Duncan Wu

The irrepressible musical gift of Huddie Ledbetter

Before his genius was widely recognised, the blues singer known as Lead Belly survived not only America’s most brutal prisons but cruel betrayal by his racist ‘manager’

Huddie Ledbetter in later life. His wife described him as a gentle man, and his best friends insisted: ‘He loved children and he loved people’. [Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images] 
issue 20 July 2024
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  • Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly’s Truths from Jim Crow’s Lies

    Sheila Curran Bernard

    Cambridge University Press, pp. 243, £25

Huddie Ledbetter, better known by the prison moniker Lead Belly, was a musical genius born in the southern United States just as Jim Crow laws were starting to bite. He fell foul of an unapologetically racist legal system and ended up serving on a chain gang in 1915, later doing time in state penitentiaries in Texas (1918-25), Louisiana (1930-34) and at Rikers Island in New York (1939).

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