The People's Songbag

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31167, 17 September 1966, Page 13

The People's Songbag

One-Piece Man

'Specialty written for "The Press" by

r ro the doctors at Bellevue Hospital. New York, the death of a huge Negro man named Huddie Ledbetter on December 6, 1949, was just the closing chapter in a case history of the crippling disease known as amyatrophic lateral scelerosis. But to the admirers the world over who knew him as Leadbelly, King of the 12-string Guitar, who bought his records and went to his concerts, his death represented the end of the road for one of the greatest artists of his time. Leadbelly’s life was as tempestuous as the rhythms that poured from his oversize guitar: like the guitar he was a little bit larger than life. He earned his nickname the hard way, picking cotton at the head of a work gang on a Southern prison farm. He was not a great singer in the academic sense. His voice never recorded well: toward the end it cracked and broke on the high notes and strained for the low ones. But it had the cold clarity of stainless steel, and it jolted through the murky recording like an electric shock. Leadbelly was born tn Mooringsport. Louisiana, about 1882 —“born to ramble,” and by 1910 he had been horse-breaker. mule-driver, and guitar-picker in a dozen states. For a while he was lead man for Blind Lemon Jefferson, who taught him many songs. By 1934 he had been three times a convict—once each for assaulting a woman, murder and assault to kill. In the prison farms he was lead man on the work gangs, picking (or so he claimed) 10001 b of cotton a day in the broiling sun and “cutting the fool for the guards all evening.” But Leadbelly put the prisons behind him when he met John A. Lomax, the first curator of the Folk-lore Archives of the Library of Congress, who recorded him for the library and launched him on his concert career. From 1934 until the late 40s Leadbelly travelled incessantly. singing, listening, singing again and recording (he is about the best-documented folk artist in history, although you would never guess it from the local catalogues) until he became possibly the greatest single repository of folk-lore in the world. A handful of his treasures has recently been made available to us on the new label Verve-Folkways (catalogue number FU9OOI, 39s 6d) — and what a superb record It Is. There are 20 short tracks, some of them lasting a little less or. little more than a minute;* but they were chosen by Alan Lomax and Frederic Ramsey. Jr., two of the few white men for whom Leadbelly lowered the implacable barriers of race, and they draw just about as accurate a (Picture as could be drawn of this man’s greatness. There are the prison songs “Take- This Hammer” and

DERRICK ROONEY'

“Old Riley," with the voice lashing out like sprung steel, work-songs, blues, stories and jump tunes, all of them burning, with almost terrifying power, through the tinny microphones and scratchy recording of a generation ago. Leadbelly was Black Power. He was, as Alan Lomax writes in the sleeve note, “never a political or financial success. He was just Leadbelly, independent of the others, more than the other . . . always and forever driving himself hard —a one-piece man.”