Lead Belly or Leadbelly (born Huddie William Ledbetter; January 20, 1889 – December 6, 1949) was an American folk and blues musician notable for his strong vocals, virtuosity on the twelve-string guitar, and the folk standards he introduced. Lead Belly’s songs covered a wide range, including gospel music; blues about women, liquor, prison life, and racism; and folk songs about cowboys, prison, work, sailors, cattle herding, and dancing. Lead Belly was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2008. (More from Wikipedia)
During their first 16,000-mile trip to the South over just four months, John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax found Huddie Ledbetter in a Louisiana prison, who became known as Lead Belly or Leadbelly. The liner notes on the album of his that I have said: “Leadbelly is the hard name of a hard man.” The Lomaxes promoted him as an authentic American folksinger, and two of his songs rank high in the folk pantheon: “Goodnight Irene” was a big hit in 1950 for the early folksinging group the Weavers (whose members included Pete Seeger), and the country-blues song “Midnight Special” became the name and also the theme song of a popular musical variety program, The Midnight Special which ran from 1972 to 1981. The latter song was attributed by the Lomaxes to Lead Belly (that was the way that Huddie Ledbetter himself used the nickname); though the song is actually much older, Lead Belly apparently supplied several verses of his own to the song. The reference is to a late-night train that would lift the spirits of men in prison as it rolled past.
Over the course of this trip, John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax uncovered hundreds of songs leading to several important books: American Ballads and Folksongs (1934), Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly (1936), Cowboy Songs (1937), and Our Singing Country (1938).
(February 2015)
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Woody Guthrie became an active mentor for folksinger Ramblin’ Jack Elliott; because of his deteriorating health from the ravages of Huntington’s Disease, Bob Dylan and his own son Arlo Guthrie said that they actually learned about Guthrie’s music mostly through Elliott. Wikipedia says of this: “When asked about Arlo’s claim, Elliott said, ‘I was flattered. Dylan learned from me the same way I learned from Woody. Woody didn’t teach me. He just said, “If you want to learn something, just steal it — that’s the way I learned from Lead Belly.”’”
(March 2015)
