Chapter 9: We're in the Same Boat, Brother 1944-1946

Discussions between many of the leading folksingers resulted in the formation of People's Songs, Inc., a politically active group which not only put out a magazine but also organized "Hootenannies" and gave concerts in support of striking workers in Pittsburg, Schenectady, and New York City. ("Hootenanny" 72)
The hootenannies were mainly to support the publication which, by 1948, also included a booking agency known as "People's Artists," as well as chapters in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago and Boston.

In the evenings, after a supper of chicken-fried steak or liver smothered in onions, my father would announce, "Let's drive around the Loop and cool off," meaning a spin around Pine Crest Drive, below Marshall to the south, touching the stately old southern houses with antebellum pines and wisteria and columned porches; and "Yankee Stadium," the cluster of two- and three-bedroom bungalows built to house the influx of workers, many of them nasal-twanged northerners, who had come for war jobs at the Longhorn Ordnance Works, fourteen miles northeast of town ("the only thing in East Texas the Germans would want to bomb," according to war strategists at Van Zandt Elementary School). (Goulden 88)
During the war Huddie was busy in New York, and involved with interesting people, but he wasn't making much money at music. He was often employed as a janitor, while Martha worked as a hotel maid. The Upper East Siders who appreciated his playing for their children didn't think to provide him a living. Moses Asch never did make much money on his record company; his mission was to keep his immense catalog of obscure recordings in print. Huddie's jam sessions with his friends were fun and fulfilling, but not financially rewarding. The municipal radio station WNYC (now the flagship National Public Radio affiliate in New York City) didn't pay performers anything, and the Village Vanguard was definitely a low-rent gig. It was no surprise that Huddie decided, in 1944, to try his luck in Hollywood.
Mary Elizabeth Barnicle hosted a farewell party for Huddie on May 5th; but during the month of June he recorded in New York with Josh White, and played at a high school prom at the fashionable Essex House on Central Park South. Eventually he boarded a train for the Coast, and in July he was reported to be in Los Angeles. According to the People's World, "he is in Hollywood, where, appropriately enough, he will spend the summer working in films and singing at People's World parties. . . ." (Lornell) On July 8th, Huddie appeared at a Peoples' World concert at Hollywood's Masonic Temple. He was to remain in California for a year and a half.
By October he was cutting songs for Capitol records, a small label at the time which since became an industry giant. Capitol grew by recording artists like Nat "King" Cole who had tremendous commercial success; Ledbetter was not one of those, but his Capitol recordings are still available. He did "Irene," "The Rock Island Line," and six other songs, accompanied by a zither player, Paul Howard (Leadbitter & Slavin 189). Oddly enough, Howard, a white, country-style player, came from Arkansas via Shreveport, but whether this had anything to do with his inclusion in the session is not known. In a separate session for Capitol, Huddie did a couple of piano tunes which reflected his early Fannin Street influences.
“When the legendary Huddie (Leadbelly) Ledbetter arrived in Los Angeles under the auspices of a communist-front organization in 1944 — an arrangement about which I remained ignorant until the war's end — it was my pleasure to record a dozen Leadbelly sides. He sang and played his battered 12-string guitar, then demanded that Paul Mason Howard, who accompanied him to the studio, be allowed to accompany him on the zither. I didn't care to argue with Leadbelly. He had been pardoned from the Louisiana state prison after killing a man. Leadbelly also made a couple of rocky, ragtimey piano solos on the session. Capitol still sells his classic performances in the seventies, remastered and packaged for microgroove turntables.” (Dexter)
Record producer Dave Dexter, Jr. wrote that paragraph in his autobiography, “Playback,” which was published in 1976. Obviously he was seeking to distance himself from any possible political taint, but the fact is that the Capitol session was re-mastered again, for Compact Disc release in the 1990's, and is thus reaching a new generation.
