(A 'Definitive' collection of Lead Belly's finest recordin...)
A 'Definitive' collection of Lead Belly's finest recordings. All the big songs are here, including "Goodnight Irene", "Midnight Special", "House Of The Rising Sun"m "Rock Island Line" and many more. All recordings have been digitally re-mastered.
(Goodnight Irene by Lead Belly
When sold by Amazon.com, t...)
Goodnight Irene by Lead Belly
When sold by Amazon.com, this product will be manufactured on demand using CD-R recordable media. Amazon.com's standard return policy will apply.
(Huddie Ledbetter was a man so full of life he seemed immo...)
Huddie Ledbetter was a man so full of life he seemed immortal. His was one of the loudest voices on record and his playing of the twelve-string guitar belied his physical strength. As he reached his teens, he took up working his father's land. From an early age, he could play accordion, harmonica, piano, guitar, and if these weren't available, he'd holler field songs. By fifteen, he was a regular entertainer. In 1908 he married and two years later the couple were in Dallas. Huddie met Blind Lemon Jefferson, something he'd celebrate in music. He also got his first twelve-string guitar. His first brush with the law was in 1915, when he was convicted of 'carrying a pistol'. The sentence was 30 days on the chain gang. Huddie escaped and made his way to New Orleans. Two years later he was convicted of the shooting of a Will Stafford. He was prolific. He amassed a huge repertoire of work that would be documented by the Library of Congress. Thus began a series of stays in prison - and reprieves, as partly documented in Governor O.K. Allen - which is why the Lomaxes found him in Angola in July 1933. He worked for years on prison gangs. He needed strength to survive and he survived better than most. His power is evident in recordings such as the extended Leaving On The Morning Train Blues, here for the first time on CD. Music was a ticket out of jail for Leadbelly. He became the Lomax's driver, making recordings as they travelled through the South. The most comprehensive sessions took place in New York. Best was a session on Boxing Day 1938, at which Leaving On The Morning Train Blues was cut, and a scathing version of Bourgeois Blues. This song is based on a visit to Washington, DC with his wife along with Mr & Mrs Alan Lomax, and the racial tensions they encountered from all. Our compilation ends with Shine On Me, taken from his last major concert at the University of Texas in 1949. A month later he died in New York. His legacy is invaluable.
(Limited 180gm vinyl LP pressing housed in tip-on jacket w...)
Limited 180gm vinyl LP pressing housed in tip-on jacket with soft touch finish. Louisiana delta native Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter is the master of twelve-string blues guitar. His story is one of high-highs and low-lows, from serving stints in prison after killing a man in a fight for a woman's heart, but then eventually earning early release by entertaining his fellow prison-mates and penning a song for the governor, thus cementing his reputation of singing his way out of prison. Folklorists John and Alan Lomax were early supporters that brought Lead Belly to the attention of Ivy Leaguers as well as a European audience. His songs have been widely covered by artists such as Elvis, Nirvana, Johnny Cash, and the Grateful Dead.
(Smithsonian Folkways Recordings is proud to present Lead ...)
Smithsonian Folkways Recordings is proud to present Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection the first in-depth, career-spanning box set of songs, photos, and essays dedicated to one of America s most treasured 20th-century icons.
A companion to 2012 s GRAMMY-winning Woody at 100: The Woody Guthrie Centennial Collection, Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection chronicles the recordings of Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter (c. 1888¬ 1949) in 108 tracks over five discs, including Lead Belly s beloved classics "The Midnight Special, " "Goodnight Irene, " and "Black Girl (Where Did You Sleep Last Night) " among many others. The collection also boasts 16 previously unreleased recordings, including four never-before-available original songs, and radio programs Lead Belly made for WNYC which can be heard for the first time since airing in 1941.
The set also features many rare photos, among them an intimate portrait taken shortly before his untimely death from ALS (Lou Gehrig s Disease) in 1949. It is one of the few known color photographs of the legend.
Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection was compiled and produced by GRAMMY-winning Smithsonian Folkways archivist Jeff Place and Executive Director of the GRAMMY Museum Robert Santelli. The collection is housed in a 140-page, large format (12x12) book, with an introduction entitled A Man of Contradiction and Complexity from Santelli and an illuminating essay The Life and Legacy of Lead Belly by Place.
(Vital 1940s recordings of 15 songs featuring Lead Belly p...)
Vital 1940s recordings of 15 songs featuring Lead Belly performing solo and accompanied by Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, and Sonny Terry. Tracks include Stewball, Lining Track, and On a Monday. "...Lead Belly's powerful, fluid baritone and brilliant 12-string playing have a clarity never heard on older records...emotional singing...and deeply banked political fires..." -- Boston Globe
Where Did You Sleep Last Night (Lead Belly Legacy, Vol. 1)
(Forty years after his death, Lead Belly’s songs and style...)
Forty years after his death, Lead Belly’s songs and style have continued to influence folk, blues, and rock artists including Neil Young, William Styron, Ben Harper, Keb’ Mo, Dionne Farris, and the late Kurt Cobain (Nirvana). Between 1941 and 1947 Lead Belly recorded some of his best music in Moses Asch’s tiny New York studio. The only surviving Asch masters of Lead Belly are now part of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings. For the first time in almost 50 years these original acetates have been carefully remastered and newly annotated. 34 tracks, including Irene, Where Did You Sleep Last Night, In the Evening When the Sun Goes Down, and Rock Island Line. Originally released as a tribute to Lead Belly after his death in 1948, this reissue includes many out-takes and previously unreleased and alternate versions. Extensive notes include Lead Belly’s own song commentary. Annotated by Jeff Place. Compiled by Jeff Place, Anthony Seeger and Kip Lornell. "The soul expressed! is full-fledged and sublime." –New England Folk Almanac
(This is the third and final volume of the Lead Belly Lega...)
This is the third and final volume of the Lead Belly Legacy Series, which makes available on CD all of the Lead Belly Performances originally recorded for Folkways Records during the 1940s. All three volumes -- Shout On, Where Did You Sleep Last Night, and Bourgeois Blues--contain previously unreleased tracks, extensive notes, bibliographies, and discographies. Completely remastered from the best sources in the Smithsonian Folkways collection, Volume 3 includes the original Shout On LP in its entirety along with 17 additional tracks. A number of the songs include accompaniment by Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston. Compiled by Jeff Place, annotated by Jeff Place and Kip Lornell.
(2008 three CD set from one of the singular most important...)
2008 three CD set from one of the singular most important Blues artists of all time. Features 75 Leadbelly classics including 'Jim Crow Blues', 'Ain't Going Down to the Well No More', 'Sweet Mary Blues', 'Midnight Special' and more. Complete Blues.
Huddie William Ledbetter was an American singer and composer. He usually played a twelve-string guitar, but he also played the piano, mandolin, harmonica, violin, and "windjammer" (diatonic accordion).
Background
Huddie William Ledbetter was born on January 21, 1885 two miles from Mooringsport, Louisiana, United States in the Caddo Lake area near the Texas border, where his parents, Wess Ledbetter and Sallie (Pugh) Ledbetter, had managed to buy sixty-five acres of land to farm together. Wess Ledbetter's parents, who had lived in Mississippi, were both slain by the Ku Klux Klan. Huddie's maternal grandmother was a Cherokee, a fact he often mentioned. He had one adopted sister, but was his parents' only natural child.
Career
Huddie Ledbetter was first exposed to music by his mother, who led her church choir. Two "songster" uncles, Bob and Terrell Ledbetter, encouraged him to become a musician. When Uncle Terrell rode home with an accordion for him on the back of a mule, the boy quickly mastered the instrument, which was especially popular among Cajun groups in the area. At the age of fifteen, Huddie fathered a child by a neighbor named Margaret, whom he had known since childhood. Their daughter, Arthur Mae, was born in 1900. The community was resentful when he did not marry Margaret. He dropped out of school and went to work on the family farm. At about this time, his father bought him a pistol, which Huddie carried in a holster under his coat, and a new horse and saddle. Huddie Ledbetter was soon known as the best guitar picker and songster in his part of Louisiana.
