BRING JUDGMENT DAY

A new biography of the Black musician Huddie Ledbetter seeks to reclaim him from “the Lead Belly mythology.”

Promulgated by folklorist John Lomax, who brought Ledbetter to a national stage, both moniker and myth do the “talented and multifaceted” performer an injustice, argues Emmy and Peabody winner Bernard convincingly. Born in Louisiana in 1889, Ledbetter grew up in the teeth of Jim Crow and was serving his third prison sentence when he met Lomax and his son Alan as they collected folk songs at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in 1933. Following his release, he traveled with John Lomax gathering songs in other prisons and making their way north, where Lomax presented him to admiring audiences. Bernard interleaves her account of the men’s travels with retrospective examinations of Ledbetter’s encounters with Jim Crow law. As represented by the Lomaxes in their book Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, Ledbetter was a “dangerous” killer, but Bernard corrects and contextualizes this representation. Drawing on oral histories and court records, she juxtaposes Ledbetter’s arrests and incarcerations against the Lomaxes’ false accounts. Equally revealing are John Lomax’s letters to his wife, in which he gloats about life with “a ‘body servant’” and repeatedly calls Ledbetter “a n[-].” The author explains that she partially redacts the N-word but otherwise retains many “offensive dialect and stereotypes.” The result is, as she acknowledges, often “shocking and difficult to read.” With so little left behind by Ledbetter himself beyond his songs and recordings, readers are lucky that Bernard was able to draw on oral histories conducted with many people familiar with Ledbetter and his early life. The portrait that emerges is of a man who defined himself as “a musician, song composer and a dancer” and whose legacy deserves better than the demeaning characterization that’s persisted for decades.

Essential for musicologists and fans of folk music.