June 5, 2010
Hello Louisiana: A Musical Travel Film
Bossler couple's Louisiana film
It is sometimes said that your reflection is best seen though another pair of eyes. When it comes to Louisiana and all it has to offer, that adage proves especially true for Monty and Marsha Brown of Bossier City.
Monty. a native of Doncaster, England, and Marsha, from upstate New York, love Louisiana. They love it so much they've written and produced a film about their adopted state just so others can understand all they have come to appreciate.
"Hello Louisiana" is a travelugue written for the novice as well as perpetual learners, says Marsha Brown. "'It is informative and humorous and fun. You can't help but tap your toes and you can't help but learn about Louisiana."
For these two wandering minstrels. the idea for a film came about while teaching a school music program. "'We got a grant through the state arts program to teach kids about their own music ... and we kind of expanded on that," Marsha Brown says.
It also seems, she says, that many adults living here all their lives knew little about their own state. "The film shows so much more of our state than what everyone knows," she says.
Starting in the northwest parishes, you learn Natchitoches is the oldest European settlement in the Louisiana Purchase. You witness a baptism in the Cane River and discover how bousillage - a mixture of mud and moss - worked quite well as an early form of housing insulation.
In Bienville Parish you join in on an alligator hunt, see the roadway where Bonnie and Clyde met their end and retrace the steps of Louisiana Hayride legends.
Cajun Country introduces you to Floyd Soileau and his Flat Town (Ville Platte) record shop, Fred's in Mamou, where dancing starts early on Saturday mornings and the history of the forced exile of the Acadian people from Nova Scotia.
Industry row is seen as you cross the Mississippi River in Baton Rouge and into the world of Louisiana's famous — and infamous — politics. River Road plantations look out on tall rows of sugar cane and city-sized refineries.
New Orleans brings us back to the familiar pre-Katrina imagery of Mardi Gras. Jackson Square and the French Quarter as seen from a ferry boat while traveling across the river to Algiers Point.
"Within the film there is a lot of well researched information," Marsha Brown says. "Louisiana is a diverse and interesting place and this film serves to show others how special it is, while reminding us just how lucky we are to call Louisiana home. We are quite proud of it."
April 16, 2010
Christmas & New Year
Interview conducted and recorded for the Library of Congress by Alan Lomax: Huddie (Leadbelly) Ledbetter is asked about Christmas traditions down on Caddo Lake in the Texas-Louisiana border area. Many thanks to Claude LeMasson in Northern France for some of the details. It's not all easy to understand, even for a person whose first language is English.
(Q is Lomax, H is Huddie)
Q: Where did you learn to play, Huddie, by listening to other people?
H: By listening to other people, you know, the words, that’s the way you’ve got to learn, if you don’t know.
Q: Do you think, when the sisters get happy in church they’re pretending, or do they really mean it all the time?
H: Well, I’ll tell you, them old Baptist sisters just feel like moving at that time. They feel the spirit.
Q: They’re not just putting on?
H: They ain’t putting on, ‘cause you know, in church when a sister jumps up and shouts, she got to feel the move, ‘cause lots of them ashamed, you see, but them sisters what shouts, they ain’t ashamed ‘cause they figured you’ve got the state of God, you don’t be ashamed nowhere, so they just get up and go to shouting. And my mama, she used to be the shoutingest thing you ever see, and she fixing to feeling good, she shout all the time, that’s all. And I’ll tell you another thing about my mama, she was a real Baptist and I believe it ‘cause every Christmas, I don’t care when a Christmas come, she gonna shout, I don’t care whether she out on the street, I don’t care what she be in somebody’s house she ain’t never saw before, but when Christmas morning come she gonna get up and go around shaking the hands, and “Thank you, thank you, Good Lord and thank you,” and come right home in the bed , she gonna come in there and jump right on my neck and go to patting me, “My son, my son, thank God for to let you see another Christmas, thank God , you don’t know where you’d be the next Christmas, but I thank the Good Lord, for that you seen and smiled for so many Christmases. My son, my child, my son and only one, I thank the Good Lord for smiling. Get up, son, and give the Lord some thanks for letting you see some Christmas.” I say, “Yes, ma’m, mama, I will after a while.” Then I’d get up.
Q: What would you do on Christmas Day, Huddie — at your house?
H: Well, what we’d do at my house, and I’ll tell you about all the Baptist people, they may drink wine at (?) time, but at Christmas, they’re going to have a little jug behind the desk. They call that the “Jimmie John.” They keep it up there all year, but they ain’t gonna bring it until Christmas comes. And when Christmas comes, they’re gonna bring that out, and everybody gonna have a drink. A lot of the neighbors all come around, people living in the woods down there and they right close, and all of them meet at one another’s house and they have a drink, and they have some breakfast there, and eat, see, and when they get onto the table, they always gonna say a blessing, and this is the blessing that my father always say, and I say it at night in my home when I say the blessing:
“Thank us the Good Lord for what we are about to receive, for the mercies, for the body of Christ Our Redeemer’s sake, Amen.”
And then we eat.
Q: Well, after breakfast, what would you do? What would you have for breakfast, when you were a little boy?
H: When I was a little boy my mother had cakes, pies, chickens and turkeys. You see, we raised them there. Pork. And we had sausages, pork sausage, they had some — everything you had on that table, in them times when they’d fix the table, that table — as fast as it get empty, they’d get some more, they’d put on it, it never get empty and it never — clean up the table, they’d keep a white sheet over the table, and that you spread over the food, and when you go there, anybody, you, friends or anybody come there, they ain’t got a thing to do but just turn that curtain back and, that tablecloth back and go right in to eating, and fast as they eat up, my mother’d put some more bags there until Christmas time — it goes on for a week that way. Christmas time takes a whole week, not just a day, but they don’t get out until the week’s out. New Year come.
Q: Well, would you get presents on Christmas?
H: We had a Christmas feast at Elizabeth Church — that’s my mama’s and them’s church, and that’s a Baptist, and every Christmas you see they go — my father used to be one of the men go out and help cut down a cedar tree, that’s what we have, for a Christmas tree, cut down a big cedar tree and set it up in the church and everybody puts presents on there, and they got the names on it, and they have some certain girls, so many girls, so many boys, they call them presents up. And then, when they call, you go up and get your present. That’s the way they done.
Q: What else would you do beside go to church, and have breakfast? Were there any special parties?
H: Well, now, when . . . they always, Christmas Eve, they used to go to church on Christmas Eve night and wait and see Christmas Day come, and then, when the New Years coming, they alway go and sing all night, go to church and stay all night long.
Q: Are there any special songs that they sung while they were waiting for Christmas Eve?
H: They’d always word out a hymn and then when they’d word out a hymn, well then they used to sing the prayer “Being So Glad For What the Lord Had Done,” they’d sing that song about, “Ain’t You Glad the Blood Done Sign My Name?” and then, after they’d sing that, then they’d sing, er, “Give Me That Old Time Religion.” Well, after they sang that, they’d sing, “I’m So Glad I’m In the Army of the Lord.” That means they’re fighting soldiers, which is Baptists, and they’re gonna fight until they die.
Q: There weren’t any songs that mention Christmas? Particularly?
H: [Not understanding the question.] They wouldn’t mention those songs ‘cause they’d just go ahead and sing them when the time comes. They never — they didn’t never did mention just like a program you’re gonna have. They didn’t do that.
Q: No, but there weren’t any songs that they sung just at the time Christmas was coming in, were there?
H: That they sang right at the time Christmas was coming in?
Q: Right at the midnight hour.
H: Well, when Christmas coming in, they always sing — lemme see, I used to know the song that they sing, too, when Christmas was coming in — er, um, — Christ Our Redeemer — I forget it now, yeah, I forget it, but they did have a song they sung right at the hour when Christmas, New Years done coming, they singing, they had a song they sung right then.
Q: Did they have “Old” Christmas where you were growing up, too?
H: Old Christmas?
Q: Yes. The 12th of January.
H: I don’t know about that. They had New Years Day, but the only Christmas I ever know was on the 25th day of December.
Q: Well, did they believe stuff about what the cows did?
H: Believe something the cows did when?
Q: On Christmas. Facing to the East.
H: Well, I used to hear that, too. I used to hear that too.
Q: What did they say about it?
H: I forget what they said. I don’t remember now, I used to hear something they say about the cows, they turned their faces to the East. But I didn’t know nothing about it.
Q: Well, would they have Sukey Jumps at Christmas week?
H: Oh, man! they’d have, that’s what they’d do, they’d have a “tracted” (?) dance — that mean a dance every night until New Year come, from Christmas they’d come on up until New Year — ‘cause I used to go there and play for them. Yes sir, they had “tracted” dance and that’s out in Terrell, Texas, down there in Kaufman County.
Q: Dance all night and all day, too?
H: Well, they wouldn’t dance all day, they’d be round there, you know, everybody’d be drinking and having a big time, and so, but they’d be that night — all night, never stop, all night long.
Q: When to when?
H: From ken to ken (?) and that means from when the sun rises, I mean, from the sun go down ‘til the sun rise. And then they’d dance the whole week — and that’s called “tract” . . . .
(Q is Lomax, H is Huddie)
 |
| Alan Lomax |
Q: Where did you learn to play, Huddie, by listening to other people?
H: By listening to other people, you know, the words, that’s the way you’ve got to learn, if you don’t know.
Q: Do you think, when the sisters get happy in church they’re pretending, or do they really mean it all the time?
H: Well, I’ll tell you, them old Baptist sisters just feel like moving at that time. They feel the spirit.
Q: They’re not just putting on?
H: They ain’t putting on, ‘cause you know, in church when a sister jumps up and shouts, she got to feel the move, ‘cause lots of them ashamed, you see, but them sisters what shouts, they ain’t ashamed ‘cause they figured you’ve got the state of God, you don’t be ashamed nowhere, so they just get up and go to shouting. And my mama, she used to be the shoutingest thing you ever see, and she fixing to feeling good, she shout all the time, that’s all. And I’ll tell you another thing about my mama, she was a real Baptist and I believe it ‘cause every Christmas, I don’t care when a Christmas come, she gonna shout, I don’t care whether she out on the street, I don’t care what she be in somebody’s house she ain’t never saw before, but when Christmas morning come she gonna get up and go around shaking the hands, and “Thank you, thank you, Good Lord and thank you,” and come right home in the bed , she gonna come in there and jump right on my neck and go to patting me, “My son, my son, thank God for to let you see another Christmas, thank God , you don’t know where you’d be the next Christmas, but I thank the Good Lord, for that you seen and smiled for so many Christmases. My son, my child, my son and only one, I thank the Good Lord for smiling. Get up, son, and give the Lord some thanks for letting you see some Christmas.” I say, “Yes, ma’m, mama, I will after a while.” Then I’d get up.
Q: What would you do on Christmas Day, Huddie — at your house?
H: Well, what we’d do at my house, and I’ll tell you about all the Baptist people, they may drink wine at (?) time, but at Christmas, they’re going to have a little jug behind the desk. They call that the “Jimmie John.” They keep it up there all year, but they ain’t gonna bring it until Christmas comes. And when Christmas comes, they’re gonna bring that out, and everybody gonna have a drink. A lot of the neighbors all come around, people living in the woods down there and they right close, and all of them meet at one another’s house and they have a drink, and they have some breakfast there, and eat, see, and when they get onto the table, they always gonna say a blessing, and this is the blessing that my father always say, and I say it at night in my home when I say the blessing:
“Thank us the Good Lord for what we are about to receive, for the mercies, for the body of Christ Our Redeemer’s sake, Amen.”
And then we eat.
Q: Well, after breakfast, what would you do? What would you have for breakfast, when you were a little boy?
H: When I was a little boy my mother had cakes, pies, chickens and turkeys. You see, we raised them there. Pork. And we had sausages, pork sausage, they had some — everything you had on that table, in them times when they’d fix the table, that table — as fast as it get empty, they’d get some more, they’d put on it, it never get empty and it never — clean up the table, they’d keep a white sheet over the table, and that you spread over the food, and when you go there, anybody, you, friends or anybody come there, they ain’t got a thing to do but just turn that curtain back and, that tablecloth back and go right in to eating, and fast as they eat up, my mother’d put some more bags there until Christmas time — it goes on for a week that way. Christmas time takes a whole week, not just a day, but they don’t get out until the week’s out. New Year come.
Q: Well, would you get presents on Christmas?
H: We had a Christmas feast at Elizabeth Church — that’s my mama’s and them’s church, and that’s a Baptist, and every Christmas you see they go — my father used to be one of the men go out and help cut down a cedar tree, that’s what we have, for a Christmas tree, cut down a big cedar tree and set it up in the church and everybody puts presents on there, and they got the names on it, and they have some certain girls, so many girls, so many boys, they call them presents up. And then, when they call, you go up and get your present. That’s the way they done.
Q: What else would you do beside go to church, and have breakfast? Were there any special parties?
H: Well, now, when . . . they always, Christmas Eve, they used to go to church on Christmas Eve night and wait and see Christmas Day come, and then, when the New Years coming, they alway go and sing all night, go to church and stay all night long.
Q: Are there any special songs that they sung while they were waiting for Christmas Eve?
H: They’d always word out a hymn and then when they’d word out a hymn, well then they used to sing the prayer “Being So Glad For What the Lord Had Done,” they’d sing that song about, “Ain’t You Glad the Blood Done Sign My Name?” and then, after they’d sing that, then they’d sing, er, “Give Me That Old Time Religion.” Well, after they sang that, they’d sing, “I’m So Glad I’m In the Army of the Lord.” That means they’re fighting soldiers, which is Baptists, and they’re gonna fight until they die.
Q: There weren’t any songs that mention Christmas? Particularly?
H: [Not understanding the question.] They wouldn’t mention those songs ‘cause they’d just go ahead and sing them when the time comes. They never — they didn’t never did mention just like a program you’re gonna have. They didn’t do that.
Q: No, but there weren’t any songs that they sung just at the time Christmas was coming in, were there?
H: That they sang right at the time Christmas was coming in?
Q: Right at the midnight hour.
H: Well, when Christmas coming in, they always sing — lemme see, I used to know the song that they sing, too, when Christmas was coming in — er, um, — Christ Our Redeemer — I forget it now, yeah, I forget it, but they did have a song they sung right at the hour when Christmas, New Years done coming, they singing, they had a song they sung right then.
Q: Did they have “Old” Christmas where you were growing up, too?
H: Old Christmas?
Q: Yes. The 12th of January.
H: I don’t know about that. They had New Years Day, but the only Christmas I ever know was on the 25th day of December.
H: Believe something the cows did when?
Q: On Christmas. Facing to the East.
H: Well, I used to hear that, too. I used to hear that too.
Q: What did they say about it?
H: I forget what they said. I don’t remember now, I used to hear something they say about the cows, they turned their faces to the East. But I didn’t know nothing about it.
Q: Well, would they have Sukey Jumps at Christmas week?
H: Oh, man! they’d have, that’s what they’d do, they’d have a “tracted” (?) dance — that mean a dance every night until New Year come, from Christmas they’d come on up until New Year — ‘cause I used to go there and play for them. Yes sir, they had “tracted” dance and that’s out in Terrell, Texas, down there in Kaufman County.
Q: Dance all night and all day, too?
H: Well, they wouldn’t dance all day, they’d be round there, you know, everybody’d be drinking and having a big time, and so, but they’d be that night — all night, never stop, all night long.
Q: When to when?
H: From ken to ken (?) and that means from when the sun rises, I mean, from the sun go down ‘til the sun rise. And then they’d dance the whole week — and that’s called “tract” . . . .