At sixteen he started visiting Fannin Street, the red-light district of nearby Shreveport. Here he heard accomplished blues musicians and learned their style and verses. He recalls these early experiences in his song "Fannin Street. " Bud Coleman and Jim Fagin were two musicians with whom he worked closely. Ledbetter soon moved away from Mooringsport. He worked during summers on farms near New Boston, Texas, in the blackland counties east of Dallas. In the winter he moved to Dallas, where he played his guitar and sang in the red-light district. Here he met the Texas bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson and learned many songs from him. One night at a circus in Dallas Ledbetter heard a musician play a twelve-string guitar; he bought one like it the next morning. He received the nickname "Lead Belly" (or "Leadbelly") because his voice was a powerful bass.
A handsome, strongly built young man, he had early learned that he was attractive to women. In Marshall, Tex. , he attacked a woman who rejected his advances and was sentenced to a year on a chain gang. His father hid him when he escaped three days later. In late 1917 Leadbelly became involved in another fracas over a woman. He was convicted on two counts, murder and assault to murder, on May 24, 1918. Once more he escaped from his cell, but on June 7, 1918, under the alias of Walter Boyd, he entered Shaw State Prison Farm, sentenced to thirty years at hard labor. For the third time he escaped. He was soon recaptured, and in 1920 he was transferred to the Central State Farm near Houston.
He worked on labor gangs for twelve to fourteen hours a day cutting logs and hoeing cotton, and through his strength and endurance he became the lead man on the fastest work gang. Leadbelly was also known for his skill as a musician and was asked to sing when visitors came to the prison. When the governor of Texas, Pat. M. Neff, came to visit, Leadbelly sang a plea for mercy to him: [If I] had you, Governor Neff, like you got me, I'd wake up in de mornin', and I'd set you free. The governor was impressed with the man and his song, and on January 15, 1925, he pardoned Leadbelly, who had then served about six and a half years. After working for a Buick agency in Houston, Leadbelly returned to his home near Mooringsport in 1926. While he worked for the Gulf Refining Company, he continued to develop as a blues singer.
In 1930 he was accosted by a group of men who wanted whiskey. Leadbelly wounded five of them with his knife and was sentenced to ten years at hard labor for assault with intent to murder. On February 28, 1930, he entered Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana and became the lead man on prison gangs, as he had in Texas. He composed another plea for mercy to Gov. O. K. Allen of Louisiana: [If I] had you, Governor O. K. Allen, like you had me, I'd wake up in de mornin', let you out on reprieve. It was recorded (along with a song that was to become even more famous, "Irene, Good Night") by folklorists John and Alan Lomax in 1934. The Lomaxes played the record for the governor in his office and obtained a reprieve for Leadbelly on August 7, 1934.
The next month Leadbelly joined John Lomax in a journey that helped make both men famous. Lomax was recording folk songs in Southern prisons, and Leadbelly accompanied him, telling of his own experiences and singing to encourage the inmates to record for Lomax. Details of these travels are graphically recalled in Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, by John and Alan Lomax. At night, after the day's recording, Leadbelly, who described himself as a "nachel rambler, " would take his guitar and sing in local bars, returning early the next morning to drive Lomax to his next recording location.
