Lead Belly

Huddie Ledbetter, better known by his nickname Lead Belly, stood out as a singular presence within twentieth-century American popular music. His lasting reputation rests on the collection of numbers he located, reshaped, or composed outright—“Goodnight, Irene,” “Rock Island Line,” “The Midnight Special,” and “Cotton Fields” among them. At the same time, he exemplified one of the first folksingers whose personal history placed him squarely inside the oral chain through which vernacular music had long been transmitted, a chain that already absorbed strands of commercial song by the opening decades of the century. Although he is sometimes classified as a blues performer because he was African-American, the blues—itself a form he preceded—was merely one ingredient among many that shaped his sound. His work left a deep mark on the 1940s generation of folk artists such as Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, whose own efforts later fed the folk revival and the evolution of rock from the 1960s forward; that lineage rendered his 1988 induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, so early in the institution’s history, entirely fitting.

Born on the Jeter Plantation near the hamlet of Shiloh, itself close to Mooringsport, Louisiana, he was the sole son of a sharecropper who relocated the household to nearby Harrison County, Texas, when the boy was roughly five. Ledbetter attended classes between the ages of eight and twelve or thirteen, after which he labored full-time on the farm his father had purchased. Music had already claimed his attention: as a child he mastered the button accordion and performed in the school ensemble. Additional instruments followed until the guitar became his main vehicle; he acquired his first six-string in 1903. By his mid-teens he was earning pay at local dances. Around sixteen he moved to Shreveport, Louisiana, supporting himself there for two years solely through performance. Between roughly eighteen and twenty he roamed Texas and Louisiana, mixing music with farm labor. After falling ill he returned home, regained his health, married, and resumed farming. In 1910 he and his wife settled in Dallas, Texas. Possibly near 1912 he encountered the younger street musician Blind Lemon Jefferson, and the pair performed together across the Dallas region for several years. During this stretch he abandoned the six-string for the twelve-string guitar that would become his signature instrument.

Around 1915 Ledbetter returned to Harrison County. In June he was taken into custody following an incident whose precise details have vanished; he was ultimately convicted of unlawful pistol possession and given thirty days on a chain gang. He escaped, relocated to Bowie County under the alias Walter Boyd, resumed performing, and again worked as a sharecropper. In December 1917 he was arrested for the murder of Will Stafford—husband of one of his cousins—and for assault with intent to murder another man. Convicted on both counts, he received consecutive sentences of five to twenty years and two to ten years. While incarcerated he acquired the nickname Lead Belly and absorbed numerous songs from fellow inmates. In January 1924 he performed for Texas Governor Pat Neff, among the selections a custom piece pleading for clemency. As Neff’s term ended in January 1925, the governor issued the pardon; Lead Belly therefore served six years, seven months, and eight days rather than the required minimum of seven.

He first settled in Houston, then returned home before establishing himself in Mooringsport. In January 1930 a stabbing led to charges of assault with intent to murder. Convicted, he received a six-to-ten-year term and was sent to Angola Prison. There he proved a model inmate; Depression-era budget cuts allowed participation in an early-release program. He filed for release in June 1933 and was informed he would be freed the following year provided Governor O.K. Allen approved.

Song collector John Lomax, working for the Library of Congress, arrived at Angola in July 1933 accompanied by his son Alan Lomax in search of folk material. They were introduced to Lead Belly and recorded him. That first session, never issued commercially, featured a piece Lead Belly titled “Irene,” learned from an uncle. Later scholarship established that the song originated not as traditional folk material but as “Irene, Good Night,” written and published in 1886 by African-American songwriter Gussie Lord Davis; the version passed to Lead Belly had diverged substantially from Davis’s text.

A year passed without movement on the petition. John and Alan Lomax returned to Angola in summer 1934 and captured another session. Several of those performances appeared commercially in 1966 on the Elektra box set The Library of Congress Recordings and were reissued in 1991 by Rounder Records on the album Midnight Special. Among them was “Midnight Special,” a number Lead Belly first encountered during his Texas imprisonment in the early 1920s and subsequently reworked. The session also included “Governor O.K. Allen,” a composition written to urge the governor’s signature. The Lomaxes delivered a copy to the governor’s office, although no record confirms he ever heard it. On 25 July 1934 Allen signed the petition, reducing the sentence to three to ten years; because Lead Belly had already served four and a half years, he walked free on 1 August 1934. Louisiana authorities later repeatedly refuted the claim that he had sung his way out of prison a second time.

Upon release he returned first to Shreveport, then in fall 1934 sought out John Lomax in Texas and took employment as chauffeur and assistant on further prison song-collecting trips. At Cummins Prison Farm in Arkansas he first heard “Rock Island Line,” which he added to his repertoire and substantially altered. In winter 1934–1935 he traveled north with Lomax for appearances before scholarly groups, including the Modern Language Association meeting in Philadelphia and lecture-performances at Yale and Harvard. Press coverage followed, with articles in major newspapers and radio and newsreel segments on Time Marches On. Lead Belly signed a management contract with Lomax and was booked by the American Record Corporation (ARC), which recorded forty sides in January, February, and March 1935 for its budget labels and the affiliated Columbia imprint. Only two singles were released at the time, a third the next year. ARC presented him as a blues artist, yet sales proved weak and most sides remained unissued for decades; the first substantial collection appeared on the 1970 Columbia LP Includes Legendary Performances Never Before Released, with additional tracks on the 1991 Columbia/Legacy release King of the 12-String Guitar. Further Library of Congress recordings made during this period later surfaced on the 1966 Elektra set and the 1991 Rounder albums Midnight Special and Gwine Dig a Hole to Put the Devil In.

