Such is the effect of Lead Belly’s Last Sessions, Vol. 1, a revelation of another world in song.
I have been listening to my copy for more than twenty years, and I continue to learn from it—not only about Lead Belly’s life and American song but also about musical arrangements and production and about my own life and what I don’t know.
This album is no Sgt. Pepper’s, no high-tech layering of sound. In fact, it could hardly be more lo-fi. It is only Lead Belly singing, joined occasionally by his wife, Martha—no instruments. They’re not even in a recording studio but in a New York apartment. A friend, jazz scholar Frederic Ramsey Jr., had invited them to dinner, and afterward he retrieved a tape deck from the closet. We hear dishes being cleared, beer bottles being opened. Then, Lead Belly sings ’em as he thinks of ’em, moving from early twentieth-century field holler to contemporary protest song. There are gospel and army songs, pop tunes, and plenty of blues. Over the course of an hour, Lead Belly sings more than thirty. Some get introductions, others flit past.
“You can almost hear him humming.” (Courtesy of Robert Gordon)
I had a hard time finding my way into this record when I bought it as a teenager in 1977. ALL USED LPS $1.88 read the store’s banner out front. I knew nothing of Lead Belly except what the cover photo told me: He was black and old. The LP was also old (I was buying the 1962 reissue of the 1953 original release), on thick vinyl, and the sleeve was of heavier paper stock than the glossy Boston and Kiss albums that overflowed from other bins.
Instead of opening with the hook of a great pop hit, Lead Belly’s Last Sessions begins with muffled conversation and hard-to-understand words, making us eavesdroppers. Once the singing finally begins (no guitar, no piano, no harmonica whipped out from anyone’s pocket), it’s a far cry from the push and pull of teenage amour:
I was standing in the bottom
Working mud up to my knees
I was working for the captain
And he’s so hard to please.
I remember reeling around a few tracks later when I heard him sing “Liza Jane.” We’d sung that in kindergarten. Then “Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care …,” then “Bet on Stewball, he might win win win.” I recognized “Bring Me a Little Water, Silvy” from a Harry Belafonte record my family played on car trips, and just before the first side ended, I got a roots-rock surprise. There was a hard-rock radio hit at the time by some group, Ram Jam, called “Black Betty,” and here it was again, just Lead Belly’s voice and his handclapping—one clap per measure, smacking like a bullwhip:
Black Betty had a baby
Bam ba lam
Little thing went crazy
Bam ba lam.
The link across time hooked me. I still didn’t like Ram Jam’s version, but I no longer laughed when I heard it. I returned to Lead Belly less hesitantly.
After one tune, Ramsey says, “That’s an old, old song, isn’t it?”
“Way back,” says Lead Belly. “Way back.”
“They made a record of it recently,” says Ramsey.
“Mm … hmm,” responds Lead Belly, “but not like that they didn’t.”
Born in Louisiana in 1888 to former slaves, Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter served time in a Texas penitentiary for murder. A composer of such facility, he wrote a song for the visiting governor that won him early release. Then a stabbing incident put him in Louisiana’s Angola prison. Song collector John Lomax heard Lead Belly there in 1933 and the following year he arranged to have him released to his oversight. Lomax made Lead Belly a popular singer, and also his manservant. Lead Belly’s relationship with John’s son Alan Lomax was more egalitarian. Alan’s defiant response to his landlord’s anger at his hosting Lead Belly and his wife inspired one of Lead Belly’s most enduring songs, 1938’s “The Bourgeois Blues.”
Last Sessions was recorded in late 1948, when Lead Belly was approaching sixty. He’d soon be diagnosed with ALS and would die in late 1949. He’s in a reflective mood, remembering songs from his days working the fields with other convicts, days when the heat beat down so relentlessly that they took it personally and named the sun:
Go down old Hannah
Please don’t rise no more
And if you do rise in the morning
Set this world on fire.
