Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly's Truths from Jim Crow's Lies

by Sheila Curran Bernard

Overview

Known worldwide as Lead Belly, Huddie Ledbetter (1889–1949) is an American icon whose influence on modern music was tremendous – as was, according to legend, the temper that landed him in two of the South's most brutal prisons, while his immense talent twice won him pardons. But, as this deeply researched book shows, these stories were shaped by the white folklorists who 'discovered' Lead Belly and, along with reporters, recording executives, and radio and film producers, introduced him to audiences beyond the South. Through a revelatory examination of arrest, trial, and prison records; sharecropping reports; oral histories; newspaper articles; and more, author Sheila Curran Bernard replaces myth with fact, offering a stunning indictment of systemic racism in the Jim Crow era of the United States and the power of narrative to erase and distort the past.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781009098120
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/11/2024
Pages:	253
Product dimensions:	5.83(w) x 8.74(h) x 1.02(d)

About the Author

Sheila Curran Bernard is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, author, and educator. The recipient of an NEH Public Scholars award, Bernard is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University at Albany, State University of New York.

Table of Contents

Introduction; 1. Encounter at Angola; 2. Two men from Texas; 3. On the road; 4. 1915: The State of Texas v. Huddie Ledbetter; 5. Frayed nerves; 6. 1918: The State of Texas v. Walter Boyd; 7. Northern debut; 8. Contracts; 9. 1930: The State of Louisiana v. Huddie Ledbetter; 10. The end of the road; Epilogue.

Editorial Reviews

‘Sheila Curran Bernard rescues the legendary ‘Lead Belly’ from a swirl of fabrication and racist presumption, and simultaneously illuminates the systemized oppression that cruelly stalked Black artists and ensured, for a century after the ostensible end of slavery, that bitter chords of racial injustice would remain as central to the American chorus as any melodies of freedom.’ Douglas A. Blackmon, author of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

‘Sheila Curran Bernard’s thoroughly researched book is necessary for recuperating and rescuing the truth of Huddie Ledbetter from racist myths and stereotypes, but also for recasting deeply held myths and assumptions about white paternalism and the origins of American folk music.’ Mary Ellen Curtin, author of Black Prisoners and Their World, Alabama, 1865–1900

‘A beautiful tribute to Lead Belly’s legacy. This book will forever change the way we think about one of America’s most iconic musical legends and one of its most misunderstood.’ Talitha L. LeFlouria, author of Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South

‘Sheila Curran Bernard is the first to give us a biographical book on Huddie Ledbetter as he really was: a complicated man tactically negotiating a complex, racist, and overwhelmingly unforgiving world.’ Gustavus Stadler, author of Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life

‘Bernard's valiant and impressively researched book is an attempt to reclaim Ledbetter from an implicitly racist narrative. Through close examination of arrest, trial and prison records, sharecropping reports, newspaper articles and oral histories contextualised by a deep understanding of American civil-rights history, she demonstrates how Ledbetter was far from a career criminal, but rather a victim of successive injustices and appalling conflicts of interest in a brutal system explicitly designed to provide enslaved work-forces and deny black rights in the post-reconstruction Southern states…. It isn't hard to draw a line from the public fear and fascination with Lead Belly to the gangsta rap controversies of more recent times. Bring Judgement Day is an overdue redress.’ Neil McCormick, Sunday Telegraph

‘A revelatory volume that rescues its subject from misconceptions that still circulate, enabling us to see more clearly a composer and performer who was the peer of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Bessie Smith.’ Duncan Wu, The Spectator

‘The portrait that emerges is of a man who defined himself as ‘a musician, song composer and a dancer’ and whose legacy deserves better than the demeaning characterization that’s persisted for decades. Essential for musicologists and fans of folk music.' Kirkus Reviews

‘[A] new and vitally important biographical study…. Lead Belly has, in many ways, remained hidden in the shadows behind myths, half-truths, and, in some cases, willful misrepresentations of him, his times, and his cultural and social significance as a Black musician in an America still rent by ‘Jim Crow’s lies.’…. Sheila Curran Bernard has exhumed this narrative and reexamined it, exposing (or, more accurately, insisting on acknowledging) the contradictions that have long compromised it.' David Whiteis, Living Blues

From the Publisher

★ 2024-05-04
A new biography of the Black musician Huddie Ledbetter seeks to reclaim him from “the Lead Belly mythology.”

Promulgated by folklorist John Lomax, who brought Ledbetter to a national stage, both moniker and myth do the “talented and multifaceted” performer an injustice, argues Emmy and Peabody winner Bernard convincingly. Born in Louisiana in 1889, Ledbetter grew up in the teeth of Jim Crow and was serving his third prison sentence when he met Lomax and his son Alan as they collected folk songs at the Louisiana State Penitentiary in 1933. Following his release, he traveled with John Lomax gathering songs in other prisons and making their way north, where Lomax presented him to admiring audiences. Bernard interleaves her account of the men’s travels with retrospective examinations of Ledbetter’s encounters with Jim Crow law. As represented by the Lomaxes in their book Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, Ledbetter was a “dangerous” killer, but Bernard corrects and contextualizes this representation. Drawing on oral histories and court records, she juxtaposes Ledbetter’s arrests and incarcerations against the Lomaxes’ false accounts. Equally revealing are John Lomax’s letters to his wife, in which he gloats about life with “a ‘body servant’” and repeatedly calls Ledbetter “a n[-].” The author explains that she partially redacts the N-word but otherwise retains many “offensive dialect and stereotypes.” The result is, as she acknowledges, often “shocking and difficult to read.” With so little left behind by Ledbetter himself beyond his songs and recordings, readers are lucky that Bernard was able to draw on oral histories conducted with many people familiar with Ledbetter and his early life. The portrait that emerges is of a man who defined himself as “a musician, song composer and a dancer” and whose legacy deserves better than the demeaning characterization that’s persisted for decades.

Essential for musicologists and fans of folk music.

Kirkus Reviews