January 30, 2009
Chapter 10: California, 1944-1946
"We're in the same boat, brother."
OSCAR BRAND: "In [December] 1945, just when the WNYC show [FolkSong Festival] was inaugurated, Margot Mayo, whose American Square Dance Group was also promulgating the dance-song gospel, decided to have a "home-from-the-war" party. Leadbelly, Seeger, [Richard] Dyer-Bennett, [John-Jacob] Niles, Guthrie, and many others performed. After the program, Pete Seeger came over to see me and asked if I would help him start a folk song magazine. We made immediate plans for a mimeographed publication, using the paraphernalia I had bought in Army days when I was editing a newspaper for psychiatric patients."
Oscar Brand was a Canadian folk singer and storyteller who emceed the Folk Song Festival on WNYC (New York) radio from 1945 until he died in 2016 at 95 years of age. However, and this is the danger of memory, he was wrong about Leadbelly being at the "home-from-the-war party." Huddie was in California.
During much of the war Huddie was busy in New York but he wasn't making much money. He was often employed as a janitor, while Martha worked as a hotel maid. The Upper East Siders who appreciated his playing for their children didn't provide him a living. Moses Asch never did make much money on his record company; his mission was to keep his immense catalog of obscure recordings in print. Huddie's jam sessions with his friends were fun and fulfilling, but not financially rewarding. The municipal radio station WNYC didn't pay performers, and the Village Vanguard was a prestigious gig; but also, low paid. It was no surprise that Huddie decided, in 1944, to try his luck in Hollywood.
Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, the NYU professor, hosted a farewell party for Huddie on May 5th, 1944; he didn't leave New York right away. During the month of June one report puts him playing a high school prom at the fashionable Essex House on Central Park South.
At some point, though, he boarded a train for the Coast; he wrote home from L.A., and in July he had a gig. According to the People's World, "he is in Hollywood, where, appropriately enough, he will spend the summer working in films and singing at People's World parties. . . ." On July 8th, Huddie appeared at a Peoples' World concert at Hollywood's Masonic Temple.
He was to remain in California for a year and a half. By October, '44, he was cutting sides for Capitol records, a small label at the time which soon became an industry giant. Capitol grew by recording artists like Nat "King" Cole who had tremendous commercial success; Ledbetter was not a money-maker, but his Capitol recordings are still available. He did "Irene," "The Rock Island Line," and six other songs, accompanied by a zither player, Paul Mason Howard. Oddly enough, Howard, a white, country-style player, came from Arkansas via Shreveport, but whether this had anything to do with his inclusion in the session is not known.
In a separate recording session for Capitol, Huddie did a couple of piano tunes which reflected his early Fannin Street influences.
Dave Dexter, Capitol Records
“When the legendary Huddie (Leadbelly) Ledbetter arrived in Los Angeles under the auspices of a communist-front organization in 1944 — an arrangement about which I remained ignorant until the war's end — it was my pleasure to record a dozen Leadbelly sides. He sang and played his battered 12-string guitar, then demanded that Paul Mason Howard, who accompanied him to the studio, be allowed to accompany him on the zither. I didn't care to argue with Leadbelly. He had been pardoned from the Louisiana state prison after killing a man. Leadbelly also made a couple of rocky, ragtimey piano solos on the session. Capitol still sells his classic performances in the seventies, remastered and packaged for microgroove turntables.” —
record producer Dave Dexter, Jr. in his autobiography, “Playback,” which was published in 1976. He was seeking to distance himself from any possible political 'taint' with his remark about People's World. He needn't have worried; the Capitol sessions were remastered yet again for Compact Disc in the 1990's, and they continue to sell.
Jessica Mitford, "A Fine Old Conflict."
While he was in Hollywood, Huddie was feted by a left-wing community of writers and directors; he was a star attraction amongst the stars at many parties, but he never managed to break into movies. By mid-February, 1945, Huddie had gone north to the Bay Area, where he performed on a Standard School Broadcast. A recording of part of this broadcast was later released on Moses Asch's Folkways records as "Negro Folk Songs for Young People"
One of Huddie's "left-wing writer" associates was Jessica Mitford, ("The American Way of Death.") of England's famous Mitford sisters. This was not a glamorous Hollywood connection, however. Ms. Mitford lived in San Francisco, later Oakland, and was very much involved politically as a civil rights activist. She came from an unorthodox family, given to extremism. Her father she described as "one of nature's fascists." Her sisters included Nancy Mitford, the novelist who was closest to the political center; another sister, Diana, married the leader of Britain's fascist movement, Sir Oswald Mosley; a third was actually associated with Hitler's inner circle in Germany, while another was confined to a mental institution. Jessica, however, became a communist during the Spanish Civil War. She migrated to the United States and, after her first husband was killed in the War (1941), wed Harvard-educated Bob Truehaft, a lawyer who specialized in defending left-wing unions and cases of Civil Rights abuse.
In her autobiography, “A Fine Old Conflict,” Jessica Mitford writes of the amusing problems often related to the visits of her upwardly mobile mother-in-law Aranka, a milliner from New York:
Somehow the timing of Aranka's visits seemed always to be unfortunate. Once she arrived when Leadbelly, the great blues singer, had come to stay for a fortnight. ‘But, Aranka, we've only got one spare bedroom. I do hope you won't mind sharing?’ Aranka, not amused, elected to sleep on the living room couch.
Leadbelly was already a legend. He had sung his way out of a Louisiana prison, where he was serving a life sentence for murder, by addressing musical pleas for clemency to the governor, whom he charmed into granting a pardon. His real name was Huddie Ledbetter: he had adopted Leadbelly as his ‘nom de theatre’ in nostalgic recollection of the numerous gunfights of his youth.
He was very large and very black. He would come down to breakfast wearing a long stark-white nightshirt, from which protruded his sable limbs and head; the visual effect was spectacular. Soon the house would ring with his wonderful music, daily concerts for the children, for whom he improvised special songs.
He and Aranka were ill-assorted houseguests; they would circle one another warily, with little to say. "Oh, Decca" — Aranka sighed wistfully — "I wish I was black like Leadbelly. Then you would love me."
Ross Russell, Tempo Music Shop.
Back in Southern California, where he stayed at the home of his cousin George Pugh, he met a music shop owner named Ross Russell. The meeting took place at the home of a Hollywood writer and after that, Huddie took to dropping in at Russell's Tempo Music Shop. Russell entertained the idea of putting together a biography, but before he could get very far with the project, Huddie had returned to the East.
One night, Russell accompanied Ledbetter and some others on a pub crawl in the black section of Los Angeles, and thus discovered how easy it was for the singer to get into trouble. After a few drinks, Ledbetter produced his guitar and virtually took over a tavern with his entertaining. Two young women "almost forty years his junior" took a shine to Huddie, much to the annoyance of their escorts, and it was only with some difficulty that the group managed to pry him loose from the place unscathed.
Paramount Pictures had optioned John Lomax's book, “Adventures of a Ballad Hunter,” and there was some talk of including Huddie in the film version. He did have some film footage taken, but it was not what he'd hoped for. He was filmed singing three songs without sound. Pete Seeger later dubbed in the sound of Huddie's voice, thus creating the only extant visual record of Huddie singing, now available on You Tube.
Huddie was rebuffed by some film studio executive, and later wrote about it in a song, "4, 5, and 9." While he was at a party, Huddie met a movie producer and asked about getting a screen test. "Sure," laughed the exec, "call me up tomorrow at 45 to 9." This was apparently an inside joke which translated as a brush-off, and for Huddie, a humiliation:
What I'm gonna do for you now —
I called my baby between 4, 5 and 9
And meet my baby on Hollywood and Vine.
Ever been to California? In Hollywood, you know, that's the way it is.
I called this morning between 4, 5 and 9
I want you to meet me on Hollywood and Vine.
If you get down there before I do
You can tell your friends that I'm coming, too.
I'm gonna sing this verse, ain't a-gonna sing no more
Next time I sing, I'm gonna be in Chicago.
Back to New York.
Just after he was discharged from the army, folksinger Oscar Brand, weighing his career possibilities, decided that most of all he'd like to write for radio or stage. He approached several New York radio stations about doing a program of Christmas music which would be unlike the standard popular fare. He received responses from WEAF, WNEW, and from Herman Neumann at WNYC. Neumann was responsible for programming music which was alternative to the vaudeville and big band sounds on the commercial stations; he also programmed folk music and jazz.
Oscar Brand:
So he called on me, he said, "I'm very much interested, do you want to do a program?" December the 10th, just before Christmas. I said, "Sure." I came on and did the program and as I was finished doing a bunch of songs and talking about them and their meanings for a half an hour, he said, "What are you doing next week?" I said, "Well, what would you like?" He said, "Well, come back, try another one."
I came back next week which put me right in front of Christmas and did another Christmas program about the kind of songs we do and how they were made up songs for people who couldn't read, and what they got out of the Bible. I did some gospel songs, old Appalachain songs, Canadian songs, and when I finished I walked by the office and waved at Herman Neumann, waved expectantly and hopefully, and he said, "Listen, if you're not doing anything next week, come on back," and that's the way I've been working for WNYC now since 1945.
[1992 Interview. In 2016, Oscar Brand's program, "Folk Song Festival," was finally off the air. According to the Guinness Book of Records it is the all-time longest-running radio program with the same host. In the mid-90's it received a Peabody Award.]
Later, Brand was asked to coordinate folk music programs for WNYC radio. He found Huddie already broadcasting for the station and since he was an old friend, "coordinating" consisted mainly of walking down the hall on the twenty-fifth floor of the Municipal Building, which housed the WNYC studios, and waving to Huddie during his broadcasts on "Folk Song Festival." He also did a half-hour program called "The Brandwagon" for which he wrote scripts and got together actors. During the week he sometimes traveled to Johnson City, N.Y., or Detroit, Michigan, to sing for striking workers under the banner of Peoples Songs.
Me: Was it the People's Songs organization that brought these people (the folksingers) together?
I didn't know he was a member of the Party until I read the book about him recently, where they interviewed me, and I said, "No, no, Pete wasn't, couldn't have been a member of the Party," and they said, "He says he was." [laughs]
Even when he was with the army in the Far East, [Stuff from Tillman Franks re Pete Seeger to go here,] Pete Seeger was dreaming of energizing the world with music. He and Lee Hays, the Alamanac's bass voice, stayed in touch with one another throughout Pete's army days, discussing their postwar plans for a nationwide organization for singers and songwriters. They wanted to use songs to change the world: songs about "truth, justice and freedom," to hammer out a better world. At the end of 1945 twenty-five singer-songwriters gathered at Toshi Seeger's parents' place on Macdougal Street in the Village. It was the 30th of December.
"Went down to a meeting of a new union of progressive songwriters that call themselves "Peoples Songs," found Pete Seeger and his banjo, the president and Lee Hays (Arkansaw Hard Luck Lee), the vice president. I found Betty Sanders, Leadbelly, (Leadbelly was in California – San Francisco, San Diego & L.A. – until 1946. Oscar was mistaken about that.) Bernie Asbel, Alan Lomax, Bess Lomax, Tom Glazer, Charlotte Anthony, Lou Kleinman, Mildred Linsley, and Shaemas O'Sheel, Bob Russell, there, almost every songwriter pitching in their efforts to make out of all of their little works one big union called 'Peoples Songs.'"
"The reason for Peoples Songs is to shoot your union the kind of a song or songs when you want it and fast. To help you make a songbook, a program,a throwaway songsheet, a whole evening. Or maybe your problem is just about how to make a song and get it copyrighted, printed, circulated around, how to set a fee, and what to do with your works after you create them. I am one of fifteen now on the Executive Committee of Peoples Songs, 130 West 42nd Street, New York City, New York." (Woody Guthrie)
The first issue of the Peoples Songs “Bulletin” was printed on Oscar Brand's mimeograph machine. The call went out for people to submit songs about the working man, repressed minorities and about peace. The war against fascism was over; now was the time to build the brotherhood of man. Idealism was at an all-time high and the “Bulletin” was successful in rousing the interest of a nationwide community of songwriters committed to changing the world through song. The second issue was printed with an offset machine, Bernie Asbell was hired as editor, and Bernie's wife, Millie, became manager of the small, crowded offices on 42nd Street. The Peoples Songs offices became a hub of activity, sending out missionaries to sing for union meetings and picket lines.
Oscar Brand recalls being an activist in the days when union people were being beaten over the head by the American Legion, the Knights of Columbus, the police, the National Guard, “and by anybody else who just wanted to beat somebody up, when unions were considered communist organizations, we were out on picket lines. I or Pete, or Cisco Houston, or Woody, or whoever was around, they'd get a phone call, I'd get a phone call, saying, ‘We're having a strike up here, this city or this town.’ And I would figure out, if I take the train it'll take me so long and coming back it'll take me so long, I can just about make it, and away we'd go and do a program. [The union]'d usually pay for the train and sometimes five or ten dollars besides.
I did programs for the Spanish Refugee Appeal, for Russian War Relief, for the American Labor Party; the left wing organizations were extremely eager to have folk music. I made up songs. I remember Elliott Roosevelt was going up to Johnson City, New York, which along with Endicott and Binghampton was owned by Johnson and Johnson at the time, and he said, ‘Would you come up with me. I can speak,’ and he was a lousy speaker but he was the former president's son. We got on the train and we got up there and I'd written a few songs. One of them was to an old tune called "The Johnson Boys:"
The Johnson Boys, they own Tri-City,
They bought it when it first began,
They're so rich it's sure a pity,
They still can't buy a union man.
They can't buy a union man,
They can't buy a union man.
Which made a tremendous hit. And that's the kind of thing we were doing.
Not only old songs: when the Farmers' Union was meeting in New York, I
remember I was working the farms then, I would go up there and sing,
When the banker hangs around
And the butcher cuts the pound,
The farmer is the man who feeds them all.
Oh, the farmer is the man,
The farmer is the man,
He lives on credit til the fall
And they take him by the hand
And they lead him by the hand,
And the mortgage man's the man who gets it all.
Which Coast? Leadbelly cabled Martha from Los Angeles on Feb. 8th, 1946, that he was heading for New York.
Those were good times, [1946] the busy days at People's Songs sometimes running into song-filled nights at the Lower East Side apartment of Martha and Huddie Ledbetter, the black ex-convict folksinger known as Leadbelly, a man all of them Pete, Lee, Woody, Cisco Houston, Alan Lomax, and every folk singer and folk song maven worshiped and learned from.
Lee wished Leadbelly could break the habit of calling them "Mr.Pete" and "Mr.Alan" and "Mr. Lee," but Leadbelly couldn't, or wouldn't. On the other hand, Lee chuckled over the irony (which he pointed out to Pete) that Leadbelly dressed in a dignified shirt-and-tie fashion while Pete, the New England aristocrat, turned up everywhere in farmer's overalls. Pete didn't see the humor at all.
Sometimes Leadbelly would stake Lee to a bottle of bourbon when Lee's always minimal money ran out. Lee swore he sang louder and better with booze lining his vocal chords. Woody and Cisco kept right up with Lee. The nights began to last until the mornings. Pete, never deflected from his work by old-boy carousing, cast a cold eye on theproceedings. Hadn't Lee learned that Pete's patience could give out?
