Jim Crow's Counterculture

by R. A. Lawson

  Well-a, Shorty George, he ain’ no friend of mine,

  Well-a, Shorty George, he ain’ no friend of mine,

  Taken all de womens an’ leave de mens behind.

  My mama died when I’se a lad,

  My mama died when I’se a lad,

  An’ ev’y since, I been to de bad.15

  Having played many songs to captivate and entertain his audience, Ledbetter ended his two-hour, multiple-encore performance with a rendition of his pardon song to Governor Neff. The show was a great success, earning Ledbetter over thirteen dollars—not an inconsequential sum by Depression-era standards— and notoriety among affluent New Yorkers. Other performances before white audiences were soon to follow, but this first exposure sent listeners away feeling that the “murderous minstrel” was certainly a true oddity among many in the Deep South. Impressed by his repertoire, delivery, and physical presence, some in the audience sensed “something special,” feeling that Leadbelly’s performance was not a mere “step’n’fetchit” routine but something “more deep-rooted, more lasting, more elemental.” Mostly alien to this New York crowd, but somehow deeply appealing, Ledbetter’s persona as Leadbelly enchanted his new admirers, winning him fame as “King of the Twelve-String Guitar” and a reputation as America’s greatest folk singer.16

  In their willingness to perceive Leadbelly as an authentic product of the pastoral existence of southern blacks, Ledbetter’s white middle-class audience gave preference to his constructed, static image over the dynamic realities of Ledbetter’s life. He was presented as a suppressed, downtrodden farmer-turned-convict who had picked up many great songs along the way; he was the stereotyped image of the desperate southern black man oppressed by Jim Crow and victimized by its many inequities. But the narrative of Ledbetter’s life can be read alternatively as a rejection of that role. Unlike his contemporaries Blind Lemon Jefferson and Sleepy John Estes, who took up music because their visual handicap precluded them from field labor, Ledbetter, throughout his life, clearly rejected the limitations imposed by Jim Crow and abandoned “his place” in favor of his own personal aspirations. Ledbetter was a disaffected youth. Empowered through musical ability, he shrugged off moral critics in his own community and defied the exclusion and incarceration white society would have forced on him. By the end of his musical career, he had become a voice of social protest from the black South.

  Leadbelly: Accommodation and Resistance in the Blues

  American blacks had been promised forty acres and a mule during Reconstruction, but Ledbetter’s father, Wes, had found life in the post-Emancipation South very difficult for an ex-slave. He and his wife, Sally Pugh, struggled in the sharecroppers’ life of labor and debt on the Jeter Plantation in northwest Louisiana’s Caddo Parish. When Huddie was born in 1888 in Mooringsport, blacks in his home state had just seen the Bourbon “redemption” of state politics and soon would confront a new generation of white supremacists in government. During the 1890s, Louisiana’s blacks watched from the outside as white politicians drafted a new constitution that reduced the state’s black electorate from more than 130,000 to fewer than 1,500. Disfranchisement, progressive politicians in Baton Rouge argued, maintained the state’s responsibility to the “ignorant” and the “weak” to “protect them just as we would protect a little child.” Born only two years before the state law that forbade black passengers from riding in white public street cars, and eight years before the Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court case that confirmed the constitutionality of such segregation statutes, Ledbetter joined the first generation of black southerners who would live with Jim Crow’s “protections.”17

  Ledbetter’s childhood surroundings reflected the effects of Reconstruction and the efforts of black reformers such as Booker T. Washington, even as statutes and white public opinion in the 1890s worked to entrench the Jim Crow sociopolitical system. While Huddie was a boy, his father sharecropped on the property of a wealthy black man, and Wes Ledbetter managed to purchase his own small piece of property in Caddo Parish, near the Texas border, in 1900. As an ex-slave, the elder Ledbetter strove to achieve and maintain his independence through farming and land ownership. He hoped Huddie, his only child, would avoid the sharecropper’s life and aspire to similar goals. Huddie learned the lessons of farming as a child, but as a young man he rejected the agricultural life that his father had chosen and that many other blacks around the turn of the century were forced to accept. Instead, Huddie sought to earn his living with the six-string guitar he persuaded his father to buy him.18