While he was in Hollywood, Huddie was feted by the left-wing community of writers and directors; he was a star attraction amongst the stars at many parties, but he never managed to break into movies. By mid-February, 1945, Huddie had gone north to the Bay Area, and was to be found performing on a Standard School Broadcast for school children. A recording of part of this broadcast was later released on Folkways records as "Negro Folk Songs for Young People."
One of Huddie's "left-wing writer" associates was Jessica Mitford, of the famous Mitford sisters. This was not a glamorous Hollywood connection, however. Ms. Mitford lived in San Francisco, later Oakland, and was very much involved as a front line political and civil rights activist. She came from a strange family, given to extremism. Her father she described as "one of nature's fascists." Her sisters included Nancy Mitford, the novelist who was closest to the political center; another sister, Diana, married the leader of Britain's fascist movement, Sir Oswald Mosley; a third was actually associated with Hitler's inner circle, while another was confined to an institution. Jessica, however, became a communist during the Spanish Civil War. She migrated to the United States and married Harvard-educated Bob Truehaft, a lawyer who specialized in defending left-wing unions and cases of Civil Rights abuse.
In her autobiography, “A Fine Old Conflict”, Ms. Mitford writes of the amusing problems often related to the visits of her upwardly mobile mother-in-law Aranka, a milliner from New York:
“Somehow the timing of Aranka's visits seemed always to be unfortunate. Once she arrived when Leadbelly, the great blues singer, had come to stay for a fortnight. ‘But, Aranka, we've only got one spare bedroom. I do hope you won't mind sharing?’ Aranka, not amused, elected to sleep on the living room couch.
“Leadbelly was already a legend. He had sung his way out of a Louisiana prison, where he was serving a life sentence for murder, by addressing musical pleas for clemency to the governor, whom he charmed into granting a pardon. His real name was Huddie Ledbetter: he had adopted Leadbelly as his ‘nom de theatre’ in nostalgic recollection of the numerous gunfights of his youth.
“He was very large and very black. He would come down to breakfast wearing a long stark-white nightshirt, (was this the famous bath robe which Woody wrote about?) from which protruded his sable limbs and head; the visual effect was spectacular. Soon the house would ring with his wonderful music, daily concerts for the children, for whom he improvised special songs.
“He and Aranka were ill-assorted houseguests; they would circle one another warily, with little to say. "Oh, Decca" — Aranka sighed wistfully — "I wish I was black like Leadbelly. Then you would love me." (Mitford)
Back in Southern California, where he stayed at the home of his cousin George Pugh, he met a music shop owner named Ross Russell. The meeting took place at the home of a Hollywood writer and after that, Huddie took to dropping in at Russell's Tempo Music Shop. Russell entertained the idea of putting together a biography, but before he could get very far with the project, Huddie had returned to the East (Russell12).
One night, Russell accompanied Ledbetter and some others on a pub crawl in the black section of Los Angeles, and thus discovered how easy it was for the singer to get into trouble. After a few drinks, Ledbetter produced his guitar and virtually took over a tavern with his entertaining. Two young women "almost forty years his junior" took a shine to Huddie, much to the annoyance of their escorts, and it was only with some difficulty that the group managed to pry him loose from the place unscathed (Russell 14).
Paramount Pictures had optioned John Lomax's book, “Adventures of a Ballad Hunter,” and there was some talk of including Huddie in the film version. He did have some film footage taken, but it was not what he'd hoped for. He was filmed singing three songs without sound. Pete Seeger later dubbed in the sound of Huddie's voice, thus creating the only extant visual record of Huddie singing, now available on You Tube.
Huddie was rebuffed by some film studio executive, and later wrote
about it in a song, "4, 5, and 9." While he was at a party, Huddie met a movie producer and asked about getting a screen test. "Sure," laughed the exec, "call me up tomorrow at 45 to 9." This was apparently an inside joke which translated as a brush-off, and for Huddie, a humiliation:

What I'm gonna do for you now — I called my baby between 4, 5 and
9 and meet my baby on Hollywood and Vine. Ever been to California? In
Hollywood, you know, that's the way it is.

I called this morning between 4, 5 and 9
I want you to meet me on Hollywood and Vine.

If you get down there before I do
You can tell your friends that I'm coming, too.

