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'Huddie Ledbetter Was A Helluva Man'
 |
Listen to a Clip (130K) |
Words by Lorre Wyatt with additional lines by Pete Seeger. Music by Lorre Wyatt. © 1988 Roots and Branches Music (BMI) |
"The best and loudest singer that I ever run onto his name was Huddie Ledbetter and we all called him Leadbelly, his arms were like big stove pipes, and his face was powerful and he picked the twelve-string guitar." - Woody Guthrie
Huddie Ledbetter, nicknamed Leadbelly, died in December 1949, age sixty-three, just six months before his song "Goodnight Irene" was to sell two million copies and make Hit Parade history. Until the last three years of his life he had recorded barely more than a few dozen songs, never made any Hollywood movie appearances, and only occasional radio appearances. Today, through his recordings, he is world-famous as one of the great singers of folk songs of this century. Songs he composed, or helped put together out of the fragments of older tunes, or adapted into the form in which we all know them now, have sold in the tens of millions: "Goodnight Irene", "Bring Me A Little Water, Silvy", "Midnight Special", "Rock Island Line", "Kisses Sweeter Than Wine" (the tune), "Old Cotton Fields at Home", and many others.
Leadbelly came out of the Deep South. John and Alan Lomax, on one of their folk song collecting trips in 1933, met him in prison and arranged for him to tour northern colleges with them the following year, demonstrating Negro folk music. He made an explosive impact on everyone he met.
But John Lomax was a conservative Texan. Leadbelly, finding a freedom up North which he had not known before, declared his independence, and settled down with his wife Martha in New York. He never wanted to live in the South again.
Woody Guthrie and I first met Huddie when he was in his fifties. He was gray-haired, not tall - perhaps five feet ten - but compactly built, and he moved with the soft grace of an athlete. He had a powerful ringing voice, and his muscular hands moved like a dancer over the strings of his huge twelve-stringed guitar.
Leadbelly and Martha had a little flat in New York's lower East Side. Woody and I visited him often there and made music together with him till the neighbors complained of the noise.
He was determined to build a successful career as a musician. If he could have lived ten more years he would have seen all his dreams come true - young people by the millions learning and singing his songs. But there was not such interest in folk music then. In the 30's and 40's the Hit Parade was dominated by the big bands, and all entertainment, to be successful, had to be geared towards Hollywood standards.
Huddie got occasional jobs singing for schools and colleges, or at little parties where they were raising money for some cause, like helping Loyalist Spain. We loved him, but I wish we hadn't been his only audience.
Too bad he was never in movies. He was an expert at country-style buck-and-wing dancing. In one number he would imitate the gait of all the women of Shreveport, Louisiana, high and low. And another dance accompanied the story of a duck hunter. Hs guitar became the gun. Pow!
One year he started having to use a cane to go on stage. His voice, always soft and husky when speaking, still rang out high on the melodies, but his hands grew stiffer and less certain on the guitar. Then one day he was gone, and we were left with regrets that we had not treasured him more.
Perhaps this modern age will not produce again such a combination of genuine folk artist and virtuoso. Nowadays when the artist becomes a virtuoso, there is a greater tendency to cease being "folk". When Leadbelly rearranged a folk melody he had come across - he often did - he did it in line with his own great folk traditions.
Lorre Wyatt started this song off. He had written lots of good songs, but was unsatisfied with this. He had a good tune, but too many verses. We wanted to see each other, so we said "Let's set ourselves the job of finishing this song." And we spent about six hours boiling down his verses, and so we got all of Huddie's life into five verses. This was a brand new song when I recorded it here, for the first time.
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