Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection produced by Jeff Place and Robert Santelli (review)

It is hard to imagine a folk singer more significant to the canon of Americana than Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter. He either wrote or refashioned such classics as "Goodnight Irene," "The Bourgeois Blues," "Midnight Special," "Pick a Bale of Cotton," and "Rock Island Line," then offered them and dozens of other songs to the nation beginning in the 1930s through his own recordings and others' publication of this material. This music has reverberated through the decades, being picked up again and again by such luminaries as Pete Seeger, Gene Autry, Nat King Cole, Johnny Cash, Odetta, Bob Dylan, Michelle Shocked, Kurt Cobain, Jack White, and Jay Farrar, who recast these songs in their own distinctive idioms and then flung them out into the world for others to find—the river of Lead Belly's legacy flowing on and on.

Not surprisingly, due to his power as a performer and his influence on many important musicians, many past efforts have been made to capture the full range of Lead Belly's recorded expression. In the singer's lifetime, a vast array of companies released his music, including American Record Corporation, RCA Victor, Disc, and Capitol Records. After Lead Belly passed away from Lou Gehrig's disease in 1949, his passionate voice and powerful guitar playing could be heard on an ever-expanding bevy of releases, especially after the folk revival period of the late 1950s and early 1960s. But the best of these sonic offerings appeared through the efforts of two government agencies. The Library of Congress, through the auspices of Rounder Records, brought out a six-volume set in the 1990s, and during that same decade, Smithsonian Folkways also brought out a three-edition series, along with the four-CD box set Lead Belly's Last Sessions. But now this latter organization has put out a new release, Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection, which eclipses all past efforts. For it comes as an LP-sized booklet containing five CDs, which hold 108 tracks, a full 16 of them not previously released. It also includes an introduction by Robert Santelli (Executive Director of the Grammy Museum) and a lengthy essay and song notes by Jeff Place (Archivist of the Smithsonian's own Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage). In addition, the entire booklet contains many rare photographs and images of Lead Belly-related ephemera, such as handbills, newspaper articles, letters, and album covers. Altogether, the combined effort is massive and duly impressive.

The songs that appear in this collection give a cross section of Lead Belly's repertoire, which was rather extensive according to the songster himself: "I can sing 500 songs and never go back to the first one." This very comment can be heard during a brief moment from a 1941 WNYC radio program called Folksongs of America, which was produced by ethnomusicologist Henrietta Yurchenco and featured Lead Belly—one of the many unusual recordings that appear in this collection. Another is "Princess Elizabeth," which was recorded by Fredric Ramsey during Lead Belly's last-ever sessions in 1948 but did not find its way onto the 1994 Smithsonian release. It commemorates the wedding of the eponymous royal and Prince Philip in 1947, not exactly the subject matter for which the singer is known. But one treat of this project is the miscellany of the offerings that include both the expected and the surprising.

Certainly, the collection does not disappoint in reviewing the kinds of personal history and material that brought Lead Belly to fame. For example, his prison songs are given much space, representing a part of the songster's life that has been long central to his public image. According to legend, Lead Belly sang his way to a pardon for a murder charge from Texas Governor Pat Neff in the 1920s, and then in the early 1930s, folklorist John Lomax found the singer imprisoned again, this time in the Louisiana State Prison...