The Importance Of Being Leadbelly Essays - American Folk Songs

The Importance Of Being Leadbelly The Importance of Being Leadbelly ?Women and Liquor, that was his problem. My father got him to marry his girl, Martha, and that settled him for a while, a week or two. He called himself ?the twelve-string champion guitar player of the world,' and I guess he was. I never heard anybody who could play it better. He loved being the best. He wanted to stay the best as long as he was alive.? -Alan Lomax, on Leadbelly He's just a name on a lot of lists: the fourth or fifth name on a list of influences, never first, and all too often not mentioned at all where appropriate. He's also an ex-convict, who was a sweet old man only while sober, which wasn't often enough. But by looking at the people he influenced, you can see that Huddie Ledbetter, Leadbelly, was redeemable no matter what he did aside from making music. The self-proclaimed ?King of the Twelve-String Guitar? was more aptly the ?Godfather of the Twelve-String Gui-tar,? being inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 as an influence. He died poor and pitiful of a form of multiple sclerosis, and six months afterward his first hit song was a million-seller for another group. And every generation thereafter earned a new respect for a band that used one of his versions of a song. The importance of Leadbelly lies not in his legendary evil ways; it was in his great talent for making popular music. To make note of his importance, it's important to note his ?discoverer,? John Lomax. Lomax was on a constant search funded by the government to find its musical roots, rather to preserve what it could of them once the portable recording device was created. At the time Lomax met him, Ledbetter was serving a sen-tence at the Angola Prison Farm in Louisiana for murder, the second long stretch in prison for him. During his first run in prison, for assault in 1925 in Texas, he would play music for the guards to get lighter work-loads and eventually his music granted him an early release from the governor himself. It was in the Texas prison that Ledbetter allegedly earned his nickname, some say because he was able to eat anything, others said it was because he was ?the number one man in the number one gang in the Texas pen.? Lomax found him doing much the same in the Louisiana prison, singing for lighter work and trying hard for a second pardon from a harder governor. Lomax saw great poten tial in Ledbetter and helped get him parole in 1933 then hired him as a prot?g? of sorts. As much of a friend John Lomax was, he was also a hindrance, ex-ploiting Leadbelly as a singing prisoner, dressing him in convict or sharecropper clothes for photo sessions. He immortalized Leadbelly and at the same time made a joke of him. For as much as Leadbelly would agree to go along with the clothes, he refused to actually talk about prison or about the ear-to-ear scar on his neck. For all the influence he had, Leadbelly was not without his influences. Prior to his arrest in Texas, he played the street corners with his mentor, Blind Lemon Jefferson for change, and they brought in small fortunes together for five years, each man gaining a lot of influence from the other. In the mid-1930s he worked and lived with Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and Woody Guthrie, each one giving and taking a bit. And John Lomax was indeed quite a benefit for Leadbelly as far as credit is concerned. Ledbetter had a repertoire of well over 500 songs, the actual number was never quantified. Upon his discovery by Lo-max, he was the first blues man to record for the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress in 1933, while still in the Angola Prison Farm. Ledbetter himself couldn't remember exactly which songs were his own as opposed to ones he made his own from someone else, and therefore his name is often attached to a lot of songs that perhaps weren't originally his own. An examp le of this is popular children's song of old,