Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter 1998 Folk Alliance International Lifetime Achievement Award Recipient

Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter was a man of sweeping appetites, for songs, for drink and for life. This made his music rugged and true, but also got him into his share of big trouble.

Very big.

Ledbetter, born on Jan. 29, 1885 on the Jeter Plantation near Mooringsport, La., would spend several stints in jail, once reportedly lived as a recluse from the law under an assumed name, and was known to resolve every-day conflict with violence right up until his early passing on Dec. 6, 1949.

Thing is, he tore into musical pursuits with the same furious abandon, picking through all that came before and carrying it across the country. Lead Belly's original compositions, and his arrangements of traditional songs, would become one of the structural supports upon which popular American music was built.

That's because Ledbetter, despite his outsized persona, had a careful ear: He internalized the resigned country blues laments of a bound but proud people; the dangerous late-night rumblings of Fannin Street flophouses and juke joints in Shreveport, La.'s legendary Bottoms section of town; the bubbling homemade music made after the work was done with cowbells, washboards, mouth organs and jugs; and the sweetly hopeful hymns heard at week's end echoing down the steps of a shotgun holy-rolling Sunday school class.

In this way, Lead Belly would provide a living soundtrack for the Deep South at mid-century, both the local barn dance and the church raffle, the backstreet barbecue and the hometown reunion.

Still, Ledbetter had wider aspirations. His ideas, like his life, were big. Very big.

It took some time, but Lead Belly eventually found his way out of the local rattle-board barrooms and dimly lit basement saloons out to the American West and over to New York City. Leadbelly was as much a traveler as he was a singer, and the two worked hand in hand. He collected tales, then wove them back into his work—perhaps never more completely experienced than on these remastered and lovingly annotated Smithsonian sides.

Compiled from a series of recordings made in New York by Moses Asch in the 1940s, the music collected on "Bourgeois Blues" was initially issued by Folkways as "Easy Rider: Lead Belly's Legacy, Vol. 4" and "Midnight Special." Ledbetter had finally been discovered during a stay at Louisiana's Angola penitentiary by collector John Lomax on one of his legendary recording trips for the Library of Congress; Lomax helped Lead Belly up to the Big Apple.

There, Ledbetter instantly connected with the local folk-music protest crowd, and his apartment became an after-hours hang out for fellow singer-songwriters and musicians like Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Several of these house guests appear on the loose-limbed recording sessions put together by Asch, providing a backstory on "Bourgeois Blues."

Lead Belly wasn't, strictly speaking, a political singer—though he would delve into such subjects on tracks like "Jim Crow," "Abraham Lincoln" and "Hitler Song," each included on "Bourgeois Blues."

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Music

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