The 100th Anniversary of the Arrest for Murder of the Man Who Changed American Folk Music
On December 13, 1917, Walter Boyd was charged with murder. He was in a jail near Caddo Lake in NW Louisiana.
Possibly the night before -- the records are silent -- he had been involved in a shooting in a black tavern. These taverns were known as sukey joints. Authorities arrested him for having shot and killed a friend, Will Stafford. Boyd denied the charge, but he was convicted of murder. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Caddo Lake covers the Texas side of the border. Boyd was sent to prison in Texas, not Louisiana. This indicates that the tavern was on the Texas side.
The authorities did not know that Walter Boyd was not his real name. His name was Huddie Ledbetter. He is known to us as Leadbelly.
In 1950, a song he wrote in prison, "Goodnight Irene," became the number-one pop song of the year, sung by a folk group known as the Weavers. He had died of Lou Gehrig's disease a year earlier on December 6. That song launched a string of hits by the Weavers. This was the first major penetration of folk music into the popular music charts.
He had always thought that "Goodnight, Irene" would be a hit. He was right. Too late.
Ledbetter was, intermittently, a violent man. He was also the first great master of the 12-string guitar.
Sometime in the early 1920's, the governor of Texas, Pat Neff, visited the prison where Ledbetter was incarcerated. Ledbetter sang a song he had written for Neff, asking for a pardon. In the last few days of his governorship in 1925, Neff signed the pardon. In 1932, Neff became the president of Baylor University.
By then, Ledbetter was back in prison, this time in Angola, the notorious prison in Louisiana. His crime was attempted murder . . . of a white man. He was convicted in 1930.
In 1933, John A. Lomax, the nation's leading musical folklorist, came to the prison to record his songs. Lomax was being paid by the Library of Congress to do this. He had just begun his 10-year position as the Library's collector of American folk music. He returned in July 1934 with better equipment to record over a hundred songs. Lomax sent a copy of "Goodnight, Irene" to the governor. On August 1, the governor pardoned him.
Ledbetter volunteered to work for Lomax as his driver. Lomax accepted the offer, and the two of them toured the United States for years. These recordings became the backbone of the famous collection of American folk music in the Library of Congress. Ledbetter later complained that Lomax kept a lot of his salary from him. But Lomax also kept him out of trouble.
If Ledbetter had not been incarcerated in 1933, it is unlikely that Lomax ever would have been able to locate him and record him free of charge. Ledbetter's violence had led to the transformation of American folk music.
Ledbetter began recording commercial records as Leadbelly in 1935. He continued until Gehrig's disease brought him down. The 4-disk set, "Leadbelly's Last Sessions," was recorded on an Ampex tape recorder in the fall of 1948. The set is still available. It is one of the great collections of American folk music ever recorded. The set was released in 1953. I bought a set in 1958. It remained my favorite collection for the next four decades.
There was a 1976 movie made of his life. Roger Ebert gave it 3 1/2 stars. Because of copyright problems, it disappeared for over 30 years. You can rent it from Google for about three dollars. If you like folk music, you ought to rent it. It is run on cable TV every so often. The guitar work was done by Dick Rosmini, who was a great studio musician. He did not have Leadbelly's guitar style down as well as Dave "Snaker" Ray did, but he was very good.
Of all of Leadbelly's songs, this was the one that impressed me most. I never thought I'd hear it in church, but then, when I was a member of an inner-city church in Memphis, they sang it. That was 48 years after I first heard it.
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