Scholarly Lomax and street-smart Leadbelly got carried away by the lure of publicity. Both knew Leadbelly had killed only one man-probably in self-defense-in Texas, in 1917; he sang for the governor, who pardoned him in 1925. He was in Angola for a 1930 assault, and Lomax didn’t spring him: he got out for good behavior. Leadbelly soon resented Lomax trotting him out in prison stripes: back in Louisiana he’d worked the fields in starched overalls; after he left Lomax, he performed in a suit and tie. His song “You Don’t Know My Mind” took on new significance: in 1935 he hired lawyers to stop what he saw as Lomax’s exploitation. But their brief partnership changed American music. Leadbelly was the first true folk performer popular with sophisticated audiences: this, even more than his powerful voice and famous songs -“Goodnight, Irene,” “Pick a Bale o’ Cotton”-was his contribution.
By the time he began making records, Leadbelly’s blues, work songs and play-party numbers were too “country” for blacks; he bombed at Harlem’s Apollo Theatre in 1936. Still, he settled in New York and became the major figure in the first folkmusic revival; his core audience was white leftists. He was an odd fellow traveler: he wrote a campaign song for 1940 Republican presidential candidate Wendell Willkie because Willkie supported civil rights. “When he found white people willing to help him,” Pete Seeger recalls, “he simply was willing to ignore our radical politics.”
Like their remarkably evenhanded treatment of the break with Lomax, Wolfe and Lornell’s account of Leadbelly and the leftists suggests that “exploitation” is the wrong word. Leadbelly was a gifted, ambitious man who got, and gave, some timely help. He was never rich-he died before Seeger and the Weavers made “Goodnight, Irene” a major pop hit of 1950-but his one-bedroom apartment in New York’s East Village was a gathering place for singers. Woody Guthrie slept on the Murphy bed; bluesman Brownie McGhee crashed there for a year, finally leaving because he felt stifled by the house rules: necktie, shined shoes, guitar carried in a case, not slung over your back. But Leadbelly had come a long way to get to where he was, and who he was. Readers of this book will understand.
