Huddie Ledbetter (January 20, 1889 – December 6, 1949),1949 passport and other government documents better known by the stage name Lead Belly, was an American folk and blues singer. He was notable for his vocals, twelve-string guitar, and the folk standards he introduced, including his renditions of "In the Pines" (also known as "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" and “Black Girl”), "Pick a Bale of Cotton", "Goodnight, Irene", "Black Betty", "Midnight Special", "Cotton Fields", and "Boll Weevil". In addition to vocals and guitar, Ledbetter also played piano, mandolin, harmonica, violin, and accordion. In some recordings he used clapping or stomping.
Ledbetter's songs covered several genres, including gospel music, blues, and folk music, as well as topics including women, liquor, prison life, racism, cowboys, work, sailors, cattle herding, and dancing. He wrote songs about newsworthy people, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Jean Harlow, Jack Johnson, the Scottsboro Boys, and Howard Hughes. Ledbetter 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 wrote his stage name as "Lead Belly". This is the spelling on his tombstone and is used by the Lead Belly Foundation. He did not care for the "Lead Belly" stage name. He always introduced himself by his given name, Huddie Ledbetter.
Biography Personal life
The only son of Sallie Brown and Wesley Ledbetter (she had an older son, and the couple adopted a daughter when Huddie was a toddler), Huddie Ledbetter was born on a plantation near Mooringsport, Louisiana. On his World War II draft registration card in 1942, his birthplace is "Freeport" (Shreveport), Louisiana.
There is uncertainty over his date and year of birth. The Lead Belly Foundation gives his birth date as January 20, 1889,. Retrieved March 8, 2020. as does his 1949 passport. His grave marker gives the year 1889, and his 1942 draft registration card states January 23, 1889. The 1900 United States census lists "Hudy Ledbetter" as 12 years old, born January 1888. The 1910 and 1930 censuses give his age as corresponding to a birth in 1888. The 1940 census lists his age as 51, with information supplied by wife Martha. These records were made by census takers, and ages and dates were defined by the date the information was collected. The books Blues: A Regional Experience by Eagle and LeBlanc and Encyclopedia of Louisiana Musicians by Tomko give January 23, 1888, while the Encyclopedia of the Blues gives January 20, 1888. There is no evidence in these sources that he had a middle name. His father and grandfather were named Wesley.
His parents cohabited for several years. They married on February 26, 1888. When Huddie was five years old, the family settled in Harrison County, Texas, where they became landowners.
By the 1910 census of Harrison County, Texas, "Hudy Ledbetter" was living next door to his parents in a separate household with his first wife, Aletha "Lethe" Henderson. Aletha, born in 1890, is recorded as age 19 and married one year. Ledbetter's uncle Terrell gave him his first instrument in Texas, an accordion. Ledbetter and his wife did not have children when they moved to the Dallas/Fort Worth area. They worked as farm laborers while Ledbetter, in his early twenties, sought opportunities as a musician.
Music career By 1903, fifteen year-old Ledbetter was already a "musicianer", a singer and guitarist of some note. He performed to Shreveport audiences in St. Paul's Bottoms, a red-light district. He began to develop his own style of music after exposure to the various musical influences on Shreveport's Fannin Street, a row of saloons, brothels, and dance halls in the Bottoms. This area is now referred to as Ledbetter Heights.
In 1915, he briefly served on a Texas chain gang, from which he escaped. In 1918, under the name of Walter Boyd and living in Bowie County, Texas, he was convicted of murder and sentenced to 30 years in prison. After writing a song pleading for clemency, Governor Pat Morris Neff pardoned Ledbetter in 1925. In 1930, he was arrested, convicted of attempted murder, and sentenced to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, also known as the Angola Penitentiary, where folklorists John Lomax and his teenaged son, Alan, "discovered" him in 1933.Santelli, Robert, 2015, Lead Belly: A Man of Contradiction and Complexity, p. 17. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings They were recording varieties of folk music in the South to preserve traditional music for the Library of Congress. This was one of numerous cultural projects the federal government sponsored during the Great Depression to advance social welfare through job creation.
