American folk and blues musician, born Huddie William Ledbetter in Mooringsport, Louisiana, near the Texas border; the most important single figure in the transmission of Black Southern folk music to the folk-revival audiences of the 1940s and after, and one of the few artists whose repertoire — learned from fieldwork, prison farms, juke joints, and the deep oral tradition of the cotton South — constitutes in itself a documentary archive of Black American life from Reconstruction through the early twentieth century.
Lead Belly grew up in a sharecropping family in the Caddo Lake country of northwest Louisiana, learned guitar, accordion, and mandolin as a child, and by his teens was playing the twelve-string guitar with the power and range that became his signature. He worked the red-light districts of Shreveport and Dallas, played with Blind Lemon Jefferson in Deep Ellum, and served two prison terms — in Texas (1918–25, for murder, pardoned by Governor Pat Neff after reportedly singing his way out) and in Louisiana's Angola Prison Farm (1930–34, for assault with intent to kill). In 1933, while he was in Angola, the folklorists John and Alan Lomax arrived on a song-collecting trip for the Library of Congress, recorded him extensively, and upon his release in 1934 brought him to New York, where he became a cause célèbre of the folk-left.
The songs Lead Belly carried north constitute one of the essential American songbooks: "Goodnight, Irene," "Midnight Special," "Rock Island Line," "Cotton Fields," "Where Did You Sleep Last Night" ("In the Pines"), "Pick a Bale of Cotton," "Bourgeois Blues" (written after he and the Lomaxes were refused service at a Washington, D.C. hotel because of his race). Some are his compositions; many are traditional songs he learned and shaped into definitive versions; all are documents of a world — the cotton South, the prison farms, the lumber camps, the segregated cities — that no other single performer preserved as completely.
In New York from the mid-1930s until his death, Lead Belly performed for left and labor audiences, recorded for Moe Asch's Folkways label (later Smithsonian Folkways), and became a central figure in the circle that included Woody Guthrie, Pete Seeger, Sonny Terry, and Brownie McGhee. He was never a commercial success in his lifetime — "Goodnight, Irene" became a number-one hit only in 1950, a year after his death, in the Weavers' version. His twelve-string guitar style, his repertoire, and his example as a performer whose material was rooted in the Black rural tradition influenced Guthrie directly and, through Guthrie, Dylan and the entire folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s.
He died of ALS in New York in December 1949, at sixty-one, and is buried in Shiloh Baptist Church cemetery in Mooringsport, Louisiana.
Lead Belly is on the graph because his repertoire is itself a social history of Black Southern life from Reconstruction through the Great Migration — the musical parallel to the literary and photographic traditions the graph already carries — and because his influence on Guthrie and the folk revival makes him the origin point of the lineage through which Black folk music entered American political culture.