From Tennessee Williams’ play Orpheus Descending:
LADY: What’s all that writing on it?
VAL: Autographs of musicians I run into here and there.
LADY: Can I see it?
VAL: Turn on that light above you. [She switches on green-shaded bulb over counter. VAL holds the guitar tenderly between them as if it were a child; his voice is soft, intimate, tender.] See this name? Leadbelly?
LADY: Leadbelly?
VAL: Greatest man ever lived on the twelve-string guitar! Played it so good he broke the stone heart of a Texas governor with it and won himself a pardon out of jail …
Huddie William Ledbetter was born on this day in 1888, in Louisiana. Some of the details are lost to history, but what is known is that he was already “playing out” at the turn of the 20th century, in and around Shreveport. He was in and out of jail starting in the teens, for owning a gun, for killing a relative. One time, he escaped from a chain gang. While in prison, he continued to sing and make music. John and Alan Lomax (whose names come up again and again in the stories of legendary blues figures in the early years of the 20th century) discovered him in prison in the 1930s. The Lomaxes were determined to capture the sound of these so-called forgotten figures, and they put Leadbelly on tape. They may have been instrumental in getting Leadbelly an early release. Alan Lomax interviewed Leadbelly extensively for his 1936 book Negro Folk Songs As Sung by Lead Belly . (You’ll see his nickname spelled both ways.) As technology developed, these 19th-century blues singers – if they were still around – found a whole new world opening up to them in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Folk music was on the rise, and the folk musicians were all well aware of the wellsprings of what they were doing – and brought these inspirations along with them. (See: Furry Lewis, as well, but there are so many more.) This man, born on a plantation in 1888, ended up touring Europe.
More after the jump:
And then Nirvana introduced to a whole new generation (i.e. mine) to Leadbelly during their MTV Unplugged concert:
“Here’s to Cisco and Sonny and Leadbelly too…” – Dylan
A riveting clip of Leadbelly performing “Hammer,” which he wrote after being released from Angola State Prison.
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martha promise receives leadbelly, 1935
By Tyehimba Jess
when your man comes home from prison,
when he comes back like the wound
and you are the stitch,
when he comes back with pennies in his pocket
and prayer fresh on his lips,
you got to wash him down first.
you got to have the wildweed and treebark boiled
and calmed, waiting for his skin like a shining baptism
back into what he was before gun barrels and bars
chewed their claim in his hide and spit him
stumbling backwards into screaming sunlight.
you got to scrub loose the jailtime fingersmears
from ashy skin, lather down the cuffmarks
from ankle and wrist, rinse solitary’s stench loose
from his hair, scrape curse and confession
from the welted and the smooth,
the hard and the soft,
the furrowed and the lax.
you got to hold tight that shadrach’s face
between your palms, take crease and lid
and lip and brow and rinse slow with river water,
and when he opens his eyes
you tell him calm and sure
how a woman birthed him
back whole again.
oh my God I don’t think I breathed through that whole thing.
That is gorgeous – thank you for posting it.