I'm gonna sing this verse, ain't a-gonna sing no more
Next time I sing, I'm gonna be in Chicago.

Just after he was discharged from the army, Canadian folksinger Oscar Brand, weighing his career possibilities, decided that most of all he'd like to write for radio. He approached several New York radio stations about doing a program of Christmas music which would be unlike the standard popular fare. He received responses from WEAF, WNEW, and from Herman Neumann at WNYC. Neumann was responsible for programming music which was alternative to the vaudeville and big band sounds on the commercial stations; he also programmed folk music and jazz.

Oscar Brand: So he called on me, he said, "I'm very much interested, do you want to do a program?" December the 10th, just before Christmas. I said, "Sure." I came on and did the program and as I was finished doing a bunch of songs and talking about them and their meanings for a half an hour, he said, "What are you doing next week?" I said, "Well, what would you like?" He said, "Well, come back, try another one."
I came back next week which put me right in front of Christmas and did another Christmas program about the kind of songs we do and how they were made up songs for people who couldn't read, and what they got
out of the Bible. I did some gospel songs, old Appalachain songs, Canadian
songs, and when I finished I walked by the office and waved at Herman Neumann and waved expectantly and hopefully, and he said, "Listen, if you're not doing anything next week, come on back," and that's the way I've been working for WNYC now since 1945. [1992 Interview]
Brand was then asked to coordinate folk music programs for New York's WNYC radio. He found Huddie already broadcasting for the station and since he was an old friend, "coordinating" consisted mainly of walking down the hall on the twenty-fifth floor of the Municipal Building, which housed the WNYC studios, and waving to Huddie during his broadcasts on "Folk Song Festival." He also did a half-hour program called "The Brandwagon" for which he wrote scripts and got together actors. During the week he sometimes traveled to Johnson City, New York, or Detroit, Michigan, to sing for striking workers under the banner of Peoples Songs.
In [December] 1945, just when the WNYC show was inaugurated, Margot Mayo, whose American Square Dance Group was also promulgating the dance-song gospel, decided to have a "home-from-the-war" party. Leadbelly, Seeger, [Richard] Dyer-Bennett, [John-Jacob] Niles, Guthrie, and many others performed. After the program, Pete Seeger came over to see me and asked if I would help him start a folk song magazine. We made immediate plans for a mimeographed publication, using the paraphernalia I had bought in Army days when I was editing a newspaper for psychiatric patients. (Brand 83-4) Even when he was with the army in the Far East, [Stuff from Tillman Franks re Pete Seeger to go here,] Pete Seeger was dreaming of energizing the world with music. He and Lee Hays, the Alamanac's bass voice, stayed in touch with one another throughout Pete's army days, discussing their postwar plans for a nationwide organization for singers and songwriters. They wanted to use songs to change the world: songs about "truth, justice and freedom," to hammer out a better world. At the end of 1945 twenty-five singer-songwriters gathered at Toshi Seeger's parents' place on Macdougal Street in the Village. It was the 30th of December.
Went down to a meeting of a new union of progressive songwriters that call themselves "Peoples Songs," found Pete Seeger and his banjo, the president and Lee Hays (Arkansaw Hard Luck Lee), the vice president. I found Betty Sanders, Leadbelly, Bernie Asbel, Alan Lomax, Bess Lomax, Tom Glazer, Charlotte Anthony, Lou Kleinman, Mildred Linsley, and Shaemas O'Sheel, Bob Russell, there, almost every songwriter pitching in their efforts to make out of all of their little works one big union called "Peoples Songs."
The reason for Peoples Songs is to shoot your union the kind of a song or songs when you want it and fast. To help you make a songbook, a program,a throwaway songsheet, a whole evening. Or maybe your problem is just about how to make a song and get it copyrighted, printed, circulated around, how to set a fee, and what to do with your works after you create them. I am one of fifteen now on the Executive Committee of Peoples Songs, 130 West 42nd Street, New York City, New York. (Guthrie)
The first issue of the Peoples Songs “Bulletin” was printed on Oscar Brand's mimeograph machine. The call went out for people to submit songs about the working man, repressed minorities and about peace. The war against fascism was over; now was the time to build the brotherhood of man. Idealism was at an all-time high and the “Bulletin” was successful in rousing the interest of a nationwide community of songwriters committed to changing the world through song. The second issue was printed with an offset machine, Bernie Asbell was hired as editor, and Bernie's wife, Millie, became manager of the small, crowded offices on 42nd Street. The Peoples Songs offices became a hub of activity, sending out missionaries to sing for union meetings and picket lines.
Oscar brand recalls being an activist in the days when union people were being beaten over the head by the American Legion, the Knights of Columbus, the police, the National Guard, “and by anybody else who just wanted to beat somebody up, when unions were considered communist organizations, we were out on picket lines. I or Pete, or Cisco Houston, or Woody, or whoever was around, they'd get a phone call, I'd get a phone call, saying, ‘We're having a strike up here, this city or this town.’ And I would figure out, if I take the train it'll take me so long and coming back it'll take me so long, I can just about make it, and away we'd go and do a program. [The union]'d usually pay for the train and sometimes five or ten dollars besides.
I did programs for the Spanish Refugee Appeal, for Russian War Relief, for the American Labor Party; the left wing organizations were extremely eager to have folk music. I made up songs. I remember Elliott Roosevelt was going up to Johnson City, New York, which along with Endicott and Binghampton was owned by Johnson & Johnson at the time, and he said, ‘Would you come up with me. I can speak,’ and he was a lousy speaker but he was the former president's son. We got on the train and we got up there and I'd written a few songs. One of them was to an old tune called "The Johnson Boys:"

