The songs of LEAD BELLY lit a path for the folk revival and beyond, but the legend of a guitar-toting killer, freed from prison by white song collectors, was fanciful at best. Adapting from her new book, SHEILA CURRAN BERNARD unpicks the man and musician from the politics of race in 20th century America, and explains how his extraordinary northern debut, 90 years ago, failed to end his troubles...
THE WEATHER WAS MILD – JUST UNDER 50 degrees fahrenheit, with light rain – on Wednesday, December 26, 1934, as 67-year-old white folk music collector John Lomax and his 19-year-old son, Alan, arrived in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, eager to show off their most important discovery to date: 45-yearold Black musician Huddie Ledbetter, the man at the wheel of Lomax’s car. For the previous three months, unpaid, Ledbetter had served as Lomax’s chauffeur and personal attendant, while also providing invaluable assistance as Lomax collected Black folk music on behalf of the US Library of Congress. Most often, they recorded in prisons, where African-Americans were incarcerated in numbers vastly disproportionate to their presence in the general population. Together, they worked their way through the southern states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina.
Now, finally, Ledbetter was returning to a role in which he was most comfortable: performer. In Philadelphia, he would face his first audience in the North. Lomax had arranged for Ledbetter to appear at the annual gathering of the Modern Language Association, an academic conference that drew some 1,000 attendees. Lomax worked hard to ensure that reporters would be there. If all went well, who knew? Lomax and Ledbetter both hoped that recording, radio, and other engagements might follow. Ledbetter, who had grown up herding cattle, taming horses, and working the fields, had dreams of following in the footsteps of Gene Autry, the popular ‘Singing Cowboy’.
The Benjamin Franklin Hotel in Philadelphia, where the MLA convention was being held, was a grand building of red brick and limestone, 18 stories high, with more than 1,200 rooms. The MLA was not segregated, but the hotel hosting the group was, and so Ledbetter dropped the Lomaxes off, parked, and then walked a mile farther until he reached a rooming house that welcomed Black guests. His first “show,” as Lomax called it, was not until Friday evening. This left Ledbetter a bit of time to rest, reflect, and maybe check out Philadelphia’s nightlife. He and his beloved, battered 12-string guitar, painted green, held together with string, settled in.
