculent Dallas prostitutes." Ledbetter was only about five-foot-eight, but he had a muscular, athletic figure. Ledbetter's promising musical career was interrupted in 1916, when he was jailed for assaulting a woman. To pay for the lawyer, his parents mortgaged their farm. Eventually he escaped from the chain gang – across a fresh-ploughed field – and spent a couple of years hiding under the alias of "Walter Boyd." His freedom outside society ended when he shot and killed a man in an argument over a woman, and received a 30-year sentence. The evidence was circumstancial. During this period he learned 'Take This Hammer,' in which the song
is
punctuated by the hammer stroke of the chain gang. In one of his
pieces, Ledbetter recalls a working day under the hot summer sun. To
communicate with each other, the men shouted back and forth, trading
lines of a song, or casually improvising new words to a familiar tune.
Ledbetter sang this shout to attract the attention of the water boy,
who would ease the thirst of the workers: "Bring a little water, Silvy,
/ Bring a little water now, / Bring a little water, Sily, / Every
little once in a while." ('Bring Me A Littke Water, Silvy,' The Leadbelly Songbook: The Ballads, Blues, and Folksongs of Huddie Ledbetter, p. 60) Seven years later, in 1925, a song begging Texas governor Pat Neff
for a pardon released Ledbetter from the Imperial State Prison Farm in
Sugar Land. Neff had said, "I'm going to turn you lose after a while,
but I'm going to keep you here so that you can pick and dance for me
when I come down." (Frankie and Johnny: Race, Gender, and the Work of African American Folklore in 1930s by Stacy I. Morgan, Austin; University of Texas Press, 2017, p. 42) Ledbetter was soon
back behind bars at Louisiana's State Penitentiary (better known as
Angola) by 1930, this time for "assault with intent to murder." The
Shreveport Times of January 16, 1930, wrote that "Dick Elliott, 36 years old, is
in the Highland sanitarium suffering from severe cuts inflicted by a
drunk-crazed negro who attacked him late Wednesday afternoon at his
home near Mooringsport where the negro was butchering a hog. The negro,
Huddie Ledbetter, 43 years old, is in the Parish jail charged with
attempt to murder. . . ." (The Life And Legend Of Leadbelly, p. 99) It is possible that Ledbetter had acted in
self-defence. His
nickname "Lead Belly," he probably acquired at Sugarland Penitentiary.
In his offstage life Ledbetter preferred to be addressed by his given
name. In 1933 folklorists John A. Lomax and his son Alan Lomax found Ledbetter, and recorded his songs for the Library of Congress in Angola Prison. He appeared to remember every song that he had ever heard. At that time Ledbetter was roughly forty-four years old. He had been moved out of the sugarcane fields and he served as a laundryman and entertained occasionally his inmates with his guitar and songs. His powerful, rough baritone voice which carried easily for considerable distance Ledbetter was not a master of technicalities – his tempo varied according to his feelings, each foot tapping out a different rhythm, and he didn't try difficult chords. His playing was straight and although his Louisiana accent was sometimes impossible to understand, he captivated the audience with his personality. According
to John Lomax, Ledbetter updated the song that had softened Pat Neff,
and
in 1934
Governor O.K. Allen let him out of prison. However, the Lousiana
authorities said that Ledbetter would have been released anyway; his
recording played little or no role. Turning a new leaf in his life,
Leadbelly sought out Lomax. He toured under his management a circuit of
college
towns and started to gather attention outside black
communities. Until they parted company, Ledbelly also worked for John
Lomax as a chauffeur, assistant and guide. Through the Lomaxes he soon
befriended a young banjo player, Peter Seeger, the son of
a famous musicologist, who had just begun performing for small
audiences. Seeger tried to hide his Harvard upbringing, dressed in
jeans, but noted that Ledbetter, who had an ugly scar on his
neck, had always a clean white shirt, starched collar,
well-pressed suit, and shined shoes. "Perhaps this modern age is not liable to produce such a combination of genuine folk artist and virtuoso. Because nowadays when the artist becomes a virtuoso, there is normally a much greater tendency to cease being folk. But when Ledbetter rearranged a folk melody he had come across – he often did, for he had a wonderful ear for melody and rhythm – he did it in line with his own great folk traditions." ('Leadbelly' by Peter Seeger, in The Leadbelly Songbook: The Ballads, Blues, and Folksongs of Huddie Ledbetter, p. 7) Ledbetter's lyrics went to the point; they were simple but the listener could give them his or her own meaning. He started to develop a free-wheeling recitative technique when he performed at universities and introduced students to what blues was about. Between verses he occasionally broke into dance. The song that taught Ledbetter the word "bourgeois" was written after the urging of Alan Lomax. 'Bourgeois Blues'