But when Lee stood up and led a hootenanny, Pete had to love him. What could be more effective than this big southern preacher-type calling out, in his marvelous deep bass voice, stingingly funny lines about antediluvian southern congressmen? When you lived in New York City, you couldn't be sure how far protest went in the country. Lee and Woody most especially could make you believe that "the folk" could be pretty durned radical. (Willens 88)
On the liner notes for Cisco [Houston]'s first album, after Cisco's big breakthrough at Gerde's Folk City, Lee wrote, "Cisco fits the scholar's definition of the wandering folk singer as well as anyone except Woody Guthrie, who was a sidekick of Cisco's for a long time. They travelled and sang together, and they both had close personal ties with Martha and Huddie Ledbetter, whose home was, at time, the only one they had. . . ." (Willens 207)
According to banjo-guitarist and New Orleans jazz historian Danny Barker, on 6 January,1946, Huddie recorded an untitled blues with Bunk Johnson and several other players at the Stuyvesant Casino. The Bunk Johnson band recordings were for V-Disc, a U.S. Government-financed project whereby armed forces overseas were provided with free recordings of all types of music. There were several other musicians, including Danny Barker, who recorded that day with Bunk. Bunk's band finished its first gig at the Casino on 12 January.
Danny Barker, Oscar Brand and Woody Guthrie, it must be noted, all placed Huddie in New York around the Christmas holiday season, 1945-46: Barker at the Casino; Brand at WNYC and the "Home-from-the-War" party; and Guthrie at the formative meeting of People's Songs. Huddie was clearly photographed with Bunk Johnson at the Stuyvesant Casino, but that could have been in the Spring of 1946 when Bunk's band returned. It is likely that Barker, Brand and Guthrie were confused about the dates.
On 24th, January, 1946, Leadbelly appeared with the Kid Ory Band on Orson Welles' Standard Oil Broadcast from Los Angeles; on 30 January, he gave an 8 p.m. concert at the YWCA Auditorium, 6th and Pacific in Los Angeles. Ross Russell places his regularly at his Tempo Music Shop on Hollywood Boulevard, and then, on 8 February, he cabled from the Coast: he was about to leave for home. In March he appeared at People's Songs' first public concert at Elizabeth Irwin High School, New York City. Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and Woody Guthrie were also on the program. From that time on, though he traveled out of town several times, and one time went to France, Huddie based himself in New York.
Late in the afternoon of 27 April, 1946, a Saturday, Huddie gave a recital at Town Hall in New York City. He was accompanied by Sonny Terry, the harmonica player, and the event was written up in the New York Times. The closing number was an audience singalong, "We're in the Same Boat, Brother."
“The songs were heard without sophistication, with no other art than that with which the singer was born and without the benefit of a beautiful voice like Paul Robeson's or Marian Anderson's. The listener heard, instead, precisely what is to be heard today in the hills of the Carolinas, the swamp lands of Mississippi and Louisiana, the small-town theatres and "hot spots" throughout the South. This is the music of the soil, direct from its source, and as Leadbelly sings it, it is filled with an emotion all its own, and is the outpouring of an art that is the simple and genuine expression of that emotion.” ("Huddie Leadbetter Heard")
On Thursday, May 9th, People's Songs, Inc. put on a "Union Hootenanny" at Town Hall. The show featured Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Huddie missed this hoot, but he performed at the Strathmore Folk Festival the following day. At the second seasonal Hoot, the following Thursday, the 16th, Huddie was also absent. [Was he out of town?]
The previous September (1945), a month after the end of the war with Japan, while Huddie was on the West Coast, an extraordinary old time jazz revival had begun to take place in New York City. William Russell was a jazz historian who loved the original New Orleans sound; he had been to the Crescent City during the war years, and there discovered that trumpeter Bunk Johnson, a kind of missing link between the unrecorded Buddy Bolden, and the meteoric Louis Armstrong, was still alive. Bunk played in the sporting houses on Basin Street, in the saloons above Canal Street, and in the bandwagons that rode around town with the slidehorns hanging out over the tailgate. He went barnstorming for as little as $5 a week and tips. Twelve years ago Bunk lost his teeth and gave up playing. A Pittsburgh jazz fan [Russell] found him, a toothless stooped laborer in the rice fields of New Iberia, La., got him some false teeth and raised money for a horn.
Said the New York Herald Tribune highbrow critic Virgil Thomson: "[Bunk] is the greatest master of blues or off-pitch notes. . . an artist of delicate imagination." ("Jazz?")
Russell got Bunk together with a group of traditional jazzmen, most of whom were holding down day jobs of one sort or another, and painstakingly recorded several tunes. The recordings turned out well, and back in New York, Russell was able to pass on his enthusiasm to a circle of friends. They decided to bring the Bunk Johnson band to New York, to show off real New Orleans jazz. The other members of the band were George Lewis, clarinet; Jim Robinson, trombone; Slow Drag Pavageau, bass; Lawrence Marrero, banjo; Alton Purnell, piano; and Baby Dodds on the drums.
Dodds, who was the brother of famed clarinetist Johnny Dodds, had the most impressive credits up to that time. He had gone to Chicago in the 1920's and played with King Oliver and Louis Armstrong; later he backed up Jelly Roll Morton, and made records with most of the famous New Orleans musicians during the Jazz Age. Though they were relatively unknown at the time, the rest of the band members were some of New Orleans finest who went on to establish fine reputations during the traditional jazz revival which started on that autumn evening — in New York — and continued well into the 1950's.
Four hundred people turned out for the opening night at the Stuyvesant Casino, a large ballroom on Second Avenue near East 9th Street, which had mostly been used for ethnic wedding receptions until that night. The Casino was close to where Huddie lived on East 10th Street, an easy walk, and he hung out at the Casino a lot during the band's second booking between April and May. He sat in with the band on several occasions. Included in the crowd on opening night, and probably on many subsequent nights as well, were names connected to Huddie Ledbetter — Fred Ramsey, Charles Edward Smith, Moses Asch. The night was, by all reports, a great success.
The Casino is decorous — the audience is mostly well-behaved youngsters — and simple, in ornamentation as well as in operation. You pay a dollar at the door, go upstairs, sit at whatever table or bench is vacant, and listen. If music is not sufficient food, there are beer and sandwiches, which you fetch yourself from the bar or buy from the Casino's only waiter, the politest and most thoughtful man of his breed I have encountered in some time.
There are, in fact, only two real drawbacks to the whole thing. The piano on the stand is in such a state of decay that Carmen Cavellero shouldn't even have to play "Til the End of Time" on it, and on some nights there is a gathering of intelligentsia that is so intense and audible about this careful reconstruction of another way of life that it is a considerable handicap to those who would rather just sit and listen to the music. (The New Yorker, 20 Oct 45)
Ralph J. Gleason was a writer on the New York scene in the 1940's. A couple of decades later he established a reputation with the national magazine, Rolling Stone, and various other prestigious musical journals. He was introduced to Ledbetter one night at the Stuyvesant Casino, and had this to say of the meeting:
Bunk and New Orleans jazz were intellectually chic that winter and their nightly sessions at the ancient East Side Hall, once the scene of a famous gangland shooting in the early days of New York Mafia wars, were an essential part of everyone's tour of New York. All the musicians and artists and writers from James Jones to Leadbelly stopped there.
Leadbelly sang a couple of numbers with the band. Art Hodes was on the piano that night and it was impossible for a piano to accompany Leadbelly because he didn't sing standard 12-bar blues, in fact, his blues varied from night to night in bar structure as his whim dictated. But most of the time he stayed at the bar.
The Stuyvesant Casino at that time was an incredible place. Admission was low and it was packed with Greenwich Village types, the kind that were then called Bohemians and later evolved into the Beatniks and, still later, their descendants became hippies. Beer was cheap; there was only one waiter and you could stall there all night without spending any money past the admission charge.
The bar was always packed and Leadbelly was pressed up against it, surrounded by a coterie of fans. He was not a tall man at all, but he was broad and chunky and gave the impression of terrific strength. He didn't smile much and implicit in standing next to him was the fact that you were standing next to a convicted murderer. It gave the crowd an added edge of excitement, like standing next to Little Augie Pisano or Tony Bender.
I was introduced to him by a friend from the Coast, and then he went on with his conversation. Suddenly, Leadbelly said, very loud and clear, "Don't fool with me, boy; I don't play." Everybody stopped talking. The silence was achingly oppressive. People slowly began backing away. Suddenly he was no longer that fascinating blues and folk singer with a prison record, but a murderer. He'd killed and he might kill again. And when he said "I don't play," you believed him. Somebody stuttered an apology and everything quieted down. But they all — myself included — looked at him differently from then on. (Gleason)
On Wednesday, September 4th, 1946, Huddie attended a benefit for the National Negro Congress in New York City. He is pictured in a Daily World photo with his guitar strapped on, posing with Sonny Terry, Cisco Houston, and the activist-singer-actor, Paul Robeson. Robeson has been described by his grand-daughter as a renaissance man. He is the only black face in his graduating class from Harvard Law School in 1923; he was an outstanding athlete in high school and college — he played football at Princeton and was good enough to play professionally when he needed the money; without any particular training, he became a concert artist and a stage and screen actor. His most outstanding roles were in Eugene O'Neill's "Emperor Jones" and "All God's Chillun Got Wings," as well as a Broadway "Othello" with Uta Hagen and Jose Ferrer during the war. He was a linguist, an historian, and an outspoken champion of the rights of African Americans. For this he was labelled a communist; Ledbetter, had he lived a little longer, may have had his moment in front of an Un-American Activities Committee, too, but he was nothing like as outstanding a target as Robeson.
Thursdays that September, at 6 p.m., Huddie was once more singing his songs during a fifteen-minute program on WNYC. On September 29th, a Saturday night, he was concertizing at New York's Town Hall, playing 12-string guitar, accordion, and piano on a variety of folksongs, blues, spirituals and work-songs. He was also aided in the concert by Edith Allaire, "American ballad singer"; Sonny Terry; Cisco Houston, who sang some cowboy songs; guitarist Brownie McGhee who played along on "Irene, Goodnight;" Sue Remos, a dancer from the West Coast; and jazz bassman "Pops" Foster.
LEAD BELLY OFFERS FOLK-MUSIC OF THE SOUTH
Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter), old-time American
folk-singer from the deep South appearing with six guest
artists, gave a concert of folk music last night at Town
Hall. To use Lead Belly's own phrase — he talks only in
verse — it was "fine as wine" throughout and gave a fairly
comprehensive picture of the genre.
Playing his own accompaniments on various
instruments, including the twelve-string guitar, the
accordion and the piano, Lead Belly sang spirituals,
reels, blues and work-songs from the levees, the railroads
and the fields.
The authenticity of his renderings gives the songs he
sings their interest, both historical and musical. (Lead Belly Offers)
In his 1971 autobiography, "Pops" Foster was clear about his dislike for Huddie, even if he got some of the facts wrong. Foster was a bassist from New Orleans who played at the Town Hall concert and with many of the early stars of jazz.
"Leadbelly's wife's name was Irene (sic) and the tune of his 'Irene' got to be a big hit. As soon as it did he died. Leadbelly was a mean and evil guy. He was in the penitentiary three times for killing guys and every time he played his way out." (Foster 153)
"Pops" found Huddie difficult, but not impossible, to accompany. He said that he and pianist Willie "The Lion" Smith were the only two people who could play with him. According to Foster, Ledbetter, and other blues singers like Josh White, had no musical training and therefore had no idea which key they were playing in. And, because they generally played solo, they were incapable of keeping time.
"When Willie and I would play with them kinda guys, he'd come around to say, 'We got a hard date today, Pops. A lot of those guys can't even tune their instruments.' "
He was talking about a different musical genre, of course. Clearly Ledbetter was capable of playing with other musicians; he did it regularly at hoots and get-togethers with the folk song crowd. But jazz was a different thing. Many of the jazz players came out of a brass band tradition in which an ability to read music was taken for granted. Many of the jazz groups depended on strict arrangements where the musicians were taken on as "sidemen" to play a particular part, whereas the folk musicians were, to varying degrees, anarchic. Ledbetter had been brought up playing for dances, but he hadn't done that much since he left his audience in Louisiana and Texas, so his rhythms may have become variable. In fact, playing for dances as a single, his rhythms were probably always variable. Like many successful dance bands — Bob Wills' Texas Playboys for instance — he had a tendency to speed up his tempos for the sake of exciting the dancers.
In his critique of Ledbetter's music, Pops Foster didn't take all that into account. Somehow, his dislike for the music was mixed up with his dislike for the man. He was at Ledbetter's apartment one day, talking to one of Moses Asch's partners about making some records, when there was a scuffle between two men outside on the landing. One man, whom Foster identified as "Leadbelly's son-in-law," had insulted the other's wife and sought refuge at Ledbetter's door.
At any rate, Huddie commenced beating the man over the head with a poker, while Foster and the man from Asch made their getaway. When Huddie went to court for assaulting the man, Foster had to go and testify. The judge fined the other man and told him he had no business being in Ledbetter's house.
Pops Foster: “When Leadbelly would get mad he'd just sit and grit his teeth. One time I told him he'd have to play a chord on his guitar or we couldn't make no record. He just sat and started gritting his teeth. I told him he could grit his teeth all day, but if he didn't play the chord we couldn't play with him. He finally played it. Leadbelly was just and evil man. I just made records with him and never hung around with him at all.” (Foster 154)
"Pops" Foster, incidentally, also intensely disliked legendary clarinettist Sidney Bechet.
OSCAR BRAND: "In [December] 1945, just when the WNYC show [FolkSong Festival] was inaugurated, Margot Mayo, whose American Square Dance Group was also promulgating the dance-song gospel, decided to have a "home-from-the-war" party. Leadbelly, Seeger, [Richard] Dyer-Bennett, [John-Jacob] Niles, Guthrie, and many others performed. After the program, Pete Seeger came over to see me and asked if I would help him start a folk song magazine. We made immediate plans for a mimeographed publication, using the paraphernalia I had bought in Army days when I was editing a newspaper for psychiatric patients."
Oscar Brand was a Canadian folk singer and storyteller who emceed the Folk Song Festival on WNYC (New York) radio from 1945 until he died in 2016 at 95 years of age. However, and this is the danger of memory, he was wrong about Leadbelly being at the "home-from-the-war party." Huddie was in California.
Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, the NYU professor, hosted a farewell party for Huddie on May 5th, 1944; he didn't leave New York right away. During the month of June one report puts him playing a high school prom at the fashionable Essex House on Central Park South.
At some point, though, he boarded a train for the Coast; he wrote home from L.A., and in July he had a gig. According to the People's World, "he is in Hollywood, where, appropriately enough, he will spend the summer working in films and singing at People's World parties. . . ." On July 8th, Huddie appeared at a Peoples' World concert at Hollywood's Masonic Temple.
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| The Masonic Temple (2013), with banners advertising TV's Jimmy Kimmel Show. |
He was to remain in California for a year and a half. By October, '44, he was cutting sides for Capitol records, a small label at the time which soon became an industry giant. Capitol grew by recording artists like Nat "King" Cole who had tremendous commercial success; Ledbetter was not a money-maker, but his Capitol recordings are still available. He did "Irene," "The Rock Island Line," and six other songs, accompanied by a zither player, Paul Mason Howard. Oddly enough, Howard, a white, country-style player, came from Arkansas via Shreveport, but whether this had anything to do with his inclusion in the session is not known.
In a separate recording session for Capitol, Huddie did a couple of piano tunes which reflected his early Fannin Street influences.
Dave Dexter, Capitol Records
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| Dave Dexter (C) and some of the artists he recorded. |
record producer Dave Dexter, Jr. in his autobiography, “Playback,” which was published in 1976. He was seeking to distance himself from any possible political 'taint' with his remark about People's World. He needn't have worried; the Capitol sessions were remastered yet again for Compact Disc in the 1990's, and they continue to sell.
