page_title: Lead Belly
section_title: Music career
hierarchical_section_title: Lead Belly / Biography / Music career
caption_attribution_description: Gottlieb, William P., 1917-, photographer. [Portrait of Leadbelly, National Press Club, Washington, D.C., between 1938 and 1948] 1 negative&#160;: b&amp;w&#160;; 3 1/4 x 4 1/4 in. Notes: Gottlieb Collection Assignment No. 201 Reference print available in Music Division, Library of Congress. Purchase William P. Gottlieb Forms part of: William P. Gottlieb Collection (Library of Congress). Subjects: Leadbelly, 1885-1949 Guitarists--1930-1950. Singers--1930-1950. National Press Club Format: Portrait photographs--1930-1950. Film negatives--1930-1950. Rights Info: Mr. Gottlieb has dedicated these works to the public domain, but rights of privacy and publicity may apply. lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/gottlieb/gottlieb-copyrig... Repository: (negative) Library of Congress, Prints &amp; Photographs Division, Washington D.C. 20540 USA, hdl.loc.gov/loc.pnp/pp.print (reference print) Library of Congress, Music Division, Washington D.C. 20540 USA, loc.gov/rr/perform/ Part Of: William P. Gottlieb Collection (DLC) 99-401005 General information about the Gottlieb Collection is available at lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/gottlieb/gottlieb-home.html Persistent URL: hdl.loc.gov/loc.music/gottlieb.05571 Call Number: LC-GLB23- 0557 This work is from the William P. Gottlieb collection at the Library of Congress. Rights and restrictions.In accordance with the wishes of William Gottlieb, the photographs in this collection entered into the public domain on February 16, 2010.
context_page_description: Huddie William Ledbetter, better known by the stage name Lead Belly, was an American folk and blues singer, musician and songwriter notable for his strong vocals, virtuosity on the twelve-string guitar, and the folk standards he introduced, including his renditions of "Goodnight, Irene", "Midnight Special", "Cotton Fields", and "Boll Weevil".
  Lead Belly usually played a twelve-string guitar, but he also played the piano, mandolin, harmonica, violin, and windjammer. In some of his recordings, he sang while clapping his hands or stomping his foot.
  Lead Belly's songs covered a wide range of genres and topics including gospel music; blues about women, liquor, prison life, and racism; and folk songs about cowboys, prison, work, sailors, cattle herding, and dancing. He also wrote songs about people in the news, such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Jean Harlow, Jack Johnson, the Scottsboro Boys and Howard Hughes. Lead Belly was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2008.
context_section_description: By 1903, Huddie was already a "musicianer", a singer and guitarist of some note. He performed for nearby Shreveport audiences in St. Paul's Bottoms, a notorious red-light district there. He began to develop his own style of music after exposure to various musical influences on Shreveport's Fannin Street, a row of saloons, brothels, and dance halls in the Bottoms, now referred to as Ledbetter Heights. While in prison, Lead Belly may have first heard the traditional prison song "Midnight Special". He was "discovered" there thirty years later during a visit by folklorists John Lomax and his son Alan Lomax.
  Deeply impressed by Ledbetter's vibrant tenor and extensive repertoire, the Lomaxes recorded him in 1933 on portable aluminum disc recording equipment for the Library of Congress. They returned with new and better equipment in July 1934, recording hundreds of his songs. On August 1, Ledbetter was released after having again served nearly all of his minimum sentence, following a petition the Lomaxes had taken to Louisiana Governor Oscar K. Allen at his urgent request. It was on the other side of a recording of his signature song, "Goodnight Irene".
  A prison official later wrote to John Lomax denying that Ledbetter's singing had anything to do with his release from Angola (state prison records confirm he was eligible for early release due to good behavior). However, both Ledbetter and the Lomaxes believed that the record they had taken to the governor had hastened his release from prison.
  In December 1934, Lead Belly participated in a "smoker" (group sing) at a Modern Language Association meeting at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where the senior Lomax had a prior lecturing engagement. He was written up in the press as a convict who had sung his way out of prison. On New Year's Day, 1935, the pair arrived in New York City, where Lomax was scheduled to meet with his publisher, Macmillan, about a new collection of folk songs. The newspapers were eager to write about the "singing convict," and Time magazine made one of its first March of Time newsreels about him. Lead Belly attained fame – although not fortune.
  The following week, he began recording for the American Record Corporation, but these recordings achieved little commercial success. He recorded over 40 sides for ARC (intended to be released on their Banner, Melotone, Oriole, Perfect, and Romeo labels and their short-lived Paramount series), but only five sides were actually issued. Part of the reason for the poor sales may have been that ARC released only his blues songs rather than the folk songs for which he would later become better known. Lead Belly continued to struggle financially. Like many performers, what income he made during his career would come from touring, not from record sales. In February 1935, he married his girlfriend, Martha Promise, who came North from Louisiana to join him.
  The month of February was spent recording his repertoire and those of other African Americans and interviews about his life with Alan Lomax for their forthcoming book, Negro Folk Songs As Sung by Lead Belly (1936). Concert appearances were slow to materialize. In March 1935, Lead Belly accompanied John Lomax on a previously scheduled two-week lecture tour of colleges and universities in the Northeast, culminating at Harvard.
  At the end of the month, John Lomax decided he could no longer work with Lead Belly and gave him and Martha money to go back to Louisiana by bus. He gave Martha the money her husband had earned during three months of performing, but in installments, on the pretext Lead Belly would spend it all on drinking if given a lump sum. From Louisiana, Lead Belly successfully sued Lomax for both the full amount and release from his management contract. The quarrel was bitter, with hard feelings on both sides. Curiously, in the midst of the legal wrangling, Lead Belly wrote to Lomax proposing they team up again, but it was not to be. Further, the book about Lead Belly published by the Lomaxes in the fall of the following year proved a commercial failure.
  In Januar
caption: Leadbelly at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. between 1938 and 1948
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