Huddie Ledbetter, better known by the prison moniker Lead Belly, was a musical genius born in the southern United States just as Jim Crow laws were starting to bite. He fell foul of an unapologetically racist legal system and ended up serving on a chain gang in 1915, later doing time in state penitentiaries in Texas (1918-25), Louisiana (1930-34) and at Rikers Island in New York (1939).
Sheila Curran Bernard takes as her focus the years 1933 to 1935 when, after years of imprisonment, Ledbetter took an academic, John Lomax, to be his manager and organise his entrance into the larger musical world of northern America. She reveals for the first time what a catastrophically bad decision that was, because Lomax’s greed and racism led him to treat Ledbetter as little more than a chauffeur, making him dependent on what could be raised by passing round the hat at the end of concerts – a sum averaging, she notes, 50 cents a day.
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