Jessica Mitford, "A Fine Old Conflict."
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| Jessica with daughter Constanza (1942) |
One of Huddie's "left-wing writer" associates was Jessica Mitford, ("The American Way of Death.") of England's famous Mitford sisters. This was not a glamorous Hollywood connection, however. Ms. Mitford lived in San Francisco, later Oakland, and was very much involved politically as a civil rights activist. She came from an unorthodox family, given to extremism. Her father she described as "one of nature's fascists." Her sisters included Nancy Mitford, the novelist who was closest to the political center; another sister, Diana, married the leader of Britain's fascist movement, Sir Oswald Mosley; a third was actually associated with Hitler's inner circle in Germany, while another was confined to a mental institution. Jessica, however, became a communist during the Spanish Civil War. She migrated to the United States and, after her first husband was killed in the War (1941), wed Harvard-educated Bob Truehaft, a lawyer who specialized in defending left-wing unions and cases of Civil Rights abuse.
In her autobiography, “A Fine Old Conflict,” Jessica Mitford writes of the amusing problems often related to the visits of her upwardly mobile mother-in-law Aranka, a milliner from New York:
Somehow the timing of Aranka's visits seemed always to be unfortunate. Once she arrived when Leadbelly, the great blues singer, had come to stay for a fortnight. ‘But, Aranka, we've only got one spare bedroom. I do hope you won't mind sharing?’ Aranka, not amused, elected to sleep on the living room couch.
Leadbelly was already a legend. He had sung his way out of a Louisiana prison, where he was serving a life sentence for murder, by addressing musical pleas for clemency to the governor, whom he charmed into granting a pardon. His real name was Huddie Ledbetter: he had adopted Leadbelly as his ‘nom de theatre’ in nostalgic recollection of the numerous gunfights of his youth.
He was very large and very black. He would come down to breakfast wearing a long stark-white nightshirt, from which protruded his sable limbs and head; the visual effect was spectacular. Soon the house would ring with his wonderful music, daily concerts for the children, for whom he improvised special songs.
He and Aranka were ill-assorted houseguests; they would circle one another warily, with little to say. "Oh, Decca" — Aranka sighed wistfully — "I wish I was black like Leadbelly. Then you would love me."
Ross Russell, Tempo Music Shop.
Back in Southern California, where he stayed at the home of his cousin George Pugh, he met a music shop owner named Ross Russell. The meeting took place at the home of a Hollywood writer and after that, Huddie took to dropping in at Russell's Tempo Music Shop. Russell entertained the idea of putting together a biography, but before he could get very far with the project, Huddie had returned to the East.
One night, Russell accompanied Ledbetter and some others on a pub crawl in the black section of Los Angeles, and thus discovered how easy it was for the singer to get into trouble. After a few drinks, Ledbetter produced his guitar and virtually took over a tavern with his entertaining. Two young women "almost forty years his junior" took a shine to Huddie, much to the annoyance of their escorts, and it was only with some difficulty that the group managed to pry him loose from the place unscathed.
Paramount Pictures had optioned John Lomax's book, “Adventures of a Ballad Hunter,” and there was some talk of including Huddie in the film version. He did have some film footage taken, but it was not what he'd hoped for. He was filmed singing three songs without sound. Pete Seeger later dubbed in the sound of Huddie's voice, thus creating the only extant visual record of Huddie singing, now available on You Tube.
Huddie was rebuffed by some film studio executive, and later wrote about it in a song, "4, 5, and 9." While he was at a party, Huddie met a movie producer and asked about getting a screen test. "Sure," laughed the exec, "call me up tomorrow at 45 to 9." This was apparently an inside joke which translated as a brush-off, and for Huddie, a humiliation:
What I'm gonna do for you now —
I called my baby between 4, 5 and 9
And meet my baby on Hollywood and Vine.
Ever been to California? In Hollywood, you know, that's the way it is.
I called this morning between 4, 5 and 9
I want you to meet me on Hollywood and Vine.
If you get down there before I do
You can tell your friends that I'm coming, too.
I'm gonna sing this verse, ain't a-gonna sing no more
Next time I sing, I'm gonna be in Chicago.
Back to New York.
Just after he was discharged from the army, folksinger Oscar Brand, weighing his career possibilities, decided that most of all he'd like to write for radio or stage. He approached several New York radio stations about doing a program of Christmas music which would be unlike the standard popular fare. He received responses from WEAF, WNEW, and from Herman Neumann at WNYC. Neumann was responsible for programming music which was alternative to the vaudeville and big band sounds on the commercial stations; he also programmed folk music and jazz.
Oscar Brand:
So he called on me, he said, "I'm very much interested, do you want to do a program?" December the 10th, just before Christmas. I said, "Sure." I came on and did the program and as I was finished doing a bunch of songs and talking about them and their meanings for a half an hour, he said, "What are you doing next week?" I said, "Well, what would you like?" He said, "Well, come back, try another one."
I came back next week which put me right in front of Christmas and did another Christmas program about the kind of songs we do and how they were made up songs for people who couldn't read, and what they got out of the Bible. I did some gospel songs, old Appalachain songs, Canadian songs, and when I finished I walked by the office and waved at Herman Neumann, waved expectantly and hopefully, and he said, "Listen, if you're not doing anything next week, come on back," and that's the way I've been working for WNYC now since 1945.
[1992 Interview. In 2016, Oscar Brand's program, "Folk Song Festival," was finally off the air. According to the Guinness Book of Records it is the all-time longest-running radio program with the same host. In the mid-90's it received a Peabody Award.]
Later, Brand was asked to coordinate folk music programs for WNYC radio. He found Huddie already broadcasting for the station and since he was an old friend, "coordinating" consisted mainly of walking down the hall on the twenty-fifth floor of the Municipal Building, which housed the WNYC studios, and waving to Huddie during his broadcasts on "Folk Song Festival." He also did a half-hour program called "The Brandwagon" for which he wrote scripts and got together actors. During the week he sometimes traveled to Johnson City, N.Y., or Detroit, Michigan, to sing for striking workers under the banner of Peoples Songs.
Discussions between many of the leading folksingers resulted in the formation of People's Songs, Inc., a politically active group which not only put out a magazine but also organized "Hootenannies" and gave concerts in support of striking workers in Pittsburg, Schenectady, and New York City.
The hootenannies were mainly to support the publication which, by 1948, also included a booking agency known as "People's Artists," as well as chapters in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston.
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Oscar Brand and me, New York, 1992.
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Interview with Oscar Brand who hosted the world's longest- running folk music program (Folk Song Festival, 1945 to 2016) on WNYC, New York, now the Public Radio flagship radio station.
Me: Was it the People's Songs organization that brought these people (the folksingers) together?
Oscar:
Pete Seeger, whose ideas are often far-fetched, ridiculous, but who always manages to bring them about, came to me. He wanted to start a magazine. You have to know that in those days, there were very few books about folk music, and when they were they were bowdlerized and changed and certainly no political material. The only one who really was doing anything in that area was Ben Botkin. Ben was the curator of the Archives of American Folk Music. As had been Alan Lomax, Ben followed him and Alan followed his father and his father followed a gentleman whose name I keep forgetting but who was the first. And they had really set up this whole archive, at the Library of Congress.
Alan and Pete always had these marvelous ideas and Pete came over to me and he said, "I'd like to start a magazine, or newsletter, with all the new songs and send them round the country, so that we'd know what we're writing, or what they're writing, and they'll send to us.
And that was really a remarkable idea because except for Ben Botkin's books which came out later, I believe, there was nothing contemporary. People didn't think of contemporary music as folk music, everybody was busy catching the dying trade, the last folksinger who when he died would take with him all his songs and so on. I mean, that's the way it was. You just couldn't do anything contemporary. There was no more creation, the rural atmosphere was going, there were factories, you see, instead of handwork, ships no longer had sailors singing, supposedly which was a lot of baloney. People always sing whether the Knights of Columbus, the Boy Scouts, they're always making up new songs and new parodies of material.
So Pete's idea was really revolutionary. We started working on it. It was a mimeograph situation with materials I had left over from my army days and then the newspaper came out, the newsletter came out and it did very well. It didn't make a lot of money, but nobody was paid so that didn't cost much. People were donating their services and paper and, we sent it out all around and then it became a little more formalized and I was leaving about then because I discovered it was being run by what was basically a communist cell.
Although a lot of the people involved were not, still I felt the people running it were doctrinaire, except for Pete. I know there was a meeting, in fact, was I at this meeting, it wasn't the Party, it was just the general board of directors meeting, there was a complaint from a group which was meeting in Yale or Harvard, I forget, that the songs were all political, didn't they know any other songs, or weren't there any new songs being written that were not leftwing political? Question was whether to stop sending it to them, and to blacklist them and so on, Pete said, "No, you can't do that!" which means he was standing up continually against the dictates of the Party.
I didn't know he was a member of the Party until I read the book about him recently, where they interviewed me, and I said, "No, no, Pete wasn't, couldn't have been a member of the Party," and they said, "He says he was." [laughs]
So that started People's Songs, the publication. In a little while people called in and said, "Who's going to sing these songs, see, Oscar Brand wrote a song here, does he sing it? Can we get him?" So they started a booking agency called People's Songs also. I remember Bina Huston, Cisco Huston's, I don't know whether he was married to her but it was Cisco Huston's wife, in effect, she was the one who was running it, Irwin Silber and others, who were running the agency, and we would get five to ten dollars for going out on a booking, five to ten dollars a lot of money. I think Pete would get 15 sometimes and Leadbelly and Woody would command 25. Once I got $50. I never forget that. You know, you talk about a lot of money, it seems like nothing now. But I remember in those days if you got $50 a week for working a full week's work, that was a lot of money. In fact the first job I had, just before the war, I got $10 a week. I was lucky to have it because I could buy a new coat for that.
Anyway, that's the way the People's Songs started, and I started moving out of it because I began to feel that I was in a hostile atmosphere. Only because they were part afraid of me. And in fact, in about '50 I think it was, '49 or '50, I was attacked by the Daily Worker for saying that censorship was dangerous and that the Soviet Union, not just the Soviet Union, I mentioned a lot of the places I had been, were so doctrinaire that they would not, their belief was that Art should be at the service of the State. And as a consequence, many good songs were being ignored, or just tossed aside, or censored. Because they did not serve the needs of the state at that time.
 |
| Interviewing Tillman Franks |
"Went down to a meeting of a new union of progressive songwriters that call themselves "Peoples Songs," found Pete Seeger and his banjo, the president and Lee Hays (Arkansaw Hard Luck Lee), the vice president. I found Betty Sanders, Leadbelly, (Leadbelly was in California – San Francisco, San Diego & L.A. – until 1946. Oscar was mistaken about that.) Bernie Asbel, Alan Lomax, Bess Lomax, Tom Glazer, Charlotte Anthony, Lou Kleinman, Mildred Linsley, and Shaemas O'Sheel, Bob Russell, there, almost every songwriter pitching in their efforts to make out of all of their little works one big union called 'Peoples Songs.'"
"The reason for Peoples Songs is to shoot your union the kind of a song or songs when you want it and fast. To help you make a songbook, a program,a throwaway songsheet, a whole evening. Or maybe your problem is just about how to make a song and get it copyrighted, printed, circulated around, how to set a fee, and what to do with your works after you create them. I am one of fifteen now on the Executive Committee of Peoples Songs, 130 West 42nd Street, New York City, New York." (Woody Guthrie)
The first issue of the Peoples Songs “Bulletin” was printed on Oscar Brand's mimeograph machine. The call went out for people to submit songs about the working man, repressed minorities and about peace. The war against fascism was over; now was the time to build the brotherhood of man. Idealism was at an all-time high and the “Bulletin” was successful in rousing the interest of a nationwide community of songwriters committed to changing the world through song. The second issue was printed with an offset machine, Bernie Asbell was hired as editor, and Bernie's wife, Millie, became manager of the small, crowded offices on 42nd Street. The Peoples Songs offices became a hub of activity, sending out missionaries to sing for union meetings and picket lines.
Oscar Brand recalls being an activist in the days when union people were being beaten over the head by the American Legion, the Knights of Columbus, the police, the National Guard, “and by anybody else who just wanted to beat somebody up, when unions were considered communist organizations, we were out on picket lines. I or Pete, or Cisco Houston, or Woody, or whoever was around, they'd get a phone call, I'd get a phone call, saying, ‘We're having a strike up here, this city or this town.’ And I would figure out, if I take the train it'll take me so long and coming back it'll take me so long, I can just about make it, and away we'd go and do a program. [The union]'d usually pay for the train and sometimes five or ten dollars besides.
I did programs for the Spanish Refugee Appeal, for Russian War Relief, for the American Labor Party; the left wing organizations were extremely eager to have folk music. I made up songs. I remember Elliott Roosevelt was going up to Johnson City, New York, which along with Endicott and Binghampton was owned by Johnson and Johnson at the time, and he said, ‘Would you come up with me. I can speak,’ and he was a lousy speaker but he was the former president's son. We got on the train and we got up there and I'd written a few songs. One of them was to an old tune called "The Johnson Boys:"
The Johnson Boys, they own Tri-City,
They bought it when it first began,
They're so rich it's sure a pity,
They still can't buy a union man.
They can't buy a union man,
They can't buy a union man.
Which made a tremendous hit. And that's the kind of thing we were doing.
Not only old songs: when the Farmers' Union was meeting in New York, I
remember I was working the farms then, I would go up there and sing,
When the banker hangs around
And the butcher cuts the pound,
The farmer is the man who feeds them all.
Oh, the farmer is the man,
The farmer is the man,
He lives on credit til the fall
And they take him by the hand
And they lead him by the hand,
And the mortgage man's the man who gets it all.
Which Coast? Leadbelly cabled Martha from Los Angeles on Feb. 8th, 1946, that he was heading for New York.
Those were good times, [1946] the busy days at People's Songs sometimes running into song-filled nights at the Lower East Side apartment of Martha and Huddie Ledbetter, the black ex-convict folksinger known as Leadbelly, a man all of them Pete, Lee, Woody, Cisco Houston, Alan Lomax, and every folk singer and folk song maven worshiped and learned from.
Lee wished Leadbelly could break the habit of calling them "Mr.Pete" and "Mr.Alan" and "Mr. Lee," but Leadbelly couldn't, or wouldn't. On the other hand, Lee chuckled over the irony (which he pointed out to Pete) that Leadbelly dressed in a dignified shirt-and-tie fashion while Pete, the New England aristocrat, turned up everywhere in farmer's overalls. Pete didn't see the humor at all.
Sometimes Leadbelly would stake Lee to a bottle of bourbon when Lee's always minimal money ran out. Lee swore he sang louder and better with booze lining his vocal chords. Woody and Cisco kept right up with Lee. The nights began to last until the mornings. Pete, never deflected from his work by old-boy carousing, cast a cold eye on theproceedings. Hadn't Lee learned that Pete's patience could give out?