  As a teenager, Ledbetter defied his parents time and again by traveling the nineteen miles from Mooringsport to Shreveport to acquaint himself with the madams and piano players of Fannin Street. His early experiences there fostered his later penchant for the South’s barrelhouse neighborhoods and their lively music scenes. It did not take long for the violence of the scene to catch up with young Huddie. “At 14 he started running around,” recalled Irene Campbell, his niece. “I can remember later when he came to his mother’s all cut up. He had been out all night, and he had his guitar strapped to his back” with “blood all over the front of his clothes and his jaw was hanging open because someone had barely missed his eye with a cut on his jaw from top to bottom.”19 These all-night adventures took a heavy toll on his loved ones. In his song, “Fannin Street,” Ledbetter related the traumatic scene in which his mother and adopted sister cried and pleaded for him stay away from the seedy red light district, but he sang that he turned his back and left “with tears runnin’ over the back of my head.” Playing music wherever and whenever he could, at sixteen Huddie was already winning local recognition as a “musicianer.” He learned waltzes to play at Saturday night country dances and was one of many southern guitarists who found that audiences loved the new sounds and feelings of blues music. During his visits to Fannin Street, Ledbetter developed an urban, boogie-woogie playing style that put his talents in demand for barn dances and all-night house parties. His musical ability won him the admiration and companionship of many young women and drew the jealousy of other young men; violence joined music and sex as a major aspect of Ledbetter’s life.20

  In the first years of the 1900s, before northwest Louisiana became a major oil-producing area, the countryside around Shreveport—farms, levee camps, logging camps—resembled something of a frontier, replete with bootleg whiskey smugglers, violent disputes over lovers, and gun fighting. Like many fathers of the frontier South, Wes Ledbetter bought his son a Colt pistol for his sixteenth birthday, and Huddie wasted no time in putting it to use. After a country dance a few weeks after his birthday, Huddie pistol-whipped and shot at a young man who demonstrated interest in his girlfriend. The sheriff released Huddie after Wes agreed to pay a twenty-five dollar fine, but the incident was only the first of many episodes in which Ledbetter proved himself to be a dangerously violent man. Neighbors increasingly looked down on the young Ledbetter, and public opinion of him further hardened when his girlfriend gave birth to two children—the first died in infancy. His temper, promiscuity, and frequent visits to Fannin Street prompted the community to banish Huddie from Caddo Parish in 1906, pushing him into the musician’s itinerant lifestyle.

  For several years, Ledbetter wandered throughout Texas performing field labor on cotton plantations. As his musicianship and repertoire improved, he increasingly supported himself by playing dances in the countryside and jook joints in eastern Texas cities. He maintained ongoing liaisons with his female fans and suffered a six-month bout with venereal disease. Ledbetter married in 1908 and attempted to settle down on a farm situated near the Texas-Louisiana border, not far from his parents’ place. He even managed a brief, uncomfortable stint in the congregation of a local Baptist church, but the country life was too slow. He longed for the money and women the musician’s life offered, and after two years, he and his wife moved to Dallas’s African American neighborhood and cultural center, Deep Ellum. In Dallas, Ledbetter met and formed a partnership with Blind Lemo
n Jefferson, a native Texan who, in the 1920s, would become America’s first country blues star. Jefferson taught Ledbetter the new slide guitar technique that, along with the twelve-bar chorus and recurrent third and seventh notes, became characteristic of the blues’s distinct music form.21

  Ledbetter, like Jefferson, was on his way to becoming a black professional entertainer in the Jim Crow South. He acquired few labor skills beyond cotton cultivation, but his musical ability afforded him significant luxuries as a black man in the Red River Valley’s cotton culture: mobility, economic independence, recognition, expressive freedom, sexual exploits, and so on. Ledbetter’s later recording of “Honey, I’m All Out and Down,” keenly demonstrated the masculine voice and identity characteristic of vernacular black music in the Lower Mississippi Valley, wherein male characters try to exert their independence and avoid being tied down to one woman or a particular woman that now tires and tries them:

  This man’s a long way from home, an’ he’s got a brownskin woman,

  An’ he knows pay-day’s comin’ pretty soon,

  An’ the ole woman’s shoutin’ for some more pay-day.