described the racial prejudices he encountered in Washington, DC. It
became one of his most famous political songs. When the writer Richard Wrigh
interviewed Ledbetter, he performed the song and Wright quoted part of
it in his Daily Worker article. A reader of "bourgeois books," Wright already knew the
meaning of the word. He described the singer's relationship with Lomax
as a case of racial exploitation, "one of the most amazing cultural
swindles in American history." (quoted in The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening by Jennifer Lynn Stoever, New York: New York University Press, 2016, p. 193) "Lord, it's a bourgeois town / Uhm, the bourgeois
town / I got the bourgeois blues / Gonna spread the news all
around / I tell all the colored folks to listen to me / Don't try to
find you no home in Washington, DC / 'Cause it's a bourgeois town /
Uhm, the bourgeois town / I got the bourgeous blues." (quoted in 'The Bourgeois Blues: Representations of Race and Authenticity in the Songs of Lead Belly' by Jonathan Lower, Madison Historical Review, Vol. 18, Spring 2021, pp. 19-20; https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/mhr/vol18/iss1/5/. Accessed 1 July 2025) The Lomaxes brought Ledbetter to New York, where he recorded his
best-known songs, 'The Rock Island Line,' 'The Midnight Special,' and
'Goodnight Irene,' which according to a family tale he had rewritten in
1908 or 1909 while singing lullabies to his niece Irene Campbell.
'Irene' was also his most popular song with the convicts, the guards,
and the visitors whom he entertained. Ledbetter added verses as he
thought of them.
He once said that he had originally learned the song from his Uncle
Terrell. "One of the old-line members of the Communist party in New
York insisted that it was a steal from a famous aria in "Martha."
Sigmund Spaeth, the tune detective, had never heard it, but agrees with
us that it is of the Stephen Foster or "Sweet Adeline" vintage and
certainly of written origin." (Negro Folk Songs As Sung by Lead Belly, transcribed, selected and edited by John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1936, p. 235)
Most likely Ledbetter's uncle had learned the song from J. H. Haverly's
American-European Mastodon Minstrels, a blackface minstrel troupe, that
toured the region in the 1880s. (Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism, p. 85) Living in freedom, Ledbetter did not try to change his habits, and he spent his earnings in partying and on booze. In 1939 he landed again in jail, and served two years for assault in New York's Riker's Island. A balancing power in life was Martha Promise, whom he had married in 1935. John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax published a book about Ledbetter in 1936, in which they defined him as a "folk artist." In the 1940s Ledbetter's home in New York was a centre for folk
and blues activity. Moses Asch, who ran Folkways Records, recoded his
music more than anyone else. Among his friends were Sonny Terry,
Brownie McGhee,
and Woody Guthrie. He wrote new songs but the audience was more
interested in the older ones, 'Gallis
Pole,' 'Sukey Jump,' 'John Hard,' 'Mary Don't You Weep,' 'Pick a Bale
of Cotton,' and others. Against expectations, he enjoyed performing to children. Moses
Asch recalled: "One Christmas Lead Belly gave a concert for children at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was jam-packed, children all over
the place, frantic parents. But the moment he started to play and sing,
the audience hushed and the children grouped around him as if it was
grandfather singing for them; some sang with him, others danced. The
parents were bewitched." (quoted in Lead Belly Sings for Children, reissue compiled and and annotated by Jeff Place and Anthony Seeger, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, 1999, p. 1) In 1949 Ledbetter travelled to Europe, appearing in jazz events in
Paris. On the tour he felt his right hand becoming paralyzed and
spent six weeks in Bellevue on his return. Huddie Ledbetter died on
December
6, 1949, of amyathopic lateral sclerosis. He was buried in Shreveport,
La., not far from the farm where he was born. It has been said that the
only time anyone saw Ledbetter cry was the day he realized that he
could no longer play his guitar. (The Essential Guide to Blues on CD by Charles Shaar Murray, London: Greenwich Editions, 1995, p. 68) Some critics regard Ledbetter's rendition of Blind Lemon's 'Matchbox Blues' probably the finest blues he ever recorded. If Ledbetter's career had lasted longer, he would have made the hit record he sought. Peter Seeger and other members of the folk group The Weavers took his 'Goodnight Irene' to the top of the pop charts. 'Rock Island Line' was a hit for Lonnie Donegan and Ledbetter's classic 'Cottonfields' became a major success for the Beach Boys. His 'Hawaiian Song' was made famous as 'Hula Hula Love' by Buddy Knox in the 1950s. Kurt Cobain recorded 'Where Did You Sleep Last Night.'
Songbooks:
Sound recordings:
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