But when Lee stood up and led a hootenanny, Pete had to love him. What could be more effective than this big southern preacher-type calling out, in his marvelous deep bass voice, stingingly funny lines about antediluvian southern congressmen? When you lived in New York City, you couldn't be sure how far protest went in the country. Lee and Woody most especially could make you believe that "the folk" could be pretty durned radical. (Willens 88)
On the liner notes for Cisco [Houston]'s first album, after Cisco's big breakthrough at Gerde's Folk City, Lee wrote, "Cisco fits the scholar's definition of the wandering folk singer as well as anyone except Woody Guthrie, who was a sidekick of Cisco's for a long time. They travelled and sang together, and they both had close personal ties with Martha and Huddie Ledbetter, whose home was, at time, the only one they had. . . ." (Willens 207)
According to banjo-guitarist and New Orleans jazz historian Danny Barker, on 6 January,1946, Huddie recorded an untitled blues with Bunk Johnson and several other players at the Stuyvesant Casino. The Bunk Johnson band recordings were for V-Disc, a U.S. Government-financed project whereby armed forces overseas were provided with free recordings of all types of music. There were several other musicians, including Danny Barker, who recorded that day with Bunk. Bunk's band finished its first gig at the Casino on 12 January.
Danny Barker, Oscar Brand and Woody Guthrie, it must be noted, all placed Huddie in New York around the Christmas holiday season, 1945-46: Barker at the Casino; Brand at WNYC and the "Home-from-the-War" party; and Guthrie at the formative meeting of People's Songs. Huddie was clearly photographed with Bunk Johnson at the Stuyvesant Casino, but that could have been in the Spring of 1946 when Bunk's band returned. It is likely that Barker, Brand and Guthrie were confused about the dates.
On 24th, January, 1946, Leadbelly appeared with the Kid Ory Band on Orson Welles' Standard Oil Broadcast from Los Angeles; on 30 January, he gave an 8 p.m. concert at the YWCA Auditorium, 6th and Pacific in Los Angeles. Ross Russell places his regularly at his Tempo Music Shop on Hollywood Boulevard, and then, on 8 February, he cabled from the Coast: he was about to leave for home. In March he appeared at People's Songs' first public concert at Elizabeth Irwin High School, New York City. Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and Woody Guthrie were also on the program. From that time on, though he traveled out of town several times, and one time went to France, Huddie based himself in New York.
Late in the afternoon of 27 April, 1946, a Saturday, Huddie gave a recital at Town Hall in New York City. He was accompanied by Sonny Terry, the harmonica player, and the event was written up in the New York Times. The closing number was an audience singalong, "We're in the Same Boat, Brother."
“The songs were heard without sophistication, with no other art than that with which the singer was born and without the benefit of a beautiful voice like Paul Robeson's or Marian Anderson's. The listener heard, instead, precisely what is to be heard today in the hills of the Carolinas, the swamp lands of Mississippi and Louisiana, the small-town theatres and "hot spots" throughout the South. This is the music of the soil, direct from its source, and as Leadbelly sings it, it is filled with an emotion all its own, and is the outpouring of an art that is the simple and genuine expression of that emotion.” ("Huddie Leadbetter Heard")
On Thursday, May 9th, People's Songs, Inc. put on a "Union Hootenanny" at Town Hall. The show featured Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Huddie missed this hoot, but he performed at the Strathmore Folk Festival the following day. At the second seasonal Hoot, the following Thursday, the 16th, Huddie was also absent. [Was he out of town?]
The previous September (1945), a month after the end of the war with Japan, while Huddie was on the West Coast, an extraordinary old time jazz revival had begun to take place in New York City. William Russell was a jazz historian who loved the original New Orleans sound; he had been to the Crescent City during the war years, and there discovered that trumpeter Bunk Johnson, a kind of missing link between the unrecorded Buddy Bolden, and the meteoric Louis Armstrong, was still alive. Bunk played in the sporting houses on Basin Street, in the saloons above Canal Street, and in the bandwagons that rode around town with the slidehorns hanging out over the tailgate. He went barnstorming for as little as $5 a week and tips. Twelve years ago Bunk lost his teeth and gave up playing. A Pittsburgh jazz fan [Russell] found him, a toothless stooped laborer in the rice fields of New Iberia, La., got him some false teeth and raised money for a horn.
Said the New York Herald Tribune highbrow critic Virgil Thomson: "[Bunk] is the greatest master of blues or off-pitch notes. . . an artist of delicate imagination." ("Jazz?")
Russell got Bunk together with a group of traditional jazzmen, most of whom were holding down day jobs of one sort or another, and painstakingly recorded several tunes. The recordings turned out well, and back in New York, Russell was able to pass on his enthusiasm to a circle of friends. They decided to bring the Bunk Johnson band to New York, to show off real New Orleans jazz. The other members of the band were George Lewis, clarinet; Jim Robinson, trombone; Slow Drag Pavageau, bass; Lawrence Marrero, banjo; Alton Purnell, piano; and Baby Dodds on the drums.
Dodds, who was the brother of famed clarinetist Johnny Dodds, had the most impressive credits up to that time. He had gone to Chicago in the 1920's and played with King Oliver and Louis Armstrong; later he backed up Jelly Roll Morton, and made records with most of the famous New Orleans musicians during the Jazz Age. Though they were relatively unknown at the time, the rest of the band members were some of New Orleans finest who went on to establish fine reputations during the traditional jazz revival which started on that autumn evening — in New York — and continued well into the 1950's.
Four hundred people turned out for the opening night at the Stuyvesant Casino, a large ballroom on Second Avenue near East 9th Street, which had mostly been used for ethnic wedding receptions until that night. The Casino was close to where Huddie lived on East 10th Street, an easy walk, and he hung out at the Casino a lot during the band's second booking between April and May. He sat in with the band on several occasions. Included in the crowd on opening night, and probably on many subsequent nights as well, were names connected to Huddie Ledbetter — Fred Ramsey, Charles Edward Smith, Moses Asch. The night was, by all reports, a great success.
The Casino is decorous — the audience is mostly well-behaved youngsters — and simple, in ornamentation as well as in operation. You pay a dollar at the door, go upstairs, sit at whatever table or bench is vacant, and listen. If music is not sufficient food, there are beer and sandwiches, which you fetch yourself from the bar or buy from the Casino's only waiter, the politest and most thoughtful man of his breed I have encountered in some time.
There are, in fact, only two real drawbacks to the whole thing. The piano on the stand is in such a state of decay that Carmen Cavellero shouldn't even have to play "Til the End of Time" on it, and on some nights there is a gathering of intelligentsia that is so intense and audible about this careful reconstruction of another way of life that it is a considerable handicap to those who would rather just sit and listen to the music. (The New Yorker, 20 Oct 45)
Ralph J. Gleason was a writer on the New York scene in the 1940's. A couple of decades later he established a reputation with the national magazine, Rolling Stone, and various other prestigious musical journals. He was introduced to Ledbetter one night at the Stuyvesant Casino, and had this to say of the meeting:
Bunk and New Orleans jazz were intellectually chic that winter and their nightly sessions at the ancient East Side Hall, once the scene of a famous gangland shooting in the early days of New York Mafia wars, were an essential part of everyone's tour of New York. All the musicians and artists and writers from James Jones to Leadbelly stopped there.
Leadbelly sang a couple of numbers with the band. Art Hodes was on the piano that night and it was impossible for a piano to accompany Leadbelly because he didn't sing standard 12-bar blues, in fact, his blues varied from night to night in bar structure as his whim dictated. But most of the time he stayed at the bar.
The Stuyvesant Casino at that time was an incredible place. Admission was low and it was packed with Greenwich Village types, the kind that were then called Bohemians and later evolved into the Beatniks and, still later, their descendants became hippies. Beer was cheap; there was only one waiter and you could stall there all night without spending any money past the admission charge.
The bar was always packed and Leadbelly was pressed up against it, surrounded by a coterie of fans. He was not a tall man at all, but he was broad and chunky and gave the impression of terrific strength. He didn't smile much and implicit in standing next to him was the fact that you were standing next to a convicted murderer. It gave the crowd an added edge of excitement, like standing next to Little Augie Pisano or Tony Bender.
I was introduced to him by a friend from the Coast, and then he went on with his conversation. Suddenly, Leadbelly said, very loud and clear, "Don't fool with me, boy; I don't play." Everybody stopped talking. The silence was achingly oppressive. People slowly began backing away. Suddenly he was no longer that fascinating blues and folk singer with a prison record, but a murderer. He'd killed and he might kill again. And when he said "I don't play," you believed him. Somebody stuttered an apology and everything quieted down. But they all — myself included — looked at him differently from then on. (Gleason)
On Wednesday, September 4th, 1946, Huddie attended a benefit for the National Negro Congress in New York City. He is pictured in a Daily World photo with his guitar strapped on, posing with Sonny Terry, Cisco Houston, and the activist-singer-actor, Paul Robeson. Robeson has been described by his grand-daughter as a renaissance man. He is the only black face in his graduating class from Harvard Law School in 1923; he was an outstanding athlete in high school and college — he played football at Princeton and was good enough to play professionally when he needed the money; without any particular training, he became a concert artist and a stage and screen actor. His most outstanding roles were in Eugene O'Neill's "Emperor Jones" and "All God's Chillun Got Wings," as well as a Broadway "Othello" with Uta Hagen and Jose Ferrer during the war. He was a linguist, an historian, and an outspoken champion of the rights of African Americans. For this he was labelled a communist; Ledbetter, had he lived a little longer, may have had his moment in front of an Un-American Activities Committee, too, but he was nothing like as outstanding a target as Robeson.
Thursdays that September, at 6 p.m., Huddie was once more singing his songs during a fifteen-minute program on WNYC. On September 29th, a Saturday night, he was concertizing at New York's Town Hall, playing 12-string guitar, accordion, and piano on a variety of folksongs, blues, spirituals and work-songs. He was also aided in the concert by Edith Allaire, "American ballad singer"; Sonny Terry; Cisco Houston, who sang some cowboy songs; guitarist Brownie McGhee who played along on "Irene, Goodnight;" Sue Remos, a dancer from the West Coast; and jazz bassman "Pops" Foster.
LEAD BELLY OFFERS FOLK-MUSIC OF THE SOUTH
Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter), old-time American
folk-singer from the deep South appearing with six guest
artists, gave a concert of folk music last night at Town
Hall. To use Lead Belly's own phrase — he talks only in
verse — it was "fine as wine" throughout and gave a fairly
comprehensive picture of the genre.
Playing his own accompaniments on various
instruments, including the twelve-string guitar, the
accordion and the piano, Lead Belly sang spirituals,
reels, blues and work-songs from the levees, the railroads
and the fields.
The authenticity of his renderings gives the songs he
sings their interest, both historical and musical. (Lead Belly Offers)
 |
| Bassist Pops Foster |
"Leadbelly's wife's name was Irene (sic) and the tune of his 'Irene' got to be a big hit. As soon as it did he died. Leadbelly was a mean and evil guy. He was in the penitentiary three times for killing guys and every time he played his way out." (Foster 153)
"Pops" found Huddie difficult, but not impossible, to accompany. He said that he and pianist Willie "The Lion" Smith were the only two people who could play with him. According to Foster, Ledbetter, and other blues singers like Josh White, had no musical training and therefore had no idea which key they were playing in. And, because they generally played solo, they were incapable of keeping time.
"When Willie and I would play with them kinda guys, he'd come around to say, 'We got a hard date today, Pops. A lot of those guys can't even tune their instruments.' "
He was talking about a different musical genre, of course. Clearly Ledbetter was capable of playing with other musicians; he did it regularly at hoots and get-togethers with the folk song crowd. But jazz was a different thing. Many of the jazz players came out of a brass band tradition in which an ability to read music was taken for granted. Many of the jazz groups depended on strict arrangements where the musicians were taken on as "sidemen" to play a particular part, whereas the folk musicians were, to varying degrees, anarchic. Ledbetter had been brought up playing for dances, but he hadn't done that much since he left his audience in Louisiana and Texas, so his rhythms may have become variable. In fact, playing for dances as a single, his rhythms were probably always variable. Like many successful dance bands — Bob Wills' Texas Playboys for instance — he had a tendency to speed up his tempos for the sake of exciting the dancers.
 |
| Willie "The Lion" Smith |
At any rate, Huddie commenced beating the man over the head with a poker, while Foster and the man from Asch made their getaway. When Huddie went to court for assaulting the man, Foster had to go and testify. The judge fined the other man and told him he had no business being in Ledbetter's house.
Pops Foster: “When Leadbelly would get mad he'd just sit and grit his teeth. One time I told him he'd have to play a chord on his guitar or we couldn't make no record. He just sat and started gritting his teeth. I told him he could grit his teeth all day, but if he didn't play the chord we couldn't play with him. He finally played it. Leadbelly was just and evil man. I just made records with him and never hung around with him at all.” (Foster 154)
"Pops" Foster, incidentally, also intensely disliked legendary clarinettist Sidney Bechet.
February 27, 2008
Leadbelly's Nieces: an Interview
Several years ago I went to visit Irene Campbell (aged 86) in Marshall, Texas. She was a retired schoolteacher; she'd attended Bishop College in Marshall and taught at the local schools, starting in the 1930's, before integration, and retired in the 1970's; which would have been about the time that segregation was ending in Texas.
Irene had caused a bit of a storm with the Louisiana relatives of Leadbelly when she'd requested that his grave site be moved over the line to Texas, because she felt that was really his home. So I went to talk to her about her Uncle Huddie. She was related through Huddie's half-brother Alonzo Batts, Irene's father. She surprised me at the interview by introducing me to her elder sister, Viola (aged 89.). This is a segment of an interview with the Batts sisters, Irene Campbell and Viola Daniels on March 14, 1991.
Me: Do you remember the songs that Huddie sang?
Irene: Some of them.
Me: When you were kids.
Irene: "Goodnight Irene," I know that.
Me: (With a laugh) Sounds like he wrote that for you.
Irene: Yes he did, he did. Really, this Mr. Myers, we called him Miles — Sterling Miles, but later I found out his name was Myers, — said he was there when Uncle Huddie wrote the song. They came through, they'd been out, and passed by my mother — he [Huddie] called her "Big Sister". "Big Sister, I'm drunk, and I'm hungry, fix me something to eat." She told him, "Well, you keep the baby while I fix something to eat." He was keeping the baby and wrote this song. "Goodnight Irene." Now that's what Mr. Myers said.
Me: Who's Mr. Myers?
Irene: He was his friend. Sterling Mi - well, we said Miles, but his name was Myers. He hasn't been dead so long either.
Me: Is there anybody else who's still living who was there?
Irene: There's a man, I think his name is Russell, but I don't know him. He says he knows Uncle Huddie. And he can play something, but he doesn't play it with the same tune that Uncle Huddie had. He can't even play "Goodnight Irene" with the same tune. (Irene turns to her sister, Viola.) Do you know anybody living now that knew Uncle Huddie?
Viola: The one I know would be already dead I guess - Roscoe Jamieson ?
Irene: He's dead.
Viola: He would be the one that would come into the house, regularly. See, all these people would meet him 'down yonder' didn't come to the house, you know. Cause what they had going down there, those songs, he didn't play at the house. So we had a wonderful time with our hymns and songs that we sang. . .
Irene: Games - what you call (sings)
I measure my love to show you
I measure my love to show you
We have a game to do. . .
Songs that you can act out. What is this you go in and out the window?
In and out the window, for we have a game today.
Viola: I forgot that one.
Irene: And what were some other play songs that we used to have?
Viola: "Little Sally Walker, sitting in a saucer" - that sort of thing. "Skip to My Lou, my darling." We'd do the skipping.
Irene: "I measure my love to show you" you know, those were the sort of things he would play for us and we would do them out on the lawn, out in the yard. And we'd have, uh, "Goodbye Mary, I hate to leave you,"
Viola: And then I notice in this children's book they've started this "Wild Goose." . . .