The Johnson Boys, they own Tri-City,
They bought it when it first began,
They're so rich it's sure a pity,
They still can't buy a union man.
They can't buy a union man,
They can't buy a union man.

Which made a tremendous hit. And that's the kind of thing we were doing.
Not only old songs: when the Farmers' Union was meeting in New York, I
remember I was working the farms then, I would go up there and sing,

When the banker hangs around
And the butcher cuts the pound,
The farmer is the man who feeds them all.
Oh, the farmer is the man,
The farmer is the man,
He lives on credit til the fall
And they take him by the hand
And they lead him by the hand,
And the mortgage man's the man who gets it all.

Those were good times, [1946] the busy days at People's Songs sometimes running into song-filled nights at the Lower East Side apartment of Martha and Huddie Ledbetter, the black ex-convict folksinger known as Leadbelly, a man all of them Pete, Lee, Woody, Cisco Houston, Alan Lomax, and every folk singer and folk song maven worshiped and learned from.
Lee wished Leadbelly could break the habit of calling them "Mr.Pete" and "Mr.Alan" and "Mr. Lee," but Leadbelly couldn't, or wouldn't. On the other hand, Lee chuckled over the irony (which he pointed out to Pete) that Leadbelly dressed in a dignified shirt-and-tie fashion while Pete, the New England aristocrat, turned up everywhere in farmer's overalls. Pete didn't see the humor at all.
Sometimes Leadbelly would stake Lee to a bottle of bourbon when Lee's always minimal money ran out. Lee swore he sang louder and better with booze lining his vocal chords. Woody and Cisco kept right up with Lee. The nights began to last until the mornings. Pete, never deflected from his work by old-boy carousing, cast a cold eye on theproceedings. Hadn't Lee learned that Pete's patience could give out?
But when Lee stood up and led a hootenanny, Pete had to love him. What could be more effective than this big southern preacher-type calling out, in his marvelous deep bass voice, stingingly funny lines about antediluvian southern congressmen? When you lived in New York City, you couldn't be sure how far protest went in the country. Lee and Woody most especially could make you believe that "the folk" could be pretty durned radical. (Willens 88)
On the liner notes for Cisco [Houston]'s first album, after Cisco's big breakthrough at Gerde's Folk City, Lee wrote, "Cisco fits the scholar's definition of the wandering folk singer as well as anyone except Woody Guthrie, who was a sidekick of Cisco's for a long time. They travelled and sang together, and they both had close personal ties with Martha and Huddie Ledbetter, whose home was, at time, the only one they had. . . ." (Willens 207)
According to banjo-guitarist and New Orleans jazz historian Danny Barker, on 6 January,1946, Huddie recorded an untitled blues with Bunk Johnson and several other players at the Stuyvesant Casino. The Bunk Johnson band recordings were for V-Disc, a U.S. Government-financed project whereby armed forces overseas were provided with free recordings of all types of music. There were several other musicians, including Danny Barker, who recorded that day with Bunk. Bunk's band finished its first gig at the Casino on 12 January.
Danny Barker, Oscar Brand and Woody Guthrie, it must be noted, all placed Huddie in New York around the Christmas holiday season, 1945-46: Barker at the Casino; Brand at WNYC and the "Home-from-the-War" party; and Guthrie at theformative meeting of People's Songs. Huddie was clearly photographed with Bunk Johnson at the Stuyvesant Casino, but that could have been in the Spring of 1946 when Bunk's band returned. It is possible that Barker, Brand and Guthrie were mistaken about the dates.
It is also possible that Huddie came home for Christmas and then returned to the West Coast for a few more weeks, because on 30 January, 1946, he gave an 8 p.m. concert at the YWCA Auditorium, 6th and Pacific in Los Angeles. On 8 February he cabled from the Coast that he was about to leave for home, and in March he appeared at People's Songs' first public concert at Elizabeth Irwin High School, New York City. Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and Woody Guthrie were also in the program. From that time on, though he traveled out of town several times, and one time went to France, Huddie based himself in New York.

