43 Facts About Lead Belly

1.

Lead Belly usually played a twelve-string guitar, but he played the piano, mandolin, harmonica, violin, and windjammer.

2.

Lead Belly's songs covered a wide range of genres, including gospel music, blues, and folk music, as well as a number of topics, including women, liquor, prison life, racism, cowboys, work, sailors, cattle herding, and dancing.

3.

Lead Belly wrote songs about people in the news, such as Franklin D Roosevelt, Adolf Hitler, Jean Harlow, Jack Johnson, the Scottsboro Boys and Howard Hughes.

4.

Lead Belly was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 and the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame in 2008.

5.

The younger of two children, Lead Belly was born Huddie William Ledbetter to Sallie Brown and Wesley Ledbetter on a plantation near Mooringsport, Louisiana.

6.

The Lead Belly Foundation gives his birth date as January 20,1889, his grave marker gives the year 1889, and his 1942 draft registration card states January 23,1889.

7.

Lead Belly performed to Shreveport audiences in St Paul's Bottoms, a notorious red-light district.

8.

Lead Belly began to develop his own style of music after exposure to the various musical influences on Shreveport's Fannin Street, a row of saloons, brothels, and dance halls in the Bottoms.

9.

In December 1934, Lead Belly participated in a "smoker" at a Modern Language Association meeting at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where the senior Lomax had a prior lecture engagement.

10.

Lead Belly was written up in the press as a convict who had sung his way out of prison.

11.

In March 1935, Lead Belly accompanied John Lomax on a previously scheduled two-week lecture tour of colleges and universities in the Northeast, culminating at Harvard.

12.

Lead Belly gave him and Martha enough money to return by bus to Louisiana.

13.

Lead Belly gave Martha the money her husband had earned during three months of performing, but in installments, on the pretext that Lead Belly would spend it all on drinking if he was given a lump sum.

14.

From Louisiana, Lead Belly successfully sued Lomax for both the full amount of his earnings and release from his management contract.

15.

In January 1936, Lead Belly returned to New York on his own, without John Lomax, in an attempted comeback.

16.

Lead Belly performed twice a day at Harlem's Apollo Theater during the Easter season.

17.

Lead Belly failed to stir the enthusiasm of Harlem audiences.

18.

Lead Belly developed his own style of singing and explaining his repertoire in the context of Southern black culture, having learned from his participation in Lomax's college lectures.

19.

Lead Belly was especially successful with his repertoire of children's game songs.

20.

Lead Belly was known to support Wendell Willkie, the centrist Republican candidate for president, for whom he wrote a campaign song.

21.

Lead Belly wrote the song "The Bourgeois Blues", which has class-conscious and anti-racist lyrics.

22.

In 1939, Lead Belly was convicted and sentenced again to prison.

23.

Lead Belly performed in nightclubs with Josh White, becoming a fixture in New York City's surging folk music scene and befriending the likes of Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Woody Guthrie, and Pete Seeger, all fellow performers on Back Where I Come From.

24.

In 1940, Lead Belly recorded for RCA Victor, one of the biggest record companies at the time.

25.

In 1941, Lead Belly was introduced to Moses "Moe" Asch by mutual friends.

26.

Between 1941 and 1944, Lead Belly released three albums under the Asch Recordings label.

27.

Lead Belly lodged with a studio guitar player on Merrywood Drive in Laurel Canyon.

28.

In 1949, Lead Belly had a regular radio show, Folk Songs of America, broadcast on station WNYC in New York, on Henrietta Yurchenco's show on Sunday nights.

29.

Lead Belly was the first American country blues musician to achieve success in Europe.

30.

Lead Belly was buried in the Shiloh Baptist Church cemetery, in Mooringsport, Louisiana, 8 miles west of Blanchard, in Caddo Parish.

31.

Lead Belly is honored with a statue across from the Caddo Parish Courthouse, in Shreveport.

32.

Lead Belly was imprisoned multiple times beginning in 1915, when he was convicted of carrying a pistol, and sentenced to time on the Harrison County chain gang.

33.

Lead Belly later escaped and found work in nearby Bowie County under the assumed name of Walter Boyd.

34.

Lead Belly nearly killed his attacker at the time with his own knife.

35.

Lead Belly was credited with good behavior, which included entertaining the guards and fellow prisoners.

36.

Lead Belly appealed for mercy to Neff's known religious beliefs.

37.

Lead Belly brought guests to the prison on Sunday picnics to hear Ledbetter perform.

38.

In 1939, Lead Belly served his final jail term for assault after stabbing a man in a fight in Manhattan.

39.

Lead Belly styled himself "King of the Twelve-String Guitar", and despite his use of other instruments, such as the accordion, the most enduring image of Lead Belly as a performer is wielding his unusually large Stella twelve-string.

40.

Lead Belly played with finger picks much of the time, using a thumb pick to provide walking bass lines described as "tricky" and "inventive", and occasionally to strum.

41.

Lead Belly's tunings are debated by both modern and contemporary musicians and blues enthusiasts alike, but it seems to be a down-tuned variant of standard tuning.

42.

Lead Belly's playing style was popularized by Pete Seeger, who adopted the twelve-string guitar in the 1950s and released an instructional LP and book using Lead Belly as an exemplar of technique.

43.

Bob Dylan credits Lead Belly for getting him into folk music.