Another Type of WorkSong (for Huddie Ledbetter) Lead Belly was born in Louisiana somewhere around 1888. Living the often violent life of an itinerate musician he found himself twice imprisoned for murder. In 1933 his reputation reached the Lomax family, who, after no small personal tragedy of their own, were traveling the Southern states, recording American work songs, ballads and blues in prisons, penitentiaries, and brothels. Moving around the country in their Ford sedan, John, and his sons John Jr. and Alan, set about recording such artists as Woody Guthrie, Muddy Waters and Jelly Roll Morton. They came across Lead Belly in the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola, and with their state-of-the-art acetate disc recorder they cut several sides together over the next few months. They soon parted ways; Lead Belly to a fifteen year career as a solo artist, and the Lomax’s continuing their collection of folk musics for the archives of the Library of Congress, and the Works Progress Administration.

Despite the difficult relationship between the academic Lomax’s and the hard-living blues artist, it is through this short-lived collaboration that Lead Belly’s work reached a wider audience, of which I count myself a part. My father, following a period of time working in the Caribbean after leaving school in 1964, had become interested in what was still at that time called ‘negro music’. A Presto vinyl record (PRE 689, 1965) containing a selection of Lead Belly’s early Lomax recordings, is one of the earliest artifacts of any kind that I remember from my childhood. For this project, I was interested in engaging with a populist folk tradition, in the hope such a strategy would enable me to think about electroacoustic composition in a new way. The sound material selected, was by necessity, lo-fidelity (A short promotional film made by Lomax and Lead Belly, found on YouTube). The surface noise in the piece, the glitches, and crackles, are inherent to the source material, and are intended to reference the sounds of old blues records, and to address issues of the value of distribution of heavily compressed audio on the internet, thought of here, as a repository of cultural memory.

The piece was entirely constructed from Lead Belly’s voice and signature 12-string guitar.1 × Buy Photo Huddie William Ledbetter is born on a Louisiana plantation, the son of a sharecropper. As a boy, he picks cotton with his parents. He gets his first guitar in his mid-teens. After a fight, Lead Belly is sentenced to a short stint in prison. He served longer terms — once for killing a man — at Texas’s Central Unit prison in 1918 and Louisiana’s Angola Prison Farm in 1930. Folklorist John Lomax and his son, Alan, discover Lead Belly while visiting Louisiana’s Angola Prison Farm and are the first to record him. mcl hoodieLead Belly’s relationship with the Lomaxes would be productive musically but complicated. marine biology hoodiesMoses Asch, owner of what would become the Folkways label, signs Lead Belly, who will record with Asch for the rest of his life. umbreon hoodie sale

Though critically acclaimed, the records do not sell. Lead Belly’s royalties from his first two releases: $11.58. Diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS, Lead Belly cuts short a European tour and returns to New York. Only months after his death, a cover of “Goodnight Irene” by the Weavers, a group that included his friend Pete Seeger, would hit No. 1 on the charts. Lonnie Donegan records “Rock Island Line,” which becomes a Top 10 hit in England. Donegan introduces Lead Belly to a generation of British youths, among them John Lennon, Paul McCartney and future Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant. fanshawe college clothing store hoursCreedence Clearwater Revival includes two Lead Belly songs, “The Midnight Special” and “Cotton Fields,” on its Top 10 album “Willy and the Poor Boys,” and the Beach Boys have an international hit with their version of “Cotton Fields.” tna hoodies prices

Other musicians who have since covered Lead Belly: Lucinda Williams, Nirvana and Jack White. The Smithsonian Institution acquires Asch’s Folkways label, hires archivist Jeff Place and curator Tony Seeger, and begins sorting through thousands of recordings. The first Lead Belly recording released after the sale comes out in 1989. Nirvana plays “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” during the wildly popular “MTV Unplugged” series. Kurt Cobain had played guitar on the song, also known as “Black Girl” and “In the Pines,” when fellow Seattle musician Mark Lanegan recorded it in 1990. wholesale hoodies in mumbaiAt a Lead Belly tribute organized by the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss play a pair of Lead Belly songs. bbt hoodiesThat leads to the two working together on their Grammy-winning 2007 collaboration, “Raising Sand.”

The “Legend of Lead Belly” documentary premieres on the Smithsonian Channel, a day before the release of a five-CD career-spanning box set, “Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection.” Negro Folk Songs As Sung by Lead Belly is a multi-author work, the result of a collaboration between Alan Lomax, John A. Lomax, Huddie Ledbetter, and George Herzog. Each man had a distinct combination of privilege and disprivilege, and, as a result, his own effect on Ledbetter's representation within Negro Folk Songs. The representation of Ledbetter in Negro Folk Songs aligns strongly with pre-existing cultural stereotypes about African American men. Based on extensive research of the working papers to Negro Folk Songs at the Library of Congress, in this thesis I argue that the Lomaxes shift Ledbetter's representation from his initial interviews through erasure, addition, censorship, and framing, and that Ledbetter resists this representation by Signifyin(g). SchoolTHE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL

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