The Importance Of Being Leadbelly

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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 potential in Ledbetter and helped get him parole in 1933 then hired him as a protégé of sorts. As ...

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