Lead Belly - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. For the biographical film on this person, see Leadbelly (film). Huddie William Ledbetter (January 2. He is best known as Lead Belly. Though many releases list him as . He also wrote songs about people in the news, such as Franklin D.
Lead Belly; Leadbelly; Born) January. Singer-guitarist Kurt Cobain refers to his attempt to convince David Geffen to purchase Lead Belly's guitar for him in an interval before the. King of the 12-String Guitar.
Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Jean Harlow, the Scottsboro Boys and Howard Hughes. Lead Belly was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1. Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2.
Biography. 1. 94. Lead Belly was born Huddie William Ledbetter on the Jeter Plantation near Mooringsport, Louisiana, in either January 1. The 1. 90. 0 United States Census lists .
Leadbelly Title Of Album: King of the 12-String Guitar. King of the 12-String Guitar Year Of. King of the 12-String Guitar contains some of the music from his earliest commercial recording date. Leadbelly's powerful voice and his work on 12-string guitar are consistently memorable.
The 1. 94. 0 census lists his age as 5. Martha. However, in April 1.
Ledbetter filled out his World War II draft registration, he gave his birth date as January 2. Freeport, Louisiana. His grave marker bears the date given on his draft registration. Ledbetter was the younger of two children born to Wesley Ledbetter and Sallie Brown.
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The pronunciation of his name is purported to be . When Huddie was five years old, the family settled in Bowie County, Texas. By 1. 90. 3, Huddie was already a . He performed for nearby Shreveport audiences in St. Paul's Bottoms, a notorious red- light district there.
He began to develop his own style of music after exposure to various musical influences on Shreveport's Fannin Street, a row of saloons, brothels, and dance halls in the Bottoms, now referred to as Ledbetter Heights. The 1. 91. 0 census of Harrison County, Texas, shows . Aletha is registered as age 1. Others say she was 1. It was in Texas that Ledbetter received his first instrument, an accordion from his uncle Terrell. By his early twenties, having fathered at least two children, Ledbetter left home to make his living as a guitarist and occasional laborer. Influenced by the sinking of the Titanic in April 1.
Ledbetter wrote the song . Initially played when performing with Blind Lemon Jefferson (1. Johnson had in fact been denied passage on a ship for being Black, but it was not the Titanic. The Captain, he says, 'I ain't haulin' no coal!' Fare thee, Titanic! In 1. 91. 5, he was convicted of carrying a pistol and sentenced to time on the Harrison County chain gang. He escaped, finding work in nearby Bowie County under the assumed name of Walter Boyd. In January 1. 91.
Imperial Farm (now Central Unit). While there he may have first heard the traditional prison song . Combined with his good behavior (which included entertaining the guards and fellow prisoners), his appeal to Neff's strong religious beliefs proved sufficient.
It was a testament to his persuasive powers, as Neff had run for governor on a pledge not to issue pardons (the only recourse for prisoners, since in most Southern prisons there was no provision for parole). Wolfe and Kip Lornell, in their book The Life and Legend of Leadbelly (1.
Neff had regularly brought guests to the prison on Sunday picnics to hear Ledbetter perform. In 1. 93. 0 Ledbetter was sentenced to Louisiana's Angola Prison Farm after a summary trial for attempted homicide for stabbing a white man in a fight. They returned with new and better equipment in July 1. On August 1, Ledbetter was released after having again served nearly all of his minimum sentence, following a petition the Lomaxes had taken to Louisiana Governor Oscar K. Allen at his urgent request. It was on the other side of a recording of his signature song, . However, both Ledbetter and the Lomaxes believed that the record they had taken to the governor had hastened his release from prison.
The nickname . Some claim his fellow inmates called him . It is recounted that during his second prison term, another inmate stabbed him in the neck (leaving him with a fearsome scar he subsequently covered with a bandana); Ledbetter nearly killed his attacker with his own knife. Blues singer Big Bill Broonzy thought it came from a supposed tendency to lay about as if . Whatever its origin, he adopted the nickname as a pseudonym while performing. Life after prison.
In September 1. 93. Lead Belly asked John Lomax to take him on as a driver. For three months he assisted the 6. South. He was written up in the press as a convict who had sung his way out of prison. On New Year's Day, 1. New York City, where Lomax was scheduled to meet with his publisher, Macmillan, about a new collection of folk songs. The newspapers were eager to write about the .
