American Folklife Center
The American Folklife Center was created in 1976 by the U.S. Congress to "preserve and
present" American folklife through research, documentation, archival preservation,
reference service, live performance, exhibition, publication, and training. A division
of the Library of Congress, the Center has a staff of about 20 professionals who
conduct programs under the general guidance of the Librarian of Congress and a Board
of Trustees. The American Folklife Center serves federal and state agencies, national,
international, regional, and local organizations; scholars, researchers, and students;
and the general public.
The Folklife Center's programs and projects have included field research and
documentation; conferences on folk custom, folk art, ethnic musical heritage, archival
practice, and cultural conservation; online presentations of selected collections, a
directory of folklife resources in the United States; books on ethnic recordings, the
American cowboy, and Italian-American folklife in the West; a quarterly newsletter;
and a performance series.
In 1978, the Archive of Folk Culture came under the supervision of the American
Folklife Center. The Archive's collections contain over one million photographs,
manuscripts, audio recordings, and moving images representing forms of folklife from
the United States and around the world. Created in 1928, it is America's first national
archive of traditional life, and one of the oldest and largest repositories of
folklife materials in the world. Among the major collections housed at the Archive
are recordings made throughout the US by John and Alan Lomax during the 1930s,
including recordings of Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie and Jelly Roll Morton;
recordings of Moroccan music made by author Paul Bowles; the Fahenstock collection of
recordings made in the south seas; and the Federal Cylinder Project, containing
thousands of recordings of Native American music and speech from the 19th and early
20th centuries. The Folk Archive's reading room is located in the Jefferson building
of the Library of Congress and is open to researchers on weekdays. A number of the
archives collections are available on line at
http://www.loc.gov/folklife/ndl.html.
Lead Belly
The "King of the 12-String Guitar," Huddie William Ledbetter is a mythical figure on
the landscape of American music. His turbulent life took him from horrible plantation
prisons to Café Society and Town Hall in New York and from performing at turn-of-the-
century country house parties to a tour of Europe. His songs are known all over the
world and his booming guitar style has been studied by countless musicians.
Huddie Ledbetter was born on January 20, 1889 just outside of Mooringsport, Louisiana.
He grew up in a log cabin in a culturally rich African-American community on the verge
of great economic and social changes, and his childhood years centered around family,
school and hard work on the family farm. Ledbetter took to music early on, receiving a
melodeon as a gift when he was seven and learning several other instruments before
switching to guitar when he was about 13. His talent was soon recognized and by the
time he was fourteen he was playing dances and parties on Saturday night and singing
in church on Sunday. His early material included rural dance music and songs and he
soon added the newly developing blues form to his repertoire.
Leadbelly spent some time working as a musician in Shreveport's red light district
before heading west to Texas around 1908. While living and working in Texas he came
under the musical influence of the great Texas musician Blind Lemon Jefferson.
Ledbetter and Jefferson traveled together through Texas playing music in dives and
dance halls and Leadbelly learned a great deal of blues music from the legendary
Jefferson.
Huddie was arrested in 1915 and sentenced to thirty days in jail for carrying a weapon.
He escaped a day or two into his sentence, eventually fleeing to North Texas where he
assumed the name Walter Boyd and worked as a sharecropper and farmhand. His quiet life
in North Texas was short-lived, however as in late 1917 he was arrested for the
murder of a neighbor named Will Stafford. Ledbetter was sentenced to a minimum of
seven years in prison, but was pardoned after six years of his sentence.
In 1930, Huddie again ran up against the law. Almost lynched after a violent
altercation with a white man, Huddie was sentenced to hard labor at Angola State
Penitentiary, an infamously brutal prison in a Louisiana swamp. It was while serving
at Angola that Leadbelly was visited and recorded by John and Alan Lomax on one of
their recording trips through the rural south. On their first visit in 1933, the
Lomaxes instantly sensed both the depth of Ledbetter's talent and the breadth of his
repertoire and recorded a number of songs from him. They returned to the prison in
1934 and again made several recordings. One of the songs sung by Huddie during this
session was a plea for clemency, directed to the governor of Louisiana. Though the
Lomaxes delivered the disc to the Governor's office, it is unlikely that it had any
effect on his case.
Ledbetter was released from Angola in August 1934 and returned to Shreveport. He
settled down in marriage with Ms. Martha Promise, and teamed up with John A. Lomax,
serving as Lomax's valet and driver for another of the Lomax recording tours in the
south. In addition to his musical skills, Ledbetter was a talented mechanic, and his
status as an African American ex-con helped to smooth the Lomaxes' way in making
recordings in southern prisons. As the personal relationship between Huddie Ledbetter
and John and Alan Lomax deepened, the Lomaxes brought Huddie North to perform for white
audiences. While in prison, Ledbetter had been given the nickname "Leadbelly" and it
was under this name that he performed.
Travelling to New York with the Lomaxes, Leadbelly soon found himself a popular figure,
the sensationalism of his criminal background combined with his obvious musical talent
to make Leadbelly a darling of the New York intelligentsia. John Lomax became
Leadbelly's manager, got him a record deal and began writing a book on Leadbelly.
