Huddie William Ledbetter was born on Jeter Plantation in Mooringsport, Louisiana, in 1885 into a relatively prosperous family that farmed land, first as sharecroppers in Louisiana, then as landowners on the Texas-Louisiana border. Taught to play accordion and then guitar by his uncle Terrel Led-better, Leadbelly soon blossomed and began to employ his talents at local “sukey-jump” parties and down on Shreveport's notorious Fannin Street.

After fathering a second child at age sixteen, Leadbelly was propelled by an outraged community to leave home. On his own, he became an itinerant minstrel and a farm laborer. He roamed around Dallas with the legendary blues singer Blind Lemon Jefferson though they parted company in 1917, when Leadbelly was jailed for assault. This was the first of many years Lead-belly spent in Southern penitentiaries.

He got his nickname, Leadbelly, in prison because of his physical toughness. He escaped from prison and returned home, but after hiding out briefly on the farm, he went to New Orleans and lived under the assumed name Walter Boyd. However, he got into a fight with a relative, Will Stafford, and Stafford was shot in the head and killed. Though Leadbelly always maintained his innocence, he was convicted of murder and assault with intent to kill, and was sentenced as Walter Boyd to a long term of hard labor on the Shaw State Farm.

His musical gifts served him well in the prison camps, where he became a favorite of the guards. Legend has it that in 1925, Leadbelly pleaded for (and was given) his release in a “please pardon me” song composed for and addressed to Governor Neff. After receiving Neff's pardon, Leadbelly returned to Mooringsport, Louisiana, but his womanizing and rough ways led to yet another conviction for assault with intent to murder. In the Louisiana state prison farm at Angola, the authorities discovered his previous conviction and considered this an aggravating factor. They turned down his written pleas for an early release.

Discovery

In the 1930s, the Texas folklorist John Lomax was traveling through the South under a Library of Congress grant, among other things recording the “musical treasury locked up” in the prisons. Lomax discovered Leadbelly at Angola in July 1933. He was astounded by Leadbelly's enormous repertoire, intense vocal style, and commanding physical presence. Using state-of-the-art equipment for the day, a bulky recorder that cut aluminum discs and occupied most of the trunk of his car, Lomax began recording Leadbelly.

John A. Lomax is internationally known as the person who spearheaded the Library of Congress's Archive of American Folk Songs with his field recording trips. With many obstacles in his way, he, and later his son Alan, were responsible for preserving roots music. You can read about their amazing contributions online at the Library of Congress's Web site w (http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/lohtml/lohome.html).

Under “double good time” measures adopted to save costs, Leadbelly was released early from prison. Lomax decided to take Leadbelly to New York, where he performed before audiences of musicologists at elite universities, inspiring fear and admiration. The mystique of his convict past and his commanding physical presence, replete with horrific scars, added to his allure. His eclectic repertoire, performed on a twelve-string guitar — which was not widely used then — was largely unknown, and harked back some thirty or more years to near-forgotten rural traditions. John Lomax also negotiated a contract with Macmillan publishers to write a book that would be titled Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Leadbelly. It detailed Leadbelly's history and the events surrounding his discovery by Lomax, together with transcripts from his repertoire and explanations of the background of his songs and their place in American folklore.

Lomax also arranged a recording contract with the American Record Company, which had highly sophisticated recording studios and equipment. However, the commercial success of rural blues had passed some ten years earlier, with the heyday of Blind Lemon Jefferson, and the records sold poorly. This was compounded by the company's insistence that Lead-belly record blues rather than the folksongs that dominated his repertoire, most of which predated the blues and were the chief source of his attraction for white audiences. As the stay in New York and environs wore on, the relationship between Lomax and Leadbelly deteriorated, and they parted company in March of 1935.

Survival Instinct

Leadbelly survived on odd jobs and welfare. The Lomax book gained him some publicity but saw poor sales. The African-American music market had moved on, and Leadbelly continued to find his principal audience among whites, especially the trade union movement and its left-wing associates. Always ready to adapt to his environment, Leadbelly added topical and protest songs to his repertoire for the first time, tackling segregation and other issues.

In early 1939, he was arrested yet again, this time for assaulting a man with a knife, and he eventually served eight months on Rikers Island. In early 1940, at the age of fifty-one, Leadbelly was released. Moving back into the New York folk circuit, he met up with newcomers Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Pete Seeger, the Golden Gate Quartet, Burl Ives, and many others who had migrated to New York and would fuel a minor folk boom during and after World War II.

He came to resent the convict image that he had acquired but found it impossible to shake off. He toured briefly in France, where jazz had become hugely popular, in early 1949. While in Paris, persistent muscle problems led to a diagnosis of Lou Gehrig's disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Six months later, on December 6, 1949, he died. In 1950, his trademark song, “Goodnight Irene,” became a nationwide number-one hit for the Weavers.