The folk musician who sang himself out of Texas’s most brutal prison

American blues musician Huddie Ledbetter, known as Lead Belly - Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Lead Belly is a name that still conjures mighty associations, implicit in that mix of metal and muscle, heavy power and raw appetite. It’s the stage name of an ex-con musician who became one of the prime figures in the history of 20th-century blues: the man who first defined such folk standards as Goodnight Irene, In the Pines, The Midnight Special, Cotton Fields and Boll Weavil alongside numerous originals. But Lead Belly was a nickname for which the man himself never much cared, acquired in prison during one of several spells for murder (subsequently pardoned), attempted murder and assault. He always introduced himself by his given name: Huddie Ledbetter.

Born in 1989, the story goes that he enjoyed local fame in Louisiana and Texas as a travelling musician, rode the rails as a double act with Blind Lemon Jefferson, had frequent run-ins with the law, escaped from a chain gang, lived under a false identity, and once sang himself out of prison by composing a song to a state governor begging for clemency. He was discovered in the notorious Louisiana State penitentiary, Angola, in 1933, by 67-year-old folklorist John Lomax and his teenage son Alan, who were travelling around collecting songs. The 44-year-old Ledbetter impressed them with his deep repertoire of over 500 songs, played deftly on a 12-string guitar, while singing melodiously and keeping time with both feet tapping out separate rhythms.

On his release in 1934, Ledbetter became John Lomax’s unpaid driver and assistant, collecting songs for the archives of the Library of Congress and performing concerts introduced by the folklorist, achieving national fame as a singing convict. “Sweet Singer of the Swamplands Here to Do a Few Tunes Between Homicides” was a typical newspaper headline.

This version of Lead Belly’s life was defined by the Lomaxes’ 1936 book, Negro Folk Songs as Sung By Lead Belly, which included an “autobiography” written in a badly spelled approximation of idiomatic “negro” vernacular. It was full of lurid incidents of dubious provenance that even the authors admitted was not “accurate biography” but “a loosely woven texture of reconstructed stories”.

“There is a book written about my life and I don’t think nothing of that book,” Ledbetter wrote in an unpublished essay in 1947. He was critical of anyone who used the “N-word”, which appears 57 times in the first 64 pages of his autobiography yet does not appear in any correspondence or recordings by Ledbetter. “The sound of that word irritated him,” his niece, Tiny Robinson, later claimed, adding that “any Negro recognised” it as a very serious put-down.

Sheila Curran Bernard, author of Bring Judgement Day

“The term bad n----- only added to his attraction,” was the written assessment of John Lomax, who evidently delighted in Ledbetter’s notoriety. During university lectures, Lomax described Ledbetter as “a natural” who has “no idea of money, law or ethics” and was “possessed of virtually no self-restraint”.

Sheila Curran Bernard’s valiant and impressively researched book is an attempt to reclaim Ledbetter from an implicitly racist narrative. Through close examination of arrest, trial and prison records, sharecropping reports, newspaper articles and oral histories contextualised by a deep understanding of American civil-rights history, she demonstrates how Ledbetter was far from a career criminal, but rather a victim of successive injustices and appalling conflicts of interest in a brutal system explicitly designed to provide enslaved work-forces and deny black rights in the post-reconstruction Southern states. Although dry and academic in tone, her illumination of the murderous hypocrisy of the era can be hard to stomach.

Often revered for his role as a founding father of folk academia, John Lomax emerges as a self-serving if unintentional racist, who exploited his protégé to extents that would be considered criminal in more enlightened times. Not only did he conjure up a management contract giving himself two-thirds of Ledbetter’s performance and recording earnings, but he expected Ledbetter and his second wife Martha to work gratis as his domestic servants, then privately berated them as “savages” with no “gratitude”. The Ledbetter who emerges between the dry facts of Bernard’s book is a gifted and serious musician, whose biggest flaw from the point of view of an explicitly unjust system was a willingness to stand up for himself.

Lead Belly performing for a gymnasium full of high school students in San Francisco, 1949 - PhotoQuest/Getty Images

After suing for freedom from Lomax’s dubious contract to embark on a late-flowering professional musical career, Ledbetter ran into trouble with the law again while defending a woman from attack. A jury recommended clemency, but the judge, having reviewed a raft of lurid stories in the press, decided “every time he gets drunk, he wants to fight somebody”, and sent him to Rikers Island for six months.

Alan Lomax, who remained close with Ledbetter to the end, helped keep his music alive after his death aged 60, in 1949, when he became a huge influence on the skiffle craze and folk boom of the 1950s and 1960s. Admirers have included The Beatles, Janis Joplin and Kurt Cobain.

John Lomax was drawn to the notion of Ledbetter as a primitive spirit connected to the untarnished roots of black folk music, but in his promotion of an outlaw image, he was effectively concocting a false new version of black male musical authenticity. It isn’t hard to draw a line from the public fear and fascination with Lead Belly to the gangsta rap controversies of more recent times. Bring Judgement Day is an overdue redress.

Bring Judgment Day is published by Cambridge University Press at £25. To order your copy for £16.99, call 0808 196 6794 or visit Telegraph Books

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