Lead Belly lived a life that included poverty and long stretches in prison to become an emblem of authentic American music. He is renowned for his songs – the best known of which include Rock Island Line, Goodnight, Irene, The Midnight Special and Cotton Fields – as well as his prowess on the 12-string guitar. In his sixty-plus years, he essentially lived two distinctly different lives: first, as a field worker, blues singer, rambling man and prisoner in the rural South; second, as a city-dwelling folksinger, performer and recording artist in the urban North.
John A. Lomax, the esteemed Library of Congress folk music anthropologist, discovered Lead Belly serving time (for assault and murder) at the infamous Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola in 1934. He immediately saw that Lead Belly was a walking anthology of African-American music, and arranged for him to come to New York, where he created a sensation. Reporters followed Lead Belly everywhere, theaters clamored to book him and celebrities thronged to his concerts. His influence on a later generation of popular musicians was massive: Keith Richards, Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, Van Morrison, Robert Plant and Beck have all paid their respects.
Photo: Tamiment Library/Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives
I have said how important Ledbelly was to me as a teenager and growing up with a precocious knowledge and affection for the early blues masters from Broonzy, John Hurt and Josh White to McGhee and Terry but Leadbelly somehow towered above even Wolf for me. I wandered to streets of my little southern village belting out Good night Irene at the top of my lungs! Western Plains Cowboy too!
Come a-cow cow yickie yickie yay!
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