Blind Lemon meets Leadbelly.(Blind Lemon Jefferson, Huddie Ledbetter)

Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, was arguably the most famous African-American folk singer in U.S. history. (1) Born in 1889 in Caddo Parish, Louisiana (near Shreveport), Leadbelly grew up in an almost entirely black world at the beginning of the decade when the most virulent Jim Crow laws were passed across the United States. His life and music mediated between Reconstruction and post-industrial America; he grew up on a small farm owned by his sharecropping parents, rode horses, and carried a pistol but ended up living in Greenwich Village at the dawn of the modern Civil Rights movement. He died in 1949, just before Joseph McCarthy's Communist witch-hunts traumatized and bedeviled the United States.

Leadbelly sang spirituals born in the antebellum South, played country dance tunes on the accordion, chanted the work songs that helped pass the time in cotton fields, and learned and contributed to the newly emerging blues tradition. He shared these genres with all of America, and for many white Americans, he was their first direct link with southern rural black musical culture. Leadbelly also shared a number of specific songs, such as "Goodnight, Irene" and "Midnight Special," with many icons of American music, including Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, and Burl Ives. But very early in his career, long before he left the South, Leadbelly met and shared his musical knowledge with Blind Lemon Jefferson.

Becoming a Man

In the years immediately before he met Blind Lemon Jefferson, Huddie Ledbetter picked cotton and undertook arduous farm work in the fields of northwest Louisiana and neighboring Harrison County, Texas. As his musicianship improved, he increasingly found work playing for dances. His self-confidence and brashness grew, and his skills with the guitar could not be matched by many of the local players.

During the first decade of the twentieth century, not only did Ledbetter's musical skills expand but so did his worldview. He survived a life-threatening illness and briefly attended a school operated by Bishop College in nearby Marshall, Texas, before his wanderlust took him further away from home. Perhaps more important, he got married. On July 18, 1908, a marriage license was issued in Kaufman County, some thirty miles east of Dallas and one hundred miles west of Marshall, near the home of one of Ledbetter's uncles. The marriage was between "Juda" Ledbetter (an interesting, Hispanic misinterpretation of Huddie) and Miss Aletta Henderson. Most people remember Aletta's name as Aletha or simply Lethe, but nobody seems to recall how she and Huddie met. It was most likely during his ramblings between Dallas and his Harrison County home.

The 1910 census records show the couple living back in Harrison County with the rest of the Lebetter clan. Huddie is described as a "farmer," while Lethe was counted as a "farm laborer." There were no children yet, but Lethe seemed to be making some progress in stabilizing Huddie's life. This included a brief association with the Baptist church. All of his life, Huddie Ledbetter had watched with a certain detachment as members of his mother's church would "get religion" and "go to shouting." Now he himself got caught up in the excitement, receiving the spirit.

Although the lure of the sukey jumps and dances diminished, it did not go away entirely. Shortly after joining the church, he went down to Leigh, Texas, where he had often played dances. "The people, all of `em merchants, asked me about my guitar, and I wouldn't know what to do about it," he remembered. "They asked me `Say Huddie, where's your guitar?' I say, `I done joined the church now.' ... So I got to thinking about my guitar [and] next Saturday I went out to Leigh, Texas, with me riding horse, had my guitar sitting on my leg, and I went back and started playing the guitar and entertaining and picking up a little change. And so I been entertaining ever since. I didn't go back to church" (Cohn n.d., 13).