Irene: (takes up the recollection) . . . the bird would come from heaven a certain time of the year. He was so large that his wings would cover the sky. It would get dark. And he would say "QUA, QUA" (laughter) and when you see this bird coming over, you tell him what you want him to tell your loved ones in heaven when he gets back, and you give him what you want him to tell, and he'd say "QUA-K-QUA" and he just pass on over and then it get light again. Cause it was black as night while he was passing over. And I can't sing - can you remember some more songs we would sing when this bird was coming over? But the tale is that the group of them went hunting and the big eagle - big bird - came over and they shot him and it took - how long did it take him to fall? -
Viola: I don't remember that.
Irene: So many years, I think it was eight years to fall, and then he fell, and then - eight hours! it took him a long time to fall. And then they decided they would cook him and they put him on to cook and it took that same length of time for him to cook, and they cooked him and they got him boiled, done, and then when they got him ready to eat, he flew away (laughter). That was a tall tale!
Viola: That's what the children -
Irene: That's what Huddie would tell us and we were there spellbound, listening.
Viola: You were listening, I don't know where I was, I didn't hear that one. I'd get part of it, I didn't get the other part of it.
Irene: Boiled him and boiled him and he finally flew away. Now he has that in music. That record would get it straight, because I have it all twisted. I know it was a ridiculously long time. Falling and cooking and finally flew away. That was just a tale to make the kids laugh. He loved children. I think, cause he took so much time with us.
It's always been said that Huddie Ledbetter was a great children's entertainer and these two ancient ladies gave a glimpse into that aspect of Huddie's life.
Irene had caused a bit of a storm with the Louisiana relatives of Leadbelly when she'd requested that his grave site be moved over the line to Texas, because she felt that was really his home. So I went to talk to her about her Uncle Huddie. She was related through Huddie's half-brother Alonzo Batts, Irene's father. She surprised me at the interview by introducing me to her elder sister, Viola (aged 89.). This is a segment of an interview with the Batts sisters, Irene Campbell and Viola Daniels on March 14, 1991.
Me: Do you remember the songs that Huddie sang?
Irene: Some of them.
Me: When you were kids.
Irene: "Goodnight Irene," I know that.
Me: (With a laugh) Sounds like he wrote that for you.
Irene: Yes he did, he did. Really, this Mr. Myers, we called him Miles — Sterling Miles, but later I found out his name was Myers, — said he was there when Uncle Huddie wrote the song. They came through, they'd been out, and passed by my mother — he [Huddie] called her "Big Sister". "Big Sister, I'm drunk, and I'm hungry, fix me something to eat." She told him, "Well, you keep the baby while I fix something to eat." He was keeping the baby and wrote this song. "Goodnight Irene." Now that's what Mr. Myers said.
Me: Who's Mr. Myers?
Irene: He was his friend. Sterling Mi - well, we said Miles, but his name was Myers. He hasn't been dead so long either.
Me: Is there anybody else who's still living who was there?
Irene: There's a man, I think his name is Russell, but I don't know him. He says he knows Uncle Huddie. And he can play something, but he doesn't play it with the same tune that Uncle Huddie had. He can't even play "Goodnight Irene" with the same tune. (Irene turns to her sister, Viola.) Do you know anybody living now that knew Uncle Huddie?
Viola: The one I know would be already dead I guess - Roscoe Jamieson ?
Irene: He's dead.
Viola: He would be the one that would come into the house, regularly. See, all these people would meet him 'down yonder' didn't come to the house, you know. Cause what they had going down there, those songs, he didn't play at the house. So we had a wonderful time with our hymns and songs that we sang. . .
Irene: Games - what you call (sings)
I measure my love to show you
I measure my love to show you
We have a game to do. . .
Songs that you can act out. What is this you go in and out the window?
In and out the window, for we have a game today.
Viola: I forgot that one.
Irene: And what were some other play songs that we used to have?
Viola: "Little Sally Walker, sitting in a saucer" - that sort of thing. "Skip to My Lou, my darling." We'd do the skipping.
Irene: "I measure my love to show you" you know, those were the sort of things he would play for us and we would do them out on the lawn, out in the yard. And we'd have, uh, "Goodbye Mary, I hate to leave you,"
Viola: And then I notice in this children's book they've started this "Wild Goose." . . .
Irene: (takes up the recollection) . . . the bird would come from heaven a certain time of the year. He was so large that his wings would cover the sky. It would get dark. And he would say "QUA, QUA" (laughter) and when you see this bird coming over, you tell him what you want him to tell your loved ones in heaven when he gets back, and you give him what you want him to tell, and he'd say "QUA-K-QUA" and he just pass on over and then it get light again. Cause it was black as night while he was passing over. And I can't sing - can you remember some more songs we would sing when this bird was coming over? But the tale is that the group of them went hunting and the big eagle - big bird - came over and they shot him and it took - how long did it take him to fall? -
Viola: I don't remember that.
Irene: So many years, I think it was eight years to fall, and then he fell, and then - eight hours! it took him a long time to fall. And then they decided they would cook him and they put him on to cook and it took that same length of time for him to cook, and they cooked him and they got him boiled, done, and then when they got him ready to eat, he flew away (laughter). That was a tall tale!
Viola: That's what the children -
Irene: That's what Huddie would tell us and we were there spellbound, listening.
Viola: You were listening, I don't know where I was, I didn't hear that one. I'd get part of it, I didn't get the other part of it.
Irene: Boiled him and boiled him and he finally flew away. Now he has that in music. That record would get it straight, because I have it all twisted. I know it was a ridiculously long time. Falling and cooking and finally flew away. That was just a tale to make the kids laugh. He loved children. I think, cause he took so much time with us.
It's always been said that Huddie Ledbetter was a great children's entertainer and these two ancient ladies gave a glimpse into that aspect of Huddie's life.
February 23, 2008
Chapter 7: Leadbelly & Lomax (1934-35)
John and Alan Lomax returned to Angola in July, 1934, only to find the irrepressible Huddie begging, pleading, and urging that they take his pardon song to Governor O.K. Allen (J. Lomax, Negro 32). He had written the song in 1932, had been revising, improving, and singing it to every white man he met ever since. He had tried to get it to the Governor (the hand-picked successor to then-U.S. Senator Huey Long) in the form of a poem, but it had been intercepted by "Tighty" Himes.
John Lomax was impressed with Lead Belly's shrewdness in his choice of tunes to go with his pardon lyrics, tunes which were "direct Negro modifications of white melodies, the sort of tunes the average white man likes best to hear Negroes sing" (232). It is difficult to reconcile this attitude of Lomax with his requirement that folk music be pure and unadulterated. If he was looking for a folksinger who had not been subject to white influences or to the music marketplace, Ledbetter seems like an odd choice; if he was looking for someone to attract attention, he found the right man.
The song "Governor O.K. Allen," which the Lomaxes recorded and took to Baton Rouge for the Governor to hear, is more interesting for its overview of the whole political situation in regard to prison paroles than as an individual plea. It tells how general manager Himes, had seen the need to relieve overcrowding, and how he went to Warden Long (Huey P. Long's cousin) to tell him about the arrangements he and the Governor were making to free a certain number of prisoners. A personal note comes in when Huddie recounts seeing an article in the Times of Shreveport which told of the release of a certain number of prisoners, and how that made him think of his woman at home. He then praises Governor Allen for his kindness in reuniting so many men with their wives, talks about Lieutenant-Governor Fournet, and closes with a verse like the end of the Governor Pat Neff song:
Had you, Governor O.K. Allen, like you got me,
I'd wake up in the morning, let you out on reprieve.
It would be interesting to speculate on a meeting between Leadbelly and Huey Long, if the latter had remained governor instead of entering the national political arena. But tragically, as it turned out, Long's ambitions went far beyond the confines of Louisiana, so he never received Leadbelly's plea for a pardon in musical form. As far as we know. In fact, the plea may never even have reached the desk of O.K. Allen.
On August 1, Huddie Ledbetter was released from Angola and though Louisiana prison authorities denied that the song was the reason, John Lomax said he liked to believe otherwise (J. Lomax, Negro 232). In a letter dated 13 May, 1939, (see 1939 in this blog) Warden L. A. Jones of Angola wrote to the Chief Probabtion Officer of the Court of General Sessions in New York with the following information about Ledbetter.
“This man has been recipient of wide publicity in various magazines of national circulation, the story usually being that he sang or wrote such moving appeals to the Governor that he was pardoned. Such statements have no foundation in fact. He received no clemency, and his discharge was a routine matter under the good time law which applies to all first and second offenders.”
Huddie made his way back to Shreveport and renewed his relationship with Martha Promise. Martha (b.1906, and thus about 17 years younger than Huddie) was originally from Longwood, near the Jeter Plantation, and had known Huddie all her life. She had a twin sister, Mary, the mother of Tiny Robinson who has been instrumental in keeping the Leadbelly flame burning. (See Leadbelly Foundation).
He must have felt a strong connection to John Lomax, however, because he wrote him four letters asking for employment; he was eventually rewarded with a telegram arranging a meeting in Marshall, Tex., a city thirty miles west of Shreveport, close to Huddie's Texas family home.
Lomax enjoyed recounting the story of their meeting in Marshall on September 1; it appeared not only in the book on Lead Belly published in 1936, but also as a re-enactment in a March of Time newsreel (Ramsey, "Leadbelly" 17), in a Time Magazine article, and in a New York Herald Tribune story, 3rd January 1935:
I was sitting in a hotel in (Marshall) Texas when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked up and there was Lead Belly with his guitar, his knife and a sugar bag packed with all his earthly belongings. He said, "Boss, here I is." I took him up to my room and asked him what he was doing there and he replied, "Boss, I came here to be your man. I belong to you."
I said, "Well, after all, I don't know you. You're a murderer." He said, "Boss, it wasn't my fault. They attacked me. I had to fight back." I told him that as a matter of fact I did need a driver for my car and might be able to use him, but I added, "If some day you decide on some lonely road that you want my money and my car, don't use your knife on me. Just tell me and I'll give them to you. I have a wife and children back home, and they'd miss me. ("Lomax Arrives")
However it came about, and it seemed like a mutually beneficial arrangement, the two set off on a tour of Southern penitentiaries, looking particularly for Negro work songs still used by black gang labor. Their first stop was Little Rock, Arkansas, where Lomax, as was his custom, visited with the state governor to get approval for his quest. During four days spent in Little Rock, recording in the Negro district, Lomax found how useful Lead Belly's playing and singing could be: when other singers heard him, they came forward with their own material. The same thing happened subsequently in the prisons: through Lead Belly's singing, the convicts were quickly able to understand what was required of them (J. Lomax, (Negro 37).
In “Negro Folks Songs as Sung by Leadbelly,” Lomax says he had no idea what was going on in Lead Belly's mind (35), yet the written word constantly reveals the latter's thoughts. When new clothes were provided to take the place of his Angola prison garb, Huddie's "face was aglow with happiness." Lomax had him keep the prison clothes, "though he always hated to wear them" (36), so that he could don them for concerts, especially for white audiences. When Lead Belly managed to commandeer a free tank of gas from the State of Arkansas, over Lomax' mild protestations, he said, "Shucks! White folks always has plenty of everything. Dey won't miss a little gas." And more than all else, Huddie was clearly depressed by the constant visits to prisons: "I'm tired of lookin' at niggers in the penitenshuh. I wish we could go somewheres else" (39).
There were visits back to Shreveport for Huddie to see Martha Promise and to show off his new clothes and job — not a particularly strange desire on his part. There was also a trip to the Lomax home in Austin, Texas, where Huddie composed a song about the family. The song, "Elnora," was based on a prison work song; it was also the name of the Lomax maid:
El-nora/ O Lawd, Lawd/ El-nora/ O Lawd, Lawd.
The verses were simply names of family members: John the bossman, John Jr., Alan the little bossman, etc., and the address of the Lomax home, but everyone seemed to enjoy and appreciate it (Negro 95).
When John Lomax decided that the penitentiary tour was over, he dropped Lead Belly in Shreveport, determined to have nothing further to do with him (43). There had been too much stress and friction beween the two; their backgrounds and agendas were simply too far opposed. John Lomax was a serious scholar in his mid-sixties who probably felt himself too old to be tramping around the countryside; Huddie was a compulsive musician, mid-forties, but in excellent physical condition due to years of hard labor; he liked to drink and party, especially with others of like mind. It was not an ideal match, yet together they accomplished a great deal, and at this point they were only half way through their adventure.
Lomax returned to Austin in November, and Huddie wrote him several letters begging to be taken on the upcoming New York trip. Lomax had been asked to make a Folk Song presentation at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in Philadelphia at year's end, and he was asked to bring Lead Belly. “American Ballads and Folk Songs,” meanwhile, had just been published, and there was some scholarly interest in the Lomaxes' activities. Alan urged that Lead Belly be included in the trip and at last his father threw "caution to the winds," and agreed (J. Lomax, Negro 43).
Early in December, 1934, Huddie was picked up in Shreveport and squeezed into the car which held the recording equipment, three people, two guitars (Alan played, too), and various personal effects. There were more penitentiaries along the way, in Georgia and North Carolina, before this odd trio arrived in Washington, D.C., where the attention started to come from white intellectuals. This was to be the core of Huddie Ledbetter's paying audience for the rest of his life; they did not pay well, but they did like his music.
In Philadelphia, meanwhile, the interest of newspapers had been aroused by his queer name. Reporters crowded into my room, while I hid Lead Belly. His singing and playing while seated on the top center of the banquet table at the smoker before a staid and dignified professorial audience smacked of sensationalism. (Negro 45)
Ninety-three people turned up the next day at 9:00 a.m., December 29, at the Popular Literature section, to hear "Comments on Negro Folk Songs" by John Lomax, illustrated by the singing and playing of the "Negro convict Lead Belly of Louisiana" (PMLA Supplement 1325). That evening a group of intellectuals in evening dress, at Bryn Mawr College, "listened curiously to 'Dicklicker's Holler' and 'Whoa, Back, Buck!'" (J. Lomax, Negro 45) The latter, an ox-driving song, contains grunts, yelps, and the unforgettable refrain:
Whoa, back, buck and gee by the lamb,
Who made the backband?
WHOA God-DAMN!
"Dicklicker" was the name of a fellow convict in Texas, and Huddie simply ascribes the "holler" to him. He offers no further explanation of the name (îNegroï 116). Several years later, Huddie made a recording of "Dick Ligger's Holler"; this may be a closer rendering of the convict's name, but Lomax evidently preferred the single word (Ramsey, "Sessions" 4).
On New Year's Day, 1935, the two Lomaxes brought Lead Belly to the "city of [his] dreams," New York. Apart from discovering that his color barred him from getting a hotel room south of 110th Street — he stayed at the Harlem YMCA — Lead Belly made quite a splash in the city. He played for a group from Columbia and New York Universities on New Year's Day and was given some media coverage. According to John Lomax, the term "bad nigger" only added to his attraction (Negro 49). Obviously, Lomax had hoped for something like this. After all, he had made him keep his prison clothes for future use ·—· a photograph of him thus attired appeared in the 14 January 1935 issue of Time Magazine (50) — and he had billed him as a "convict" at the M.L.A. meeting in Philadelphia. The New York Herald Tribune, said Lomax, described Lead Belly as "a saturnine singer of the swamplands," (îNegro ï49) but "saturnine" was Lomax's word; it was not in the newspaper article. To Lomax, Huddie was saturnine: gloomy and unfathomable. To the Herald Tribune reporter, he was
“a powerful, knife-toting Negro, who has killed one man and seriously wounded another, but whose husky tenor and feathery, string-plucking fingers ineluctably charm the ears of those who listen. . . His voice causes brown-skinned women to swoon and produces a violently inverse effect on their husbands and lovers.” ("Lomax Arrives")
Huddie was excited to be in New York and obviously planned to do more than be an exhibit for these curious white folks. He had gone off on his own to check out the Harlem nightlife, much to the concern of Lomax, who was trying to make arrangements that would benefit his enterprise and, he thought, his protege (îNegroï 48). But the protege returned the morning after to the Lomax's flat in the Village, somewhat hungover.