Released in 1936, the book, Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, was the first
book-length study of African American folk artist. Though Leadbelly didn't like the
book, it did provide him with some publicity.
As Leadbelly remained in New York, tensions between Ledbetter and Lomax began to
increase. Leadbelly didn't like performing in public in his prison clothes, preferring
pressed shirts and stylish suits. Lomax's control of Leadbelly's finances was another
issue between the two men. They ended their professional relationship in early 1935 and
Leadbelly began to work closely with New York author and professor Mary Elizabeth
Barnicle. A committed leftist and social activist, Barnicle made several recordings
of Leadbelly and introduced Leadbelly to the Folk Song revival then occurring among
New York leftists. Leadbelly performed at several gatherings and rallies, and met
artists like Aunt Molly Jackson, Pete Seeger,
Woody Guthrie, and the duo of
Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry. It was through these associations that Leadbelly met
Moe Asch, who recorded and released a great deal of Ledbetter's music. Though
Leadbelly profited from his association with the left, he was, outside of the issue
of Civil Rights, not very interested in politics and was no doctrinaire communist.
Nonetheless, the FBI began a file on Leadbelly in the early 1940s.
Though he released several commercial recordings, Leadbelly was never a commercially
successful recording artist, making most of his income from live performances. Helping
him during his last few years was Tiny Robinson, a niece of his wife Martha. Tiny had
come to New York in the late 1930s and began to act as Leadbelly's manager soon after.
A revival of interest in Dixieland-style jazz and the early blues that began in the
late 1940s offered new opportunities to Leadbelly and he became a relatively successful
touring musician during those last few years of his life, appearing at clubs like
Cafe Society and The Village Vanguard and touring across the country.
Leadbelly was diagnosed with ALS (Lou Gehrig's disease) in 1949 during a tour of Europe
. He declined rapidly and died December 6th, 1949. A few months later, the song
"Goodnight Irene", a song closely identified with Leadbelly, became a national hit for
the Weavers. Tragically, Leadbelly's early death robbed him of a great deal of fame
and income as many of Leadbelly's signature songs, including "The Midnight Special",
"Kisses Sweeter Than Wine", and "Rock Island Line" became widely circulated in the
decade after his death.
Though he never received the fame or fortune he so eagerly sought, Leadbelly's
influence on American music is undeniable. Many of his songs, nearly 500 of them, are
known and played by today's musicians. Through Pete Seeger
and Julius Lester's
book, A Folksinger's Guide to the 12-String Guitar As Played by Leadbelly,his guitar
style has been studied and absorbed by legions of both professional and amateur
guitarists. Finally, his recordings and concert appearances introduced many listeners
to the beauty of African-American folk music when that rich bundle of traditions was
unknown to much of America. Today Leadbelly, nearly sixty years after his passing,
continues to inspire and teach new generations through his music and recordings. He
said it best:
"If anyone asks you people,
Who made up this song,
Tell them it was Huddie Ledbetter,
Done been here, and gone."
For More Information
Most of what's written above owes a deep debt to
Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell's
outstanding biography
"The Life and Legend of Leadbelly"
published in 1992 by HarperCollins
Jean Ritchie
Jean Ritchie was born and raised in Viper, Kentucky in the heart of the Southern
Appalachian Mountains, the youngest in a family of 14 children. Walled in by the rugged
Cumberland ridges, the Ritchies and their neighbors worked the land in old fashioned
ways and attended Old Regular Baptist church meetings. Music was omnipresent in their
lives; family members had songs to accompany the myriad farm and household chores, and
, for entertainment, there were play-party games and ballads handed down through the
generations from their Scottish, English and Irish ancestors.
In her second year at Cumberland College, Ritchie was trying to decide between being a
teacher and being a missionary. "I remember asking myself what else was there I could
do to help people, but not force my beliefs on them. I came up with the idea of being
a social worker." Ritchie left the small village of Viper and become the first person
to obtain a degree in social work from the University of Kentucky. In 1947 she moved to
New York and began work at the famous Henry Street Settlement.
While working at Henry Street, she would use songs from home to entertain children
under her care. Word of her singing ability and her rare repertoire got out and soon
she was performing for New York folk audiences. By 1950 Ritchie was an important figure
on the New York folk scene, leading a revival of the mountain dulcimer. She recorded
her first album in 1952 (it was the first folk album issued by Elektra Records) and
received a Fullbright scholarship to study folk music in Britain that same year. In
1955 Oxford Press published Jean's book about her family and its music, Singing Family
of the Cumberlands.
Ritchie became somewhat of a star during the folk revival, recording and touring
frequently and publishing her guide to the mountain dulcimer, The Dulcimer Book, in
1963. She has recorded more than 30 albums, including several on her own Greenhays
label. Kentucky Educational Television featured her in the 1996 program, Mountain Born:
The Jean Ritchie Story. She received the Bess Lomax Hawes National Heritage Award from
the National Endowment for the Arts in 2002.
Ritchie and her husband, photographer George Pickow, live in New York and have a log
house in Viper, Kentucky. Ritchie continues to perform about 15 to 20 times a year.
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