Prestige box sets of pre-rock music that out-price the casual fan or curious newcomer tend to emphasize an artist’s importance and influence, carefully delineating his or her legacy across subsequent generations of followers. You listen because it’s good for you, is the implication, which is certainly worthwhile as far as that goes. But rarely is this type of retrospective quite as much fun as Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection. It’s not only the first full career retrospective of one of the most significant musicians of the twentieth century. It’s also a blast.
We have an image of Lead Belly as a somber bluesman, a stoic song collector who wore a perpetually solemn expression like that on the cover of the new 5xCD set. That was, of course, only one side of the musician, who memorized and personalized a vast array of American work songs, play songs, Tin Pan Alley hits, spirituals, blues, ballads, reels, hollers, jigs, calls, and more. He was as much a raconteur as he was a songster, and when he has a chance to tell you all about a song—where it came from, how he heard it, why it sounds the way it does, or how it fits into your everyday life—Lead Belly reveals the dynamism of a great storyteller. When he introduces "Leaving Blues" during a radio broadcast, Lead Belly declaims the nature of the blues with a preacherly cadence, which turns a sad situation into something almost comical. The story lasts longer than the actual song: For him talk is not just crucial to the music, but a kind of music in and of itself.
"Fun" is not the first word applied to Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter because certain aspects of his life were inflated in the 1930s and '40s and have yet to deflate. He did serve prison sentences for manslaughter—at Imperial State Prison Farm in Texas and Angola in Louisiana, both notoriously brutal institutions—and he managed to sing his way out of them. When he moved to New York City, the press played up his past at the expense of his music; the New York Herald previewed an early performance with the sensationalist headline, "Sweet Singer of the Swamplands Here to Do a Few Tunes Between Homicides". As archivist and curator Jeff Place points out in the liner notes here, it was an all too common attitude at the time.
Over the course of his relatively short 15-year recording career, Lead Belly met many sympathetic label executives, producers, and fellow musicians who promoted him as a dynamic entertainer and an accomplished songster, but he never truly escaped the condescending "noble savage" stigma attached to him by the liberal elite of the Northeast. Nor did he achieve much popular success during his lifetime. He sold primarily to a small community of folk fans in and around New York, but never made a considerable impact beyond the city. In that regard, he was a man slightly out of time. It was just a few years after his death in 1949 when folk became big business, when the songs he had preserved became mainstays in coffeehouses and concert halls. Without Lead Belly, the folk revival of Dylan, Baez, and Fred Neil would have been very different, and it might not have happened at all.
Lead Belly also left his mark on rock'n'roll. What’s remarkable about this collection is just how familiar many of these songs already are. "Black Girl (Where Did You Sleep Last Night)" is perhaps best known to many via Nirvana’s 1993 Unplugged performance, but there’s also "The Midnight Special" (a hit for Creedence Clearwater Revival, among others) and "Black Betty" (Ram Jam, Tom Jones, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion). "Pick a Bale of Cotton" and "Rock Island Line" formed the foundation of the UK skiffle movement in the 1950s, and Led Zeppelin more or less stole "The Gallis Pole" riff, lyrics, and all. Lead Belly didn’t write all of these songs, but he collected them from a variety of sources—other cotton pickers in Texas, other inmates, other musicians, family members, friends—and put his indelible stamp on them. Most subsequent artists discovered these songs through his versions.
The first three discs of The Smithsonian Folkways Collection are as fine a retrospective as you can find for Lead Belly, showcasing the diversity of his repertoire and the precision of his playing and singing. (For those who don’t have the $100 for this box set, many of these tracks were compiled on Smithsonian Folkways’ Lead Belly Legacy series, any of which makes a fine entry point into his vast catalog.) What distinguishes this collection is its scope: There have been hundreds of Lead Belly comps released over the last half-century, but too few put his best-known material alongside his radio performances and final sessions, which are included on the fourth and fifth discs. Recorded during the 1940s for a folk series on WNYC, his radio broadcasts show him in a looser setting where the distinctions between his patter and his playing seem to disappear. Whether he’s singing solo or accompanied by the Oleander Quartet, he’s an outsize personality on the airwaves, especially during the two 15-minute programs that allow him to regale his imagined, invisible audience with stories as well as songs.
The final disc includes songs from what would be Lead Belly’s last sessions in 1948. His voice sounds noticeably weaker, with an uneasy grain in his syllables that has less to do with age and more to do with the onset of ALS. He’d be dead in a year, but as shaky as his voice may be, it is no less certain in its phrasing, whether he’s rhapsodizing with a Bessie Smith record on "Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out" or singing "Stewball" accompanied only by backing vocals and handclaps. It’s tempting to read anything called "Last Sessions" as poignant, but Lead Belly brings a very familiar exuberance to "It’s Tight Like That" and "House of the Rising Son".
It’s fitting that the final track on The Smithsonian Folkways Collection isn’t a song, but a brief monologue called "In the World", based on a half-remembered conversation from long ago. It makes for a fitting epilogue to this monumental box set, primarily because it reveals Lead Belly’s role as an archivist of American music, passing tunes and ideas along from one person to the next, from one generation to the next. "We all gotta get peace together because we’re in the world together," he muses. "I never heard nothing like it. Now you got it now."