Ledbetter's vibrant tenor and extensive repertoire impressed the Lomaxes. They recorded him in 1933 on portable but permanent aluminum disc recording equipment. They returned with new and better equipment in July 1934, capturing numerous additional songs. While in prison, Ledbetter may have first heard the traditional prison song "Midnight Special"; his versions became famous.Lomax, Alan, ed. Folk Song USA. New American Library. On August 1, Ledbetter was released after having served nearly all of his minimum sentence. The Lomaxes had taken a record and a petition seeking his release to Louisiana Governor Oscar K. Allen at Ledbetter's request, but there is no evidence that this had any effect on his release. A prison official later wrote to John Lomax denying that Ledbetter's singing had anything to do with his release. (State prison records confirm he was eligible for this due to good behavior.) Both Ledbetter and the Lomaxes promoted the myth that Ledbetter had sung his way to freedom again.
With the Great Depression ongoing and Alan Lomax ill and unable to assist his father in song collecting, Ledbetter and John Lomax teamed up in September, 1934. For three months, the 46-year-old Ledbetter assisted the 67-year-old academic in his folk song collecting around the South.
In December 1934, Ledbetter participated in a "smoker" (group sing-along) at a Modern Language Association meeting at a hotel in Philadelphia. 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". Time magazine made one of its first March of Time newsreels about him. Lead Belly attained fame but not fortune.
In January 1935, he married his girlfriend, Martha Promise. She came north from Louisiana to join him and the Lomaxes in Wilton, Connecticut, as they began work on a book about Lead Belly's music. On January 23–25, 1935, Ledbetter had the first of several commercial recording sessions with American Record Corporation (ARC). These sessions, combined with two others on February 5 and March 25, yielded 53 takes. Only six were released during Ledbetter's lifetime. ARC released these songs on six different labels they owned: Banner, Melotone, Oriole, Perfect, Romeo, and Paramount. These recordings achieved little commercial success. Part of the reason for the poor sales may have been that ARC released only his blues songs rather than the folk songs he would later become better known for. Ledbetter continued to struggle financially. He earned his income through touring, not record sales.
While in Wilton, the Lomaxes recorded Ledbetter's songs for the book Negro Folk Songs As Sung by Lead Belly (1936), and purportedly captured his life story. The book contains numerous sensational accounts of uncertain authenticity. The authors said the work was not an "accurate biography" but a "loosely woven texture of unreconstructed stories."
In March 1935, Ledbetter 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 Ledbetter. He gave him and Martha enough money to return by bus to Louisiana. He also gave Martha the money her husband had earned during three months of performing, but in installments, on the pretext that Lead Belly would spend it all on drinking if given a lump sum. From Louisiana, Ledbetter successfully sued Lomax for his full earnings and release from his management contract. The quarrel was bitter, with hard feelings on both sides. In the midst of the legal wrangling, Ledbetter wrote to Lomax proposing they team up again. This did not happen. The book that the Lomaxes published about Lead Belly in the fall of 1936 was a commercial failure.
In January 1936, Ledbetter 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. He developed a live dramatic recreation of the March of Time newsreel (itself a recreation) about his prison encounter with John Lomax, when he was still wearing uniform stripes. By this time, he was no longer associated with Lomax.
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. Also included was a photograph of his wife Martha Promise (identified in the article as his manager). Other photos showed Ledbetter'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 his petitions to the governors, who were so moved that they pardoned him. The article closed by saying that Lead Belly "may well be on the brink of a new and prosperous period."
Ledbetter failed to stir the enthusiasm of Harlem audiences. Instead, he attained success playing at concerts and benefits for an audience of 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. Black novelist Richard Wright wrote about him as a heroic figure in the Daily Worker, of which Wright was the Harlem editor. The two men became friends. In contrast to Wright, who was then a communist, commentators described Ledbetter as apolitical. He was known to support Wendell Willkie, the centrist Republican candidate for president, for whom he wrote a campaign song. Ledbetter also wrote the song "The Bourgeois Blues", which has class-conscious and anti-racist lyrics.
In 1939, Ledbetter was involved in an altercation after a small gathering in New York City and accused of stabbing a man. Alan Lomax, then 24, helped raise money for his legal expenses, dropping out of graduate school to do so. Based in part on Ledbetter's apparent notoriety, the judge sentenced him to a year in Rikers. After gaining release, Ledbetter appeared as a regular on Lomax and Nicholas Ray's CBS radio show Back Where I Come From, broadcast nationwide.
He performed in nightclubs with Josh White, becoming a fixture in New York City's folk music scene and befriending Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger, all fellow performers on Back Where I Come From.