Lead Belly attained fame (although not fortune). The following week, he began recording for the American Record Corporation, but these recordings achieved little commercial success. He recorded over 4. ARC (intended to be released on their Banner, Melotone, Oriole, Perfect, and Romeo labels and their short- lived Paramount series), but only five sides were actually issued. Part of the reason for the poor sales may have been that ARC released only his blues songs rather than the folk songs for which he would later become better known. Lead Belly continued to struggle financially. Like many performers, what income he made during his career would come from touring, not from record sales.
In February 1. 93. Martha Promise, who came north from Louisiana to join him. The month of February was spent recording his repertoire and those of other African Americans and interviews about his life with Alan Lomax for their forthcoming book, Negro Folk Songs As Sung by Lead Belly (1. Concert appearances were slow to materialize. In March 1. 93. 5, Lead Belly accompanied John Lomax on a previously scheduled two- week lecture tour of colleges and universities in the Northeast, culminating at Harvard. At the end of the month, John Lomax decided he could no longer work with Lead Belly and gave him and Martha money to go back to Louisiana by bus.
He gave Martha the money her husband had earned during three months of performing, but in installments, on the pretext Lead Belly would spend it all on drinking if given a lump sum. From Louisiana, Lead Belly successfully sued Lomax for both the full amount and release from his management contract.
The quarrel was bitter, with hard feelings on both sides. Curiously, in the midst of the legal wrangling, Lead Belly wrote to Lomax proposing they team up again, but it was not to be. Further, the book about Lead Belly published by the Lomaxes in the fall of the following year proved a commercial failure. In January 1. 93. Lead Belly returned to New York on his own, without John Lomax, in an attempted comeback.
He performed twice a day at Harlem's Apollo Theater during the Easter season in a live dramatic recreation of the March of Time newsreel (itself a recreation) about his prison encounter with John Lomax, where he had worn stripes, though by this time he was no longer associated with Lomax. Life magazine ran a three- page article titled .
It included a full- page, color (rare in those days) picture of him sitting on grain sacks playing his guitar and singing. The article attributes both of his pardons to his singing of his petitions to the governors, who were so moved that they pardoned him. The text of the article ends with . Instead, he attained success playing at concerts and benefits for an audience of leftist folk music aficionados. He developed his own style of singing and explaining his repertoire in the context of Southern black culture, having learned from his participation in Lomax's college lectures. He was especially successful with his repertoire of children's game songs (as a younger man in Louisiana he had sung regularly at children's birthday parties in the black community).
He was written about as a heroic figure by the black novelist Richard Wright, then a member of the Communist Party, in the columns of the Daily Worker, of which Wright was the Harlem editor. The two men became personal friends, though some say Lead Belly himself was apolitical and if anything was a supporter of Wendell Willkie, the centrist.
Republican candidate for President, for whom he wrote a campaign song. However, he also wrote the song . Alan Lomax, then 2. After his release (in 1. He also appeared in nightclubs with Josh White, becoming a fixture in New York City's surging folk music scene and befriending the likes of Sonny Terry, Brownie Mc. Ghee, Woody Guthrie, and a young Pete Seeger, all fellow performers on Back Where I Come From.
During the first half of the decade, he recorded for RCA, the Library of Congress, and Moe Asch (future founder of Folkways Records) and in 1. California, where he recorded strong sessions for Capitol Records. He lodged with a studio guitar player on Merrywood Drive in Laurel Canyon. Lead Belly was the first American country blues musician to achieve success in Europe. Later in the year he began his first European tour with a trip to France, but fell ill before its completion and was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), or Lou Gehrig's disease (a motor neuron disease). Martha also performed at that concert, singing spirituals with her husband.
Lead Belly died later that year in New York City and was buried in the Shiloh Baptist Church cemetery, in Mooringsport, Louisiana, 8 miles (1. Blanchard, in Caddo Parish. Lead Belly's tuning is debated. Lead Belly's playing style was popularized by Pete Seeger, who adopted the twelve- string guitar in the 1. LP and book using Lead Belly as an exemplar of technique. In some of the recordings in which Lead Belly accompanied himself, he would make an unusual type of grunt between his verses, best described as .
The hammer rings, and we swing, and we sing. John, Ry Cooder, Davy Graham, Maria Muldaur, Rory Block, Grateful Dead, Gene Autry, Odetta, Billy Childish (who named his son Huddie), Mungo Jerry, Paul King, Van Morrison, Michelle Shocked, Tom Waits (. Biram, Ron Sexsmith, British Sea Power, Rod Stewart, Ernest Tubb, Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Ram Jam, Spiderbait (. In his notebooks, Cobain listed Lead Belly's Last Session Vol.
Nirvana's sound. 2 (1. Shout On, Lead Belly Legacy, vol.