The song is slow and heavy, a tempo for the long haul. Ramsey says, “That’s the first time I’ve heard you sing that many verses.”
“Oh well,” says Lead Belly, “you can just make ’em right on up.”
Periodically throughout the evening we hear Lead Belly pause or slow in his singing, groping for a rhyme or idea. Once, he makes “anywhere” rhyme with “car.”
He sings a series of field hollers, wherein individual words are dragged over many notes. His bass tones are thick and humid like summer. As important as the words are to one alone in the field (“I don’t know you / What have I done?”), the sound of the voice is supreme, the calling forth of the rumbling from deep within, cajoling it from the pit of the soul through the belly and along the gullet before it flies from the throat to the open sky and Hannah above, where its dissipation is so vast as to make the plaint totally ineffective. The sun won’t feel that rumble, no matter how deep I go. The futility builds belief in the process, in the making of the sounds, in the emotion with which they are vested. Forget Hannah, if she don’t hear my plea, I feel better having made it.
Lead Belly pauses after these hollers to speak a few quiet sentences in his deep voice to Ramsey: “I be around home sometimes and do that one. My baby, she says, ‘What’s the matter, you sick or something?’ When you get the blues feeling, I be washing dishes, keep her from having to wash ’em. I love to wash dishes … Well, I know you got it running and you want something else, let me see what I can give you,” and without hesitation, as much for himself as for the listener who has been left on the floorboards, he cannonballs into the excitement of “Rock Island Line.” The power of a train as a means out of a bad place, a promise not of freedom but of escape, is overwhelming.
Not until well into the evening do we hear from Lead Belly’s wife. During “Old Ship of Zion,” Martha joins in, the additional voice giving new dimension to the material. Their voices were made for blending; even when their harmonies are off, they are on. She contributes to the next song, then she returns several times, but like a sitar or a studio effect, she’s on only enough cuts to make us want more.
Much later and a couple verses into an old army song, Lead Belly says, “That’s the part you can catch; come in there.” Obligingly, like a weary soldier, she joins him on the chorus. “That’s pretty good, your coming in there,” he drawls, and continues. After the fourth verse, when she again adds her mournful harmony, he interjects, like a dope fiend who’s taken a good hit, “Oh good God, it’s killer.”
The biscuits that they give you
They say they’re mighty fine
But one jumped off the table
Knocked down a pal of mine.
They do a few more, her voice turning the bread to cake, and after the last one, Lead Belly speaks the closing flourish: “Wow!”
The comments that he sprinkles throughout the album are as integral as the melodies. They are about timing, mood, and effect, like horn lines in a soul song. Between verses of one holler, Lead Belly creates whip sounds, the captive’s cry, and the captain’s gleeful retort—in the same breath. The contrast, the ease of delivery, and the way these asides make the lyrics stand out have helped me understand how complex songs come together from various elements.
Martha Ledbetter, left, and Huddie Ledbetter, aka Lead Belly. (Courtesy of the John Reynolds Collection, Smithsonian Folkways)
His protest songs reach to the same authority as his gospel:
If the Negro was good enough to fight
Why can’t we get a little equal rights?…
One thing folks should realize
Six feet of dirt makes us all the same size
Well, God made
us all and in Him we trust
Nobody in this world is better than us.
That song leads right back into the next:
We’re in the same boat brother
We’re in the same boat brother
And if you shake one end
You’re gonna rock the other.
He drags the second “same” like a trombone’s blue note, at once gleeful and woefully sad. There’s also handclapping, which, after the lack of accompaniment, is thunderous.
Lead Belly may attend church and may join in a protest song, but he’s never far from the street. In “Mistreatin’ Mama,” each verse is a short story, the next line building on the previous one, so that a song that begins (belted out like Ethel Merman), “Mama, Papa’s got the blues” leads to
Don’t bother me
I’m just as mean as can be
I’m like the butcher coming down the street
I’ll cut you all to pieces
Like I would a piece of meat.
