The Singing Convict

"Raiding the Lead Belly Vault" (NPR)

It was probably mentioned in class before, but there seems to be so much emphasis put on the fact that Leadbelly was a criminal. It's hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that this man who created such rich, wonderful, influential music killed his own relative and was imprisoned for multiple attempted homicides, but maybe that's just a display of my naivety.

There are articles that state that John Lomax, who "discovered" Leadbelly, eagerly crafted this image of murderer musician who "sung his way out of prison" (see newsreel). Given the circumstances that drove Leadbelly to eventually sue Lomax and deliberately jeopardize their mentor-mentee relationship, I'm curious to know who Leadbelly really was, what drove him to such violent acts, and did it stem from the same passion that he put into his music? Who was the man that Martha Promise looked at with such genuine affection in that photograph?

With my project, I aimed to illustrate the hidden side of Leadbelly... we don't really know who Leadbelly was and probably never will. We'll always be speculating...

In Take This Hammer, I believe Leadbelly may be singing about prison life, maybe of his time in the chain gang that he later escaped from.

I don't want no cornbread and molasses; it hurts my pride

This lyric of the song particularly resonates with me because it so starkly simplifies the experience that the song is alluding to, with just a mention of the meal that was fed... Some internet-digging led to me to learn that cornbread and molasses was a major part of the slave diet, which was lacking in both variety and nutrients and closely resembled the diet of prison convicts. So maybe Leadbelly is singing of both slavery and imprisonment and the tragic parallels between the two...

Leadbelly's prison experiences are a central theme in his music, with the Midnight Special (according to Mudcat) referring to a legend from the Texas Sugar Land Penitentiary (where Leadbelly spent some time) that if the lights of a night train passing by the prison fell upon a prisoner's cell, that prisoner would be given a ride out of prison. Knowing this, and knowing some of where Leadbelly comes from, inspires me to appreciate his music more and listen to his lyrics more closely.

As for why Leadbelly (the film) is so hard to find, it's most likely due to the same reason Leadbelly did not have a very profitable recording career despite the immense attention he received. As Wikipedia so elegantly put it, Leadbelly had fame but not fortune.

I would say that this was largely due to racial prejudice.

What would Leadbelly's life have been like if he did not possess such musical talent? He was a man regarded as impulsively violent (as seen in the film), whose musical career was tainted by the sensationalist notion that the hands playing the guitar were the same hands that killed a man... His history actually reminds me a lot of the prison crisis in the South today, and I imagine that there could be another Leadbelly right now singing in one of those prison cells (but probably not)...