"Lead Belly sang in Manhattan last week for University of Texas alumni. And John Lomax was nervous. Theatrical agents and radio scouts insisted on hearing his protege who had been out on a wild 24-hour rampage in Harlem. Until it was time for him to sing Lomax kept his hell-raising minstrel locked up in a coat room." ("Murderous Minstrel" 50)
The performance went off without mishap, the report went on to say, and Lead Belly was praised for his rich, clear voice. As a result, he was featured in the March of Time newsreel, which was a re-enactment of Lead Belly's release from Angola, his subsequent meeting with John Lomax, and his marriage to Martha Promise; in articles in the New York newspapers and national magazines; in dispatches from the Associated Press; and in a poem, "Ballad of a Ballad Singer," by William Rose Benet (J. Lomax, Negro 49). The American Record Company (A.R.C.) recorded at least forty-nine sides by Lead Belly during five separate studio sessions in early 1935: on January 23, 24, and 25; on February 5; and on March 25 (Dixon & Godrich 381). For some reason, the bulk of this material was not released until Columbia Records, which had taken over A.R.C., put out an album called "Leadbelly" (Col 30035) in the 1970's.
The famous March of Time newsreel (3:39):
During Huddie's 1935 New Year binge, he apparently ran across bandleader Cab Calloway, arguably the most popular black performer of the era. The Herald Tribune stated that Huddie claimed to have received job offers from Calloway, but in return had expressed his contempt for Cab. "He don't know nothin' 'bout singin'," said Huddie, according to the newspaper report.
Members of the New York press were fascinated by the prison record of the performer and they were charmed by his music. They could hardly understand the lyrics because of Leadbelly's thick plantation accent, but they were moved by the power and raw emotion of his performance. (Brand 74)
In mid-January Huddie, no doubt feeling like a fish out of water or, perhaps, in a goldfish bowl, sent for his lady-friend Martha Promise of Shreveport, and the two were married in Wilton, Connecticut. John Lomax had borrowed the country cottage of a friend in Wilton, and he and Alan had moved Huddie there, away from Harlem. Jerrold Hirsch (personal interview) points out that Lomax deliberately set up house in Wilton because he thought of Lead Belly as a "country" Negro, unable to cope with the poison of the big city. Of course, the genteel Connecticut countryside would have been a far cry from the backwoods of Caddo Parish. Also, John Lomax wanted to keep his "subject" to himself.
The wedding between Martha and Huddie was widely reported; even the Shreveport papers, usually oblivious to the social lives of "negroes," mentioned the occasion, though not on the bridal page. "Negro to Join Radio Artist Mate in New York," announced the Times of Shreveport:
Martha Promise Ledbetter, 30-year-old negro, will leave Shreveport next week to join her husband singing cowboy songs in the east for John A. Lomax, folk song composer. The woman formerly worked in a local laundry. (18)
That was the whole story and, brief though it was, it gave a rather skewed picture of what was happening. Martha was actually going to get married; she and her husband were not likely to be performing cowboy songs together; and if people do "compose" folk songs, John Lomax certainly didn't, he collected them. Although pretty harmless, the story is a good example of how information can be misleading. The Shreveport îJournalï took more interest in the event, running a four-paragraph story:
"Martha Promise Ledbetter, 30-year-old Shreveport Negro, will lay aside her duties checking garments at a local laundry next week and go to New York, where she will join her husband in singing for John A. Lomax, writer of cowboy and folk songs.
"The Ledbetter woman, who is one of the principal sopranos in the Silver Leaf Jubilee Choir, local negro singers, will have transportation provided by the Macmillan Publishing Co. and Lomax through C.M. "Red" Leman of the Hirsch and Leman Co. Lomax, the song writer, hails from Austin, Texas, and he recently published a book of cowboy and folk songs. Lomax heard Ledbetter sing and had him come to New York last November shortly after he and Martha Promise had married. Ledbetter is reported to be giving Lomax 'inspiration for his negro songs.'
"A few days ago Mr. Leman received a telegram from the Macmillan company asking if he would make transportation arrangements for the Ledbetter woman. He agreed to do so and later Lomax communicated with him. Money for the woman's expenses was wired here. (3)
Apparently the reason for announcing that the Ledbetters were already married had something to do with Lomax's fear of being accused of white slavery (J. Lomax, Negro 50). The term "white slavery" seems odd in this instance. The Herald Tribune had the most colorful article on the wedding celebration.
GAY LEADBELLY IN CINNAMON SUIT
WEDS MARTHA ON 46TH BIRTHDAY
Sheds White Gloves After Ceremony in Connecticut,
Seizes Guitar and Has Preacher and Deacon Tapping Feet.
WILTON, Conn., Jan.20 - Precisely at high noon today the saga of Lead Belly, which had begun forty-six year ago to the hour in the bayou swamps of Louisiana, reached an emotional climax in a 200-year-old house perched on a Revolutionary Connecticut hill near this village.
There was a picture of the bride and groom (above) and a solid two-column article which described their clothes, listed the guests, and gave an account of the party which followed the ceremony. Huddie was attired in "an enchanting" double-breasted cinnamon suit with red checks. Martha wore a black silk frock with a brightly striped yoke and sleeves. She had bought it "on sale" in Norwalk for three dollars, reduced from $12.95. They both wore white gloves for the ceremony, but Huddie removed his immediately afterwards, took up the guitar, and sang,
I'm in love with you, honey
You said you'd love me, too, honey
I'm in love with you, honey
It's funny but it's true, honey
None but you will do, honey.
The ceremony was performed by the bespectacled Rev. Samuel Weldon of the Bethel A. M. E. Church of Norwalk, who arrived in the company of three church deacons. John Lomax gave the bride away and Alan was the best man; he dropped the ring at a critical moment, but other than that, the ceremony went without a hitch. Alan's brother John, Jr., was also there, with Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, who owned the house, and two Lomax friends, Margaret Conklin and Gertrude E. King.
After Huddie sang his love song, one of the deacons let out a "Whoopee!" and everyone smiled and applauded. Then Huddie sang one of those blues songs in praise of darker skin-tones:
A yellow-skinned woman keeps you worried all the time
A yellow-skinned woman makes a moon-eyed man go blind
But a dark-skinned woman makes a jack rabbit hug a hound
And makes a brown-skinned preacher lay his Bible down.
Martha was slim and tall, with a large, infectious smile and dark skin. As Huddie finished the song and the applause died down, the Rev. Welden clutched his Bible tightly and uttered an embarassed, but good-humored, "Oh, my!" Deacon Leonard Brown laughed and told him he'd better "hold that Bible tight."
Lead Belly laid down his guitar and went into a tap dance. With a broomstick on his shoulder he shuffled and slapped and clicked his glistening heels in the ineffable rhythms of an impromptu buck and wing.
"Man, oh man, look at that boy dance," said Deacon Brown.
"Step it, step it!" cried Deacon Maurice Podd.
"He's goin' to town," shouted Deacon Sol Nichols.
"I never saw him dance like that before," said Mr. Lomax in astonishment. "He pulls new rabbits out of his hat every day."
"I never been so happy in my life," said Martha. ("Gay Lead Belly")
According to Lomax, Martha Promise adapted well to her changed circumstances. She was, indeed, a happy bride. She and Huddie divided up the household chores while the Lomaxes went about their ethnography. John was in the process of putting together the book which would come out as "Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly". They made many recordings of Huddie at Wilton, and deposited them in the Library of Congress (Dixon & Godrich 380). Huddie made the fires, carried the water, cleaned and drove the car, shoveled the snow, and helped Martha wash the dishes; Martha was the maid, cook, and laundrywoman. (J. Lomax, îNegroï 53) "He's a fine driver and keeps the car looking like new," said the elder Lomax. There's not a lazy bone in his body." (Lomax Arrives)
John Lomax set up a tour of colleges, mostly in New York state but including Harvard and Yale, and he and Huddie set off together once again, leaving Martha behind at Wilton.
For some of the audience, it was more fun than a bear-baiting, but just about as culturally valid. But many remembered that vital figure on the stage beating out the rhythms and pounding out the lyrics of "Goodnight, Irene," "The Rock Island Line," "The Muleskinner Blues," and "Silvy." When Leadbelly sang "Midnight Special" and "Boll Weevil," they began to foot-tap to their own surprised delight. Perhaps he was rough and crude, and his guitar-playing was often untutored, but Leadbelly was a man. And his music was full of a joyful singing that was rare among the choked-up megalopolitans.
(Brand 74)
There may have been good moments on the tour, but the overall impression from the Lomax narrative is that the relationship between the two men quickly deteriorated and John remembered why he wanted to leave Huddie in Shreveport in the first place.
"I reminded him that I was trying to help him, that I had made only a few requests of him, and these for his protection in a strange country; that I wanted him to eat good food, to take plenty of rest, not to play and sing for groups of Negroes late at night, and not to drink too much." (Negro 59)
Lomax felt that he had failed, that someone else would have to help Lead Belly. He was "threatened" over a money incident; Lead Belly "had swapped his comfortable black overcoat for a gray and green combination with loud checks;" and he was not one to moderate his drinking habits or stay away from the black sections of the cities they visited (60). Lomax had always considered Lead Belly to be a "natural," a sort of primitive who had no idea of money, law, or ethics, and who was possessed of virtually no self-restraint. ("Lomax Arrives") Eventually the whole sad business affected the poor man's health and he became "deathly sick," while Lead Belly had become sullen, demanding, overbearing and unreliable (see: saturnine); by the end of March, they all agreed to part company (Negro 62). Monday, 25 March, was the last A.R.C. recording date, and Tuesday was the Ledbetters' day of departure from New York. "The last glimpse we catch of this incorrigible wastrel and his woman, is to see them depart, in a Greyhound bus, for their beloved and more congenial Shreveport" (Engel 388).
This last sentence is taken from a scholarly review of Negro Folk Songs. The review is a harsh condemnation of Ledbetter combined with sympathy and reverence for the work of John Lomax. Possibly that is what Lomax was going for, because it is easy to interpret the book that way. A Time magazine writer in 1976 felt that the "Lomax version shows Leadbelly as both a genius and a dangerously wild creature" ("Cinema" 76). Huddie is said to have been very unhappy about Lomax's book, feeling that he was completely misunderstood by the author. According to Arnold S. Caplan, Ledbetter managed to stop distribution of the book and later wrote, "Lomax did not write nothing like I told him."
John Lomax was impressed with Lead Belly's shrewdness in his choice of tunes to go with his pardon lyrics, tunes which were "direct Negro modifications of white melodies, the sort of tunes the average white man likes best to hear Negroes sing" (232). It is difficult to reconcile this attitude of Lomax with his requirement that folk music be pure and unadulterated. If he was looking for a folksinger who had not been subject to white influences or to the music marketplace, Ledbetter seems like an odd choice; if he was looking for someone to attract attention, he found the right man.
 |
| John Lomax in the midst of interviewees. |
The song "Governor O.K. Allen," which the Lomaxes recorded and took to Baton Rouge for the Governor to hear, is more interesting for its overview of the whole political situation in regard to prison paroles than as an individual plea. It tells how general manager Himes, had seen the need to relieve overcrowding, and how he went to Warden Long (Huey P. Long's cousin) to tell him about the arrangements he and the Governor were making to free a certain number of prisoners. A personal note comes in when Huddie recounts seeing an article in the Times of Shreveport which told of the release of a certain number of prisoners, and how that made him think of his woman at home. He then praises Governor Allen for his kindness in reuniting so many men with their wives, talks about Lieutenant-Governor Fournet, and closes with a verse like the end of the Governor Pat Neff song:
Had you, Governor O.K. Allen, like you got me,
I'd wake up in the morning, let you out on reprieve.
It would be interesting to speculate on a meeting between Leadbelly and Huey Long, if the latter had remained governor instead of entering the national political arena. But tragically, as it turned out, Long's ambitions went far beyond the confines of Louisiana, so he never received Leadbelly's plea for a pardon in musical form. As far as we know. In fact, the plea may never even have reached the desk of O.K. Allen.
On August 1, Huddie Ledbetter was released from Angola and though Louisiana prison authorities denied that the song was the reason, John Lomax said he liked to believe otherwise (J. Lomax, Negro 232). In a letter dated 13 May, 1939, (see 1939 in this blog) Warden L. A. Jones of Angola wrote to the Chief Probabtion Officer of the Court of General Sessions in New York with the following information about Ledbetter.
“This man has been recipient of wide publicity in various magazines of national circulation, the story usually being that he sang or wrote such moving appeals to the Governor that he was pardoned. Such statements have no foundation in fact. He received no clemency, and his discharge was a routine matter under the good time law which applies to all first and second offenders.”
Huddie made his way back to Shreveport and renewed his relationship with Martha Promise. Martha (b.1906, and thus about 17 years younger than Huddie) was originally from Longwood, near the Jeter Plantation, and had known Huddie all her life. She had a twin sister, Mary, the mother of Tiny Robinson who has been instrumental in keeping the Leadbelly flame burning. (See Leadbelly Foundation).
He must have felt a strong connection to John Lomax, however, because he wrote him four letters asking for employment; he was eventually rewarded with a telegram arranging a meeting in Marshall, Tex., a city thirty miles west of Shreveport, close to Huddie's Texas family home.
Lomax enjoyed recounting the story of their meeting in Marshall on September 1; it appeared not only in the book on Lead Belly published in 1936, but also as a re-enactment in a March of Time newsreel (Ramsey, "Leadbelly" 17), in a Time Magazine article, and in a New York Herald Tribune story, 3rd January 1935:
I was sitting in a hotel in (Marshall) Texas when I felt a tap on my shoulder. I looked up and there was Lead Belly with his guitar, his knife and a sugar bag packed with all his earthly belongings. He said, "Boss, here I is." I took him up to my room and asked him what he was doing there and he replied, "Boss, I came here to be your man. I belong to you."
I said, "Well, after all, I don't know you. You're a murderer." He said, "Boss, it wasn't my fault. They attacked me. I had to fight back." I told him that as a matter of fact I did need a driver for my car and might be able to use him, but I added, "If some day you decide on some lonely road that you want my money and my car, don't use your knife on me. Just tell me and I'll give them to you. I have a wife and children back home, and they'd miss me. ("Lomax Arrives")
However it came about, and it seemed like a mutually beneficial arrangement, the two set off on a tour of Southern penitentiaries, looking particularly for Negro work songs still used by black gang labor. Their first stop was Little Rock, Arkansas, where Lomax, as was his custom, visited with the state governor to get approval for his quest. During four days spent in Little Rock, recording in the Negro district, Lomax found how useful Lead Belly's playing and singing could be: when other singers heard him, they came forward with their own material. The same thing happened subsequently in the prisons: through Lead Belly's singing, the convicts were quickly able to understand what was required of them (J. Lomax, (Negro 37).