The songs blend together, trancelike. The occasional discussion, at a lower volume, becomes the soft part of the symphony, preparing us for an explosion of song. And like the melody of hushed violins, Lead Belly’s quiet discussion takes hard listening; then it reveals its complexity. It took years before I distinguished an argument between tracks. A conversation is silenced by the sudden presence of Martha’s thin voice, sounding a beautiful weariness:
I’m thinking of a friend
Whom I used to know
Who wandered and suffered
In this world below
I—
But she stops short and says, “I forgot.”
Lead Belly: “Go ahead and sing something. Christ. You started.”
The song returns to Martha’s mind, and she continues her elegy.
What are they doing in heaven today
Where sins and sorrows are all done away.
She makes it through the chorus once before Lead Belly interjects, “That’s good, let loose on that thing. Sing it, let yourself on go.” She forges ahead, and he quiets.
There was someone who was poor
And suffered in pain—
“Let loose,” Lead Belly says, no longer playing the between-line turnarounds but sabotaging her song, the only one she leads. She tsks her tongue and says, “I wish you would leave me alone.”
“Sing it, honey. You done all right now.”
“I can’t. If you talking—”
“All right, I’ll lay low. But you were doing good. Come on, what’s the matter with you?”
“I’ll sing later,” she says.
“Don’t pay me no mind. Just think about what you’re doing.”
“I can’t! I’m trying to listen to you. How I’m gonna—”
“Don’t listen to me. You’re singing. Somebody says something to me and I’m singing, I don’t listen to ’em. You watch and see if I don’t.”
“You do it all the time.”
She quiets, and everyone quiets. “Just pour it right on there,” says Lead Belly as if nothing’s happened, as if he’s not, like the butcher in “Mistreatin’ Mama,” mean as he can be. “That was a good piece. Special too.” Martha is done.
With the next-to-last track, Lead Belly changes his tone, launching into a sermonette built around the repetition of the phrase “in the world.” Purposely disjointed and mumbled, only occasional words are decipherable (“I met an old man … a different type of man from our world … I walked into a bar … in the world and asked for a drink in the world …”) until the ending, which is stated clearly: “We all got to get peace together because we’re in the world together.” It’s Lead Belly producing the record, giving a final meditation, a closing convocation. “I’m sleepy now,” he says, “I want to go home. I’m going to have to go home.”
But there’s still a hot coal on his fire, and ever the professional, he knows to leave ’em singing, so he makes the thought into a song. “I Want to Go Home” sounds improvised, and it is light and fun, but its plea for freedom, refracted through the evening’s material, evokes the captivity of the slave, hearkens to the subjugation of every recording artist to both the recording tape and to the recording company.
The quiet that follows the record’s completion is huge, and puzzling. The initial distance from the artist has completely disappeared. It’s not as though we were sucked in close but, rather, we crawled willingly, song by song, nearer my God to thee, and his sudden absence leaves us wanting. Here we are, after all, in the world we know, far from this other place we couldn’t invent, yet that drips from our being, so recently immersed in it.
This album is a testament to the nature of song, how lyrics and music live, how they can transcend time to resonate to a man born soon after the Civil War and also to a man born a century later during Vietnam. This album spreads itself across a life, with some songs belonging to childhood, some to adolescence, and many yet to reveal themselves. Most studio recordings fail to capture the personality that makes this night so eternal. The ease of the situation draws him out, and he seems to sing for the sake of the song, not for his own personal gain. The living was hard, but the art is fun.
