Robert Bennett talks about Leadbelly!

If you are at all interested in the history of Rock’n’Roll, Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter is indispensable listening. But be warned, once you have invested in a Lead Belly record you won’t be able to hear all those strutting, posturing, squeaking bands of the British Invasion in the same way. Simply put, when you’ve heard Lead Belly’s “Gallis Pole”, Led Zeppelin’s rendition will sound embarrassingly limp. 

“Lead Belly Legacy Volume 2” is the record that most clearly presents his versatility and power. Like all of Lead Belly’s music, the record is brimming with American mythology and enigmatic references to lives and events long buried. This mesmeric quality is evident from the first track: “Fannin Street”. The plaintive and mysterious lyrics are sent soaring by Lead Belly’s phantom cries: “Follow me down..” His unbeatable, driving twelve-string guitar playing lends forceful momentum to the story of a mother begging her son to stay away from the iniquity, corruption and evil women of Fannin Street.

Born in rural Texas to sharecropping parents at a time when the Blues were just emerging and life was not far removed from frontier-times, Lead Belly seems to have absorbed every type of song that he came across from spirituals and work-songs to children’s songs and sea-shanties. By the time he died he possessed a repertoire of five hundred songs. More than Blues, his music became a kaleidoscope of all early black American music, songs that would have died from memory had he not recorded them. “Fannin Street” is a tantalizing slice of autobiography. It was the place that young Lead Belly went to take up a life of hell-raising that resulted in him being exiled from his community as a dangerous menace. This was the beginning of his journey as an itinerant musician which was to see him travelling with Blind Lemon Jefferson, imprisoned for murder, and ultimately released on the strength of his musical talent and knowledge to become a recording artist with a regular slot on the radio.
The second track on this collection: “Bourgeois Blues” is a protest song that reveals a lot about Lead Belly’s position at the time of these recordings. His adoption in the 1940s by white Folk musicians, including Woody Guthrie, as a representative of lost music led to Guthrie-esque topical songs entering his repertoire and also resulted in audio engineer and archivist, Moses Asch offering Lead Belly free-reign over his recordings. Where his earlier sessions had been directed to suit misguided notions of “authenticity” and he had even been forced to wear a striped convict outfit when performing live to present a genuine jailbird image he now had complete control over his music. Asch remarked of these recordings: “He utilized me and I was willing to be used because he knew that through me and through my medium he was able to express what he wanted.”

“Gallis Pole” is a fast, desperate, raucous song. Listening to this story of betrayal and death it is not hard to see why Lead Belly was Kurt Cobain’s favourite performer. He plays the role of a man condemned to hang, hoping against hope that his father, mother, or “so-called friend” will bring the silver and gold that can save his life. Crazily shouting from the gallows, he is driven on by the relentless speed of the guitar picking. Where many Blues- players prided themselves on the delicacy of their picking, Lead Belly applied tremendous strength to his playing, letting the strings ring out loudly to support his booming voice. As the build up of frenzied anticipation in this song demonstrates, he was also a master of coordination and timing, playing extremely fast rhythms while singing with ease. After a spoken warning about the treachery of a “so-called friend” the protagonist is abandoned to his fate. The lyrics are nightmarishly bleak but the force and punching pace of the music stop the song from inhabiting the world of gloom and terror painted by a typical Skip James or Robert Johnson song. However hopeless the scenarios presented in these songs are, the sledgehammer-power of Lead Belly’s voice always suggests defiant strength.

Listening to Lead Belly’s music two ideas strike you. Firstly, how fortunate it is that he was able to produce so many recordings spontaneously and unfettered from record producers’ demands. Secondly, how little work most people in Rock have had to do to earn their bread and butter.

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