In March 1935 Lomax, having found Lead Belly unreliable on a northeastern tour, ended their professional association, and the singer returned to Louisiana. There he secured legal counsel and pressed Lomax for additional compensation; months of negotiation produced a settlement permitting Lomax to include Lead Belly’s songs in the 1936 volume Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly. In February 1936 Lead Belly relocated once more to New York City in an effort to establish himself as a performer. Between 1937 and 1939 he recorded additional Library of Congress material at Alan Lomax’s request, some of which later appeared on the Elektra and Rounder albums already cited. He was embraced by left-wing circles that increasingly employed folk music to articulate political convictions; although his own political engagement remained limited, his advocacy for civil rights—voiced in songs such as “The Bourgeois Blues”—aligned with their concerns. He joined an urban folk community that included Aunt Molly Jackson, Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and the duo Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee.

In March 1939 Lead Belly was arrested in New York for stabbing a man. While free on parole before trial he completed a second commercial session for Musicraft Records, arranged by Alan Lomax to cover legal costs. Those recordings first appeared on the Musicraft album Negro Sinful Tunes and have since been reissued by Stinson, Everest, and Collectables. Convicted of third-degree assault, he served an eight-month sentence.

The year 1940 proved active: he performed on the network programs Folk Music of America and Back Where I Come From, began a weekly fifteen-minute WNYC series that ran for a year, and undertook a third commercial session in June for RCA Victor, accompanied on several tracks by the Golden Gate Quartet. The resulting album, The Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs, was issued on Bluebird. Later compilations include the 1964 RCA collection Midnight Special, the 1989 set Alabama Bound, and the 2003 Bluebird volume When the Sun Goes Down, Vol. 5: Take This Hammer, which contains all twenty-six tracks from the sessions. In August 1940 he again recorded for the Library of Congress; selections later appeared on the Elektra set and the Rounder albums Gwine Dig a Hole to Put the Devil In and Let It Shine on Me (1991).

May 1941 marked his first session for the small independent Asch Records run by Moses Asch. He continued to record extensively for Asch and its successors Disc and Folkways; the material has been reissued by Smithsonian/Folkways since the 1990s and by various smaller labels that acquired rights. In 1944 he moved to the West Coast for nearly two years. While there he signed with Capitol Records and cut three sessions in October 1944 that yielded a series of singles. Capitol later compiled selections on Classics in Jazz (1953) and Leadbelly: Huddie Ledbetter’s Best (1962). Returning to New York in 1946, he resumed recording for Folkways; the 1948 sessions later appeared on the Leadbelly’s Last Sessions LP series and were collected in a four-CD Smithsonian/Folkways box set in 1994.

By 1948 unexplained numbness in his legs began to affect him, often compelling him to rely on a cane or perform seated. In May 1949 he toured France, but mounting physical limitations prompted a medical consultation that revealed amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease), an incurable condition leading to paralysis and death. Back in the United States he managed a few additional appearances, including dates in Texas and Oklahoma in June; the Texas performance was recorded and released by Playboy Records as Leadbelly, inaccurately promoted as his final concert. He soon became bedridden and died at age sixty-one in December.

His renown grew rapidly after his passing. In 1950 “Irene,” retitled “Goodnight, Irene,” was recorded by the Weavers—the group that included Pete Seeger and other associates of Lead Belly—and reached number one on the pop charts, with additional hit versions by Frank Sinatra and a number-one country recording by Ernest Tubb and Red Foley. The Weavers reworked another Lead Belly song, “If It Wasn’t for Dickey” (itself derived from the Irish folk piece “Drimmer’s Cow”), into “Kisses Sweeter Than Wine,” which they took into the Top 40 in 1951; Jimmie Rodgers reached the Top Ten with his cover in 1957. In 1956 the Lonnie Donegan Skiffle Group scored a Top Ten hit in both the U.K. and the U.S. with “Rock Island Line,” drawn directly from Lead Belly’s arrangement, igniting the British skiffle craze that influenced later British rock musicians including the Beatles. (Johnny Cash later reached the country Top 40 with his own version in 1970.) “The Midnight Special” had first charted in Lead Belly’s version via the Tiny Grimes Quintet in 1948; Paul Evans took it Top 40 in 1960 and Johnny Rivers followed in 1965. Lead Belly’s “Cotton Fields” (also known as “Old Cotton Fields at Home”) became a Top 40 hit for the Highwaymen in 1961. All of these numbers have entered the standard repertoire. When the folk revival emerged in the late 1950s, its performers frequently interpreted other Lead Belly-associated songs in arrangements that echoed his own.

Beyond the authorized reissues on Rounder, Columbia/Legacy, RCA Victor, Capitol, and Smithsonian/Folkways, Lead Belly’s recordings have appeared on countless labels in the digital era, particularly once they entered the public domain in Europe, where copyright protection lasts only fifty years. However tangled the resulting discography, it testifies to his enduring impact on contemporary music.