ROBERT JOHNSON
I got serious about writing after college. To get out of the nightclubs, I took a job as a baker, reporting to work when the opening act would be taking the stage. I’d wake early afternoons, sit at my manual typewriter for several hours, then sneak a falafel into the repertory theater before punching the bakery’s clock. I wrote a novel that way, got practice in long-form narrative arcs, and developed discipline. (I could afford an electric typewriter, but the authenticity of the manual let me commune with all the greats. And I liked the sounds it made. And here’s two writing lessons from college: 1. You can’t pay the rent on inspiration. Meaning: Writers write. Sit in the chair even when you don’t want to. And 2. Avoid adverbs. If you have to describe the action, then the setup hasn’t been developed. A third rule I think I always knew: If you can say it in fewer words, do.) The bakery job was not happenstance. Writing was a risk, and if I failed, if nuclear fallout hit, if the economy crumbled—we’d always need bread. I can, today, put my hands on the recipes, measured in pounds of yeast and sacks of flour.
Soon into the magazines, I hit my short-form stride, delivering 300- to 1,500-word articles many times a week. Some pieces were for them, some for me. I was getting the drill down, my eye on making a living at it.
This Robert Johnson piece was different. Until this point, I’d mostly written profiles and album reviews. In music journalism, there’s plenty of room to write creatively, to research important history, to share the power and impact of someone’s life. However, and especially with older recordings, it’s ultimately subsumed by the corporation—boosting their sales. With this article, I experienced a deeper kind of journalism: Poor people entitled to money weren’t getting it, and everyone who might be responsible claimed it wasn’t their fault.
The Complete Recordings marked the first time that all the known tracks by the Delta blues great Robert Johnson were released, and it promptly earned gold-record status—selling more than half a million copies. There was much rehashing of Johnson’s Faustian legend and analyses of his musical prowess and spare, elegant storytelling, but nobody wrote about the royalties.
Follow the money, right?
Like so many other good ideas, this one began with Peter Guralnick. I met him toward the end of the 1980s. He was in Memphis beginning his research on the Elvis biographies, and I was making a blues short, All Day & All Night. The producer invited him to the edit room, and when we were introduced, he asked if I was the guy who’d written a small piece on Al Green’s collaborator Teenie Hodges for Spin. I was flattered that this authority noticed my article, and impressed with how he kept up; Spin was not where you’d find a lot of roots music writing. We began a correspondence, and when I was doing archival newspaper research for the 1995 publication of It Came from Memphis, I’d mail him interesting Elvis bit
s. He’d come to town and I’d take him to funky places for fun, food, and listening. (The bond was sealed after he ordered and consumed a heap of deep fried chicken livers. Respect.) Peter’s always had a generous spirit, and that empathy comes through in his books. It makes him a good guy too. He was too far gone with Elvis to write this piece, but he called me, said the LA Weekly would allow the newsprint space this might need, was I interested?
The LA Weekly editor RJ Smith schooled me. This story had many characters, byzantine business transactions, and was about—blues. To make it accessible to a wide audience, RJ had me ease the reader in, slowing to paint the pictures needed, pulling wide every now and then—an establishing shot for each new scene. He had me considering images that open a paragraph, the weight on which a paragraph closes, the implications of putting a name near an event (meaning, even if I don’t connect them, the reader will, which is useful for insinuation but can be a danger for unintended innuendo). We spent hours on the phone, working through the meticulous process of getting the details in and keeping the article moving. I did two more features for RJ over the following year, Charlie Feathers and James Carr. When we were done, I felt more like a writer.
Hellhound on the Money Trail
LA Weekly, July 5–11, 1991
The sun did not shine, but it was hot as hell the day a memorial stone was unveiled for bluesman Robert Johnson near a country crossroads outside Greenwood, Mississippi. About seventy-five people filled the tiny Mt. Zion church, a row of broadcast video cameras behind the back pew and a bank of lights illuminating a hoarse preacher as he praised a man who reputedly sold his soul to the devil.
There was no finality in setting the stone. The attention came fifty years too late, and even if his memory is more alive today than ever before, Johnson’s rightful heirs still have nothing but the name. This service was not about the body of the bluesman, which lies in an unmarked grave somewhere in the vicinity; it was about the guitar-shaped wreath provided by Johnson’s current record label, and about the video bite that would be beamed into homes around the country that April 1991 evening.
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