Lomax's tapes of Leadbelly's songs were eventually deposited in the Library of Congress. After 6, 000 miles of travel, performances, and recording, they arrived in New York City. Leadbelly described it: "Capital of all de states in de world! Run under a mile of water to git in it! Subways up in de air, on de ground and under de ground through a solid rock!" (Lomax, Negro Folk Songs, p. 17). Leadbelly was given a resounding reception by the New York intellectual and literary scene, who embraced him as the "bad nigger. " The Herald Tribune introduced him as a "powerful knife-toting Negro, a saturnine singer of the swamplands, who has killed one man and seriously wounded another. .. . A large scar which spans his neck from ear to ear bears witness to his dreadful charm and a knife that was fortuitously dull. "
John Lomax promoted Leadbelly's music for white audiences rather than those of his "own color. " Whites who could not understand his words were drawn by the power of his singing. He performed before the Poetry Society of Cambridge and at Harvard, where George Lyman Kittredge said to his former student, "He is a demon, Lomax. " During these performances Leadbelly often introduced "talkin'" before songs and between their verses to explain his music to the audience. Leadbelly found himself surrounded by admiring middle-class whites who often could not appreciate his life style.
The singer soon returned to his old life style, and Lomax commented on his efforts: "I had planned to take a former Negro criminal back to Texas, changed to a good citizen. .. . But it was I who wanted the pretty home for them, not Lead Belly. " On March 26, 1935, Leadbelly went back to Shreveport, Louisiana, with his wife. He later returned to New York and continued his career as a folk singer. Large recording studios refused to issue his music because he wasn't "commercial" enough. The best selection of his music was gathered by Frederick Ramsey, Jr. , who recorded ninety-four of his songs on Folkways Records. Leadbelly visited Hollywood briefly, but he was coolly received and treated as an entertainer at parties given by celebrities. He was jokingly told to come for a screen test at "45 to 9 at Hollywood and Vine, " and he recalled these bitter memories in the song "4, 5, and 9. "
Returning to New York City, Leadbelly did a series of half-hour programs for WNYC radio station. During a visit to Washington, D. C. , he and his wife were refused service by a number of hotels, and he immortalized the city in his "Bourgeois Blues, " concluding: "Tell all the colored folks to listen to me, / Don't try to find a home in Washington, D. C. " He also sang a classic version of a ballad about the Titanic, whose captain, refusing passage to the famous black fighter Jack Johnson, said, "I ain't haulin' no coal. " Leadbelly's repertoire included traditional folk and children's songs, blues, and topical numbers, all of which are an important part of American folklore.
His presence in New York City was a catalyst for writers, folk singers, and leftists who saw him as a symbol of the struggling proletariat. According to one biography of Leadbelly these admirers "considered his life their personal property, to be clutched and guarded like a family heirloom. " Folk singers such as Pete Seeger learned Leadbelly's style and continue to sing his music today. He died of myotrophic lateral sclerosis at Bellevue Hospital in New York.
Achievements
Ledbetter and his music became a symbol of the strength and beauty of black culture which was accessible to whites. He survived gunfights and prison gangs to bring a unique sound to New York and the American public. His complicated boogie-woogie runs on the twelve-string guitar have been imitated but never equaled. His best-known songs include "Boll Weevil, " "Rock Island Line, " "Old Cottonfields at Home, " "Take This Hammer, " "Pick a Bale of Cotton, " and "Midnight Special. "
Lead Belly was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2008.
Quotations:
"In Texas I was a number one roller, jus' flyin' all day long. I can make a ax talk, an' I can handle a hoe jus' like I can handle a guitar. "
"My guitar is half my life and my wife is the other half. "
"I always sings too long and too loud. "
"Look a here people, listen to me, Don't try to find no home in Washington, D. C. Lord, it's a bourgeois town, it's a bourgeois town. "
"The blues is like this. You lay down some night and you turn from one side of the bed to the other all night long. It's not too cold in that bed, and it ain't too hot. But what's the matter The blues has got you. "
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
". .. crouched over his guitar as he played, as his fingers made the incredibly swift, skillful runs; and he sang with an intensity and passion that swayed audiences who could not understand a single word of his songs. " - Lomax.
"Greatest man that ever lived on the twelve-string guitar! Played it so good he broke the stone heart out of a Texas Governor and won himself a pardon out of jail. " -Tennessee Williams.
Connections
His first wife was Lethe Henderson. In February 1935, he married his girlfriend, Martha Promise, who came North from Louisiana to join him.