In “Negro Folks Songs as Sung by Leadbelly,” Lomax says he had no idea what was going on in Lead Belly's mind (35), yet the written word constantly reveals the latter's thoughts. When new clothes were provided to take the place of his Angola prison garb, Huddie's "face was aglow with happiness." Lomax had him keep the prison clothes, "though he always hated to wear them" (36), so that he could don them for concerts, especially for white audiences. When Lead Belly managed to commandeer a free tank of gas from the State of Arkansas, over Lomax' mild protestations, he said, "Shucks! White folks always has plenty of everything. Dey won't miss a little gas." And more than all else, Huddie was clearly depressed by the constant visits to prisons: "I'm tired of lookin' at niggers in the penitenshuh. I wish we could go somewheres else" (39).
There were visits back to Shreveport for Huddie to see Martha Promise and to show off his new clothes and job — not a particularly strange desire on his part. There was also a trip to the Lomax home in Austin, Texas, where Huddie composed a song about the family. The song, "Elnora," was based on a prison work song; it was also the name of the Lomax maid:
El-nora/ O Lawd, Lawd/ El-nora/ O Lawd, Lawd.
The verses were simply names of family members: John the bossman, John Jr., Alan the little bossman, etc., and the address of the Lomax home, but everyone seemed to enjoy and appreciate it (Negro 95).
When John Lomax decided that the penitentiary tour was over, he dropped Lead Belly in Shreveport, determined to have nothing further to do with him (43). There had been too much stress and friction beween the two; their backgrounds and agendas were simply too far opposed. John Lomax was a serious scholar in his mid-sixties who probably felt himself too old to be tramping around the countryside; Huddie was a compulsive musician, mid-forties, but in excellent physical condition due to years of hard labor; he liked to drink and party, especially with others of like mind. It was not an ideal match, yet together they accomplished a great deal, and at this point they were only half way through their adventure.
Lomax returned to Austin in November, and Huddie wrote him several letters begging to be taken on the upcoming New York trip. Lomax had been asked to make a Folk Song presentation at the annual meeting of the Modern Language Association in Philadelphia at year's end, and he was asked to bring Lead Belly. “American Ballads and Folk Songs,” meanwhile, had just been published, and there was some scholarly interest in the Lomaxes' activities. Alan urged that Lead Belly be included in the trip and at last his father threw "caution to the winds," and agreed (J. Lomax, Negro 43).
Early in December, 1934, Huddie was picked up in Shreveport and squeezed into the car which held the recording equipment, three people, two guitars (Alan played, too), and various personal effects. There were more penitentiaries along the way, in Georgia and North Carolina, before this odd trio arrived in Washington, D.C., where the attention started to come from white intellectuals. This was to be the core of Huddie Ledbetter's paying audience for the rest of his life; they did not pay well, but they did like his music.
In Philadelphia, meanwhile, the interest of newspapers had been aroused by his queer name. Reporters crowded into my room, while I hid Lead Belly. His singing and playing while seated on the top center of the banquet table at the smoker before a staid and dignified professorial audience smacked of sensationalism. (Negro 45)
Ninety-three people turned up the next day at 9:00 a.m., December 29, at the Popular Literature section, to hear "Comments on Negro Folk Songs" by John Lomax, illustrated by the singing and playing of the "Negro convict Lead Belly of Louisiana" (PMLA Supplement 1325). That evening a group of intellectuals in evening dress, at Bryn Mawr College, "listened curiously to 'Dicklicker's Holler' and 'Whoa, Back, Buck!'" (J. Lomax, Negro 45) The latter, an ox-driving song, contains grunts, yelps, and the unforgettable refrain:
Whoa, back, buck and gee by the lamb,
Who made the backband?
WHOA God-DAMN!
"Dicklicker" was the name of a fellow convict in Texas, and Huddie simply ascribes the "holler" to him. He offers no further explanation of the name (îNegroï 116). Several years later, Huddie made a recording of "Dick Ligger's Holler"; this may be a closer rendering of the convict's name, but Lomax evidently preferred the single word (Ramsey, "Sessions" 4).
On New Year's Day, 1935, the two Lomaxes brought Lead Belly to the "city of [his] dreams," New York. Apart from discovering that his color barred him from getting a hotel room south of 110th Street — he stayed at the Harlem YMCA — Lead Belly made quite a splash in the city. He played for a group from Columbia and New York Universities on New Year's Day and was given some media coverage. According to John Lomax, the term "bad nigger" only added to his attraction (Negro 49). Obviously, Lomax had hoped for something like this. After all, he had made him keep his prison clothes for future use ·—· a photograph of him thus attired appeared in the 14 January 1935 issue of Time Magazine (50) — and he had billed him as a "convict" at the M.L.A. meeting in Philadelphia. The New York Herald Tribune, said Lomax, described Lead Belly as "a saturnine singer of the swamplands," (îNegro ï49) but "saturnine" was Lomax's word; it was not in the newspaper article. To Lomax, Huddie was saturnine: gloomy and unfathomable. To the Herald Tribune reporter, he was
“a powerful, knife-toting Negro, who has killed one man and seriously wounded another, but whose husky tenor and feathery, string-plucking fingers ineluctably charm the ears of those who listen. . . His voice causes brown-skinned women to swoon and produces a violently inverse effect on their husbands and lovers.” ("Lomax Arrives")
Huddie was excited to be in New York and obviously planned to do more than be an exhibit for these curious white folks. He had gone off on his own to check out the Harlem nightlife, much to the concern of Lomax, who was trying to make arrangements that would benefit his enterprise and, he thought, his protege (îNegroï 48). But the protege returned the morning after to the Lomax's flat in the Village, somewhat hungover.
"Lead Belly sang in Manhattan last week for University of Texas alumni. And John Lomax was nervous. Theatrical agents and radio scouts insisted on hearing his protege who had been out on a wild 24-hour rampage in Harlem. Until it was time for him to sing Lomax kept his hell-raising minstrel locked up in a coat room." ("Murderous Minstrel" 50)
The performance went off without mishap, the report went on to say, and Lead Belly was praised for his rich, clear voice. As a result, he was featured in the March of Time newsreel, which was a re-enactment of Lead Belly's release from Angola, his subsequent meeting with John Lomax, and his marriage to Martha Promise; in articles in the New York newspapers and national magazines; in dispatches from the Associated Press; and in a poem, "Ballad of a Ballad Singer," by William Rose Benet (J. Lomax, Negro 49). The American Record Company (A.R.C.) recorded at least forty-nine sides by Lead Belly during five separate studio sessions in early 1935: on January 23, 24, and 25; on February 5; and on March 25 (Dixon & Godrich 381). For some reason, the bulk of this material was not released until Columbia Records, which had taken over A.R.C., put out an album called "Leadbelly" (Col 30035) in the 1970's.
The famous March of Time newsreel (3:39):
During Huddie's 1935 New Year binge, he apparently ran across bandleader Cab Calloway, arguably the most popular black performer of the era. The Herald Tribune stated that Huddie claimed to have received job offers from Calloway, but in return had expressed his contempt for Cab. "He don't know nothin' 'bout singin'," said Huddie, according to the newspaper report.
Members of the New York press were fascinated by the prison record of the performer and they were charmed by his music. They could hardly understand the lyrics because of Leadbelly's thick plantation accent, but they were moved by the power and raw emotion of his performance. (Brand 74)
In mid-January Huddie, no doubt feeling like a fish out of water or, perhaps, in a goldfish bowl, sent for his lady-friend Martha Promise of Shreveport, and the two were married in Wilton, Connecticut. John Lomax had borrowed the country cottage of a friend in Wilton, and he and Alan had moved Huddie there, away from Harlem. Jerrold Hirsch (personal interview) points out that Lomax deliberately set up house in Wilton because he thought of Lead Belly as a "country" Negro, unable to cope with the poison of the big city. Of course, the genteel Connecticut countryside would have been a far cry from the backwoods of Caddo Parish. Also, John Lomax wanted to keep his "subject" to himself.
The wedding between Martha and Huddie was widely reported; even the Shreveport papers, usually oblivious to the social lives of "negroes," mentioned the occasion, though not on the bridal page. "Negro to Join Radio Artist Mate in New York," announced the Times of Shreveport:
Martha Promise Ledbetter, 30-year-old negro, will leave Shreveport next week to join her husband singing cowboy songs in the east for John A. Lomax, folk song composer. The woman formerly worked in a local laundry. (18)
That was the whole story and, brief though it was, it gave a rather skewed picture of what was happening. Martha was actually going to get married; she and her husband were not likely to be performing cowboy songs together; and if people do "compose" folk songs, John Lomax certainly didn't, he collected them. Although pretty harmless, the story is a good example of how information can be misleading. The Shreveport îJournalï took more interest in the event, running a four-paragraph story:
"Martha Promise Ledbetter, 30-year-old Shreveport Negro, will lay aside her duties checking garments at a local laundry next week and go to New York, where she will join her husband in singing for John A. Lomax, writer of cowboy and folk songs.
"The Ledbetter woman, who is one of the principal sopranos in the Silver Leaf Jubilee Choir, local negro singers, will have transportation provided by the Macmillan Publishing Co. and Lomax through C.M. "Red" Leman of the Hirsch and Leman Co. Lomax, the song writer, hails from Austin, Texas, and he recently published a book of cowboy and folk songs. Lomax heard Ledbetter sing and had him come to New York last November shortly after he and Martha Promise had married. Ledbetter is reported to be giving Lomax 'inspiration for his negro songs.'
"A few days ago Mr. Leman received a telegram from the Macmillan company asking if he would make transportation arrangements for the Ledbetter woman. He agreed to do so and later Lomax communicated with him. Money for the woman's expenses was wired here. (3)
Apparently the reason for announcing that the Ledbetters were already married had something to do with Lomax's fear of being accused of white slavery (J. Lomax, Negro 50). The term "white slavery" seems odd in this instance. The Herald Tribune had the most colorful article on the wedding celebration.
GAY LEADBELLY IN CINNAMON SUIT
WEDS MARTHA ON 46TH BIRTHDAY
Sheds White Gloves After Ceremony in Connecticut,
Seizes Guitar and Has Preacher and Deacon Tapping Feet.
WILTON, Conn., Jan.20 - Precisely at high noon today the saga of Lead Belly, which had begun forty-six year ago to the hour in the bayou swamps of Louisiana, reached an emotional climax in a 200-year-old house perched on a Revolutionary Connecticut hill near this village.
There was a picture of the bride and groom (above) and a solid two-column article which described their clothes, listed the guests, and gave an account of the party which followed the ceremony. Huddie was attired in "an enchanting" double-breasted cinnamon suit with red checks. Martha wore a black silk frock with a brightly striped yoke and sleeves. She had bought it "on sale" in Norwalk for three dollars, reduced from $12.95. They both wore white gloves for the ceremony, but Huddie removed his immediately afterwards, took up the guitar, and sang,
I'm in love with you, honey
You said you'd love me, too, honey
I'm in love with you, honey
It's funny but it's true, honey
None but you will do, honey.
The ceremony was performed by the bespectacled Rev. Samuel Weldon of the Bethel A. M. E. Church of Norwalk, who arrived in the company of three church deacons. John Lomax gave the bride away and Alan was the best man; he dropped the ring at a critical moment, but other than that, the ceremony went without a hitch. Alan's brother John, Jr., was also there, with Mary Elizabeth Barnicle, who owned the house, and two Lomax friends, Margaret Conklin and Gertrude E. King.
After Huddie sang his love song, one of the deacons let out a "Whoopee!" and everyone smiled and applauded. Then Huddie sang one of those blues songs in praise of darker skin-tones:
A yellow-skinned woman keeps you worried all the time
A yellow-skinned woman makes a moon-eyed man go blind
But a dark-skinned woman makes a jack rabbit hug a hound
And makes a brown-skinned preacher lay his Bible down.
Martha was slim and tall, with a large, infectious smile and dark skin. As Huddie finished the song and the applause died down, the Rev. Welden clutched his Bible tightly and uttered an embarassed, but good-humored, "Oh, my!" Deacon Leonard Brown laughed and told him he'd better "hold that Bible tight."
Lead Belly laid down his guitar and went into a tap dance. With a broomstick on his shoulder he shuffled and slapped and clicked his glistening heels in the ineffable rhythms of an impromptu buck and wing.
"Man, oh man, look at that boy dance," said Deacon Brown.
"Step it, step it!" cried Deacon Maurice Podd.
"He's goin' to town," shouted Deacon Sol Nichols.
"I never saw him dance like that before," said Mr. Lomax in astonishment. "He pulls new rabbits out of his hat every day."
"I never been so happy in my life," said Martha. ("Gay Lead Belly")
According to Lomax, Martha Promise adapted well to her changed circumstances. She was, indeed, a happy bride. She and Huddie divided up the household chores while the Lomaxes went about their ethnography. John was in the process of putting together the book which would come out as "Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly". They made many recordings of Huddie at Wilton, and deposited them in the Library of Congress (Dixon & Godrich 380). Huddie made the fires, carried the water, cleaned and drove the car, shoveled the snow, and helped Martha wash the dishes; Martha was the maid, cook, and laundrywoman. (J. Lomax, îNegroï 53) "He's a fine driver and keeps the car looking like new," said the elder Lomax. There's not a lazy bone in his body." (Lomax Arrives)
John Lomax set up a tour of colleges, mostly in New York state but including Harvard and Yale, and he and Huddie set off together once again, leaving Martha behind at Wilton.
For some of the audience, it was more fun than a bear-baiting, but just about as culturally valid. But many remembered that vital figure on the stage beating out the rhythms and pounding out the lyrics of "Goodnight, Irene," "The Rock Island Line," "The Muleskinner Blues," and "Silvy." When Leadbelly sang "Midnight Special" and "Boll Weevil," they began to foot-tap to their own surprised delight. Perhaps he was rough and crude, and his guitar-playing was often untutored, but Leadbelly was a man. And his music was full of a joyful singing that was rare among the choked-up megalopolitans.
(Brand 74)
There may have been good moments on the tour, but the overall impression from the Lomax narrative is that the relationship between the two men quickly deteriorated and John remembered why he wanted to leave Huddie in Shreveport in the first place.
"I reminded him that I was trying to help him, that I had made only a few requests of him, and these for his protection in a strange country; that I wanted him to eat good food, to take plenty of rest, not to play and sing for groups of Negroes late at night, and not to drink too much." (Negro 59)
Lomax felt that he had failed, that someone else would have to help Lead Belly. He was "threatened" over a money incident; Lead Belly "had swapped his comfortable black overcoat for a gray and green combination with loud checks;" and he was not one to moderate his drinking habits or stay away from the black sections of the cities they visited (60). Lomax had always considered Lead Belly to be a "natural," a sort of primitive who had no idea of money, law, or ethics, and who was possessed of virtually no self-restraint. ("Lomax Arrives") Eventually the whole sad business affected the poor man's health and he became "deathly sick," while Lead Belly had become sullen, demanding, overbearing and unreliable (see: saturnine); by the end of March, they all agreed to part company (Negro 62). Monday, 25 March, was the last A.R.C. recording date, and Tuesday was the Ledbetters' day of departure from New York. "The last glimpse we catch of this incorrigible wastrel and his woman, is to see them depart, in a Greyhound bus, for their beloved and more congenial Shreveport" (Engel 388).
This last sentence is taken from a scholarly review of Negro Folk Songs. The review is a harsh condemnation of Ledbetter combined with sympathy and reverence for the work of John Lomax. Possibly that is what Lomax was going for, because it is easy to interpret the book that way. A Time magazine writer in 1976 felt that the "Lomax version shows Leadbelly as both a genius and a dangerously wild creature" ("Cinema" 76). Huddie is said to have been very unhappy about Lomax's book, feeling that he was completely misunderstood by the author. According to Arnold S. Caplan, Ledbetter managed to stop distribution of the book and later wrote, "Lomax did not write nothing like I told him."
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