  An’ the ole mule is hungry and the sun is going down,

  An’ the man wishes that pay-day would move off a little further,

  So he wouldn’t have to pay the woman nothin’.

  I’m goin’ t’ tell ma woman like the Dago told the Jew,

  You don’t wan’ me, and honey, I don’ wan’ you.22

  At first glance “Honey, I’m All Out and Down” seems to be a pretty straightforward, descriptive song about the gender relations on the farm, with a few references to racial and ethnic monikers popular at the time (“brownskin” and “Dago”). If the veil over the lyrics is pulled back, however, it is easy to imagine that black audiences in the sharecropping districts might think “bossman” when they heard “woman” when Ledbetter sang, “So he wouldn’t have to pay the woman nothin’.” And the last line—”You don’t wan’ me, and honey, I don’ wan’ you”—could be heard as much more than the bickering between a man and a woman who disaffectedly remain dependent on each other. Was this Ledbetter’s subliminal refiguring of white-black relations in the South? Perhaps Ledbetter was thinking only of a common lover’s feud back in the cotton fields, but there’s no telling how many listeners heard a message about race. Either way, it is clear from Ledbetter’s verse that the black South of the early twentieth century—and America at large, perhaps—was a place where many people found themselves uncomfortably bound to and dependent on one another.

  Indeed, it was in interpersonal relations that Ledbetter kept running into trouble. His penchant for sex and his intemperate disposition hindered his musical ambitions. In 1915 he was arrested after allegedly beating a woman who refused his advances. Unlike his earlier scrapes as a teenager, this incident exposed him to the ordeal of being a black convict in Jim Crow-era Texas. Ledbetter was sentenced to thirty days on the Harrison County chain gang. The thirty-day sentence was far from draconian given his alleged offense, but Ledbetter was, as his biographers suggested, “a man used to virtually complete freedom of choice”—which, if true, would represent quite an anomaly among black southerners. Ledbetter demonstrated his pride and will to freedom by escaping the chain gang only three days into his incarceration. He fled to New Orleans for a short time, haunting the French Quarter and Storyville districts of the Crescent City, and then returned to northeastern Texas under the alias Walter Boyd.23

  Ledbetter resumed his life as a musician and part-time field laborer, but his possessive behavior toward women once again resulted in violence two years later. On the way to a dance in Beaver Dam, Texas, Ledbetter argued with a neighbor over a woman who had recently moved to the community. Before they arrived at the dance, Ledbetter had produced his pistol and killed his counterpart. Though he was mere miles from the Red River and Oklahoma, Ledbetter remained at a nearby farm and was arrested without incident; he claimed the shooting was in self-defense. Recent events contributed to a racially charged atmosphere. White and black Texans around the state had just heard about the race riot in Houston in which black soldiers mustering for World War I began to defy segregation laws and had revolted against their officers. Thirty-seven black citizens and soldiers were hanged as a result. Given this context, Ledbetter and his pro bono lawyer did not expect leniency or fairness from a segregationist justice system that was now on alert. A white lawyer commented that Ledbetter would not receive a fair trial because the county court system treated a black man as the “equivalent of a stray dog.” Although prosecutors failed to disprove Ledbetter’s claim that he acted in self-defense, the singer was convicted of murder. Had he killed a white person, he certainly would have faced capital punishment, but Ledbetter was sentenced to twenty years imprisonment and hard labor—quite a harsh sentence given that his was a so-called black-on-black crime. He began his sentence at a local state prison farm. In 1920, after two failed attempts at escape, Ledbetter was transferred to Sugarland, the infamous state prison farm outside Houston that local blues songs referred to as “a burning hell.” There, amid the swampy Brazos River bottomlands, the thirty-two year-old Ledbetter joined hundreds of other black prisoners, many convicted on minor charges, who were coerced into labor on the farm. The Sugarland cotton farm was like so many of the state-run prison farms throughout the New South: “a source of immense profits for the state . . . and a source of extraordinary suffering for black men who were all too often worked to death.” This convict labor system, in Houston Baker Jr.’s interpretation, was yet another example of the centuries-old dynamic enterprise of white power controlling the black body.24