Late in the afternoon of 27 April, 1946, a Saturday, Huddie gave a recital at Town Hall in New York City. He was accompanied by Sonny Terry, the harmonica player, and the event was written up in the New York Times. The closing number was an audience singalong, "We're in the Same Boat, Brother."
“The songs were heard without sophistication, with no other art than that with which the singer was born and without the benefit of a beautiful voice like Paul Robeson's or Marian Anderson's. The listener heard, instead, precisely what is to be heard today in the hills of the Carolinas, the swamp lands of Mississippi and Louisiana, the small-town theatres and "hot spots" throughout the South. This is the music of the soil, direct from its source, and as Leadbelly sings it, it is filled with an emotion all its own, and is the outpouring of an art that is the simple and genuine expression of that emotion.” ("Huddie Leadbetter Heard")

On Thursday, May 9th, People's Songs, Inc. put on a "Union Hootenanny" at Town Hall. The show featured Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee. Huddie missed this hoot, but he performed at the Strathmore Folk Festival the following day. At the second seasonal Hoot, the following Thursday, the 16th, Huddie was also absent. [Was he out of town?]

The previous September (1945), a month after the end of the war with Japan, when Huddie was on the West Coast, an extraordinary old time jazz revival had begun to take place in New York City. William Russell was a jazz historian who loved the original New Orleans sound; he had been to the Crescent City during the war years, and there discovered that trumpeter Bunk Johnson, a kind of missing link between the unrecorded Buddy Bolden, and the meteoric Louis Armstrong, was still alive. Bunk played in the sporting houses on Basin Street, in the saloons above Canal Street, and in the bandwagons that rode around town with the slidehorns hanging out over the tailgate. He went barnstorming for as little as $5 a week and tips. Twelve years ago Bunk lost his teeth and gave up playing. A Pittsburgh jazz fan [Russell] found him, a toothless stooped laborer in the rice fields of New Iberia, La., got him some false teeth and raised money for a horn.
Said the New York Herald Tribune highbrow critic Virgil Thomson: "[Bunk] is the greatest master of blues or
off-pitch notes. . . an artist of delicate imagination." ("Jazz?")
Russell got Bunk together with a group of traditional jazzmen, most of whom were holding down day jobs of one sort or another, and painstakingly recorded several tunes. The recordings turned out well, and back in New York, Russell was able to pass on his enthusiasm to a circle of friends. They decided to bring the Bunk Johnson band to New York, to show off real New Orleans jazz. The other members of the band were George Lewis