Lead Belly’s Louisiana State Penitentiary Blues

The 1934 Lomax-Supervised Library of Congress Recordings at Angola

Lead Belly promo photo issued by Playboy Records, 1970s.

His birth name was Huddie William Ledbetter, but he was best known as Lead Belly, the self-proclaimed “King of the 12-String Guitar.” The brawling, stocky, 5'7" songster had done hard time for murder and then virtually exchanged worlds in 1934. Leaving behind his chain-gang shackles, he became lionized by New York City’s high society and performed for receptive audiences on college campuses, concert halls, and over the radio. He was among the most recorded blues artists of the 1930s and ’40s.

Few doubted his boast that he and a partner could pick a bale of cotton a day—a thousand pounds—and many saw him as little more than a clothed savage. But he could be charming, witty, and courteous, and he was a superlative songster and bluesman. “He sang some of the greatest protest songs of all time,” remembered his friend Pete Seeger. “He had the heart of a champion.”

Lead Belly’s voice was field-holler powerful, his 12-string guitar playing forceful and nimble. He had a superior feel for time, easily jumping tempos to heighten a song’s drama. He created muscular walking bass lines, and like his acquaintance Blind Lemon Jefferson excelled at speedy solos. With a repertoire estimated at 500 songs, he recorded everything from cattle calls, slave songs, and spirituals to square dances, children’s music, blues, and Tin Pan Alley. “But when does your guitar talk the best?” Woody Guthrie once asked him. “Well,” Lead Belly drawled, “my guitar talk the best when I’m playin’ and singin’ blues.”

He was born on January 13, 1888, on the Jeter plantation near Mooringsport, Louisiana. “We was living out in the country,” he remembered of his childhood. “We had to ride five miles to get mail and get it once a week. Read a newspaper once a week.” At age seven Huddie began playing a diatonic button accordion—a “windjammer,” he called it. The first songs he learned were “There’s No Corn Bread Here,” a jig called “Diana Got a Wooden Leg,” and “sukey-jump” tunes like “Green Corn” and “Po’ Howard.” While attending the Shiloh Baptist Church he heard his mother sing spirituals.

Huddie attended Lake Chapel School near Elizabeth, Texas, where he learned to read and write. His classmates remembered him as “the smartest, the biggest, the best.” His father handed him his first 6-string guitar in 1903. “When he give it to me,” Huddie remembered, “glory to God, I was gone some. I jumped down and commenced to a-whippin’ it to a plank.” During trips to Shreveport, young Huddie watched Big Jim Fagan, Bud Coleman, and other street guitarists. A local pianist known as Pine-Top inspired his trademark bass runs: “He played that boogie woogie,” Lead Belly said. “That’s where I got that bass—Fannin Street. And that’s what I wanted to play on guitar, that piano bass. I always like to play piano tunes. I got it out of the barrelhouses on Fannin Street.”