  At Sugarland, Ledbetter was made to do hard labor, but prison officials allowed him to keep his guitar. During hours when he was free from the fields, Ledbetter continued to develop his musical repertoire. In the postwar years, jazz and vaudeville blues began to capture the nation’s interest, but the South’s black convicts were contemporaneously preserving and constantly reproducing their own musical record of prison reality. Prison blues, such as the following example from Tunica County, Mississippi (transcribed in 1942 by Alan Lomax), commonly sublimated the personal devastation of black jailhouse life through bare recognition of the facts, mitigated by satire and euphemism:

  In the South, when you do anything that’s wrong,

  In the South, when you do anything that’s wrong,

  They’ll sho put you down on the county farm.

  They’ll put you under a man called Captain Jack,

  They’ll put you under a man called Captain Jack,

  Who’ll write his name up and down your back.25

  The last line exemplifies the satirical blues: the brutality of the prison’s total authority is symbolized in the violence of whipping but cast in a darkly humorous metaphor.

  Other prison songs mixed satire with pragmatism; work songs functioned as group timekeepers for prison laborers. As the following song fragments demonstrate, the prison labor system brought into sharp focus the exploitive relationship between white officials and poor black convicts:

  Well the nigger like ‘lasses, and the white man, too,

  Well the nigger like ‘lasses, and the white man, too.

  Chorus:Wo, Lordy, oh my Lordy, Lord,

  Wo, Lordy, oh my Lordy, Lord.

  Well a nigger like ‘lasses, well he lick it out the can,

  Well the white man like ‘lasses, lick it out the nigger’s hand.26

  In addition to housing some of Texas’s most hardened criminals, Sugarland in the twenties was a rich musical milieu of shared talents and repertoires. Convicts from all over the state sang work songs as they labored on the chain gangs, and musicians among the group entertained their fellow prisoners after hours with ballads and blues songs. Ledbetter contributed to the prison culture at Sugarland by often playing an autobiographical song, “Last Monday,” that poked fun at due process as it was practiced in the Lone Star State:

  Last Monday, baby
I was arrested,

  On Tuesday, I was locked up in jail.

  On Wednesday, my trial was attested,

  On Thursday, nobody couldn’t post my bail.

  Ledbetter had always been a good field hand, and his strength was certainly appreciated by the prison farm overseers, but at Sugarland, Ledbetter earned respect as an accomplished musician as well as a strong hand. Many of the songs he learned and developed at Sugarland enjoyed wide popularity and longevity in his postprison days. Arkansas native Johnny Cash, another famed prison-song minstrel, adapted the essential elements of “Last Monday” in his version of the criminal ballad, “I Got Stripes.” Ledbetter’s version of “Midnight Special”—a song about Sugarland inmates listening to the Southern Pacific train that pulled out of Houston every night for points west—went through various renditions at the hands of folk and rock artists in the fifties and sixties. By 1924, Ledbetter was not yet a musical legend and had been for seven years stuck in the Texas prison system, but his mystique was developing.27

  Texas governor Pat Neff and his entourage toured Sugarland in late 1924, and Ledbetter was summoned to provide the evening’s entertainment. Dressed in a special white suit he saved for big occasions, Ledbetter picked his guitar and danced, playing ballads, blues, a few spirituals, and some “hillbilly” tunes the governor requested. An accomplished performer, Ledbetter played the part of compliant servant, trying to humor and appease Governor Neff. He performed the comical “Sugarland Shuffle,” in which he parodied a frantic man chopping cotton. He was trying to establish a rapport with his unique audience and formulate on-the-spot lyrics to plead for his freedom in a song. Making no reference to his crime, or his guilt or innocence, Ledbetter broke into an impromptu song to become known simply as “Governor Pat Neff.” The tune began with a traditional AAB blues structure, Ledbetter setting up his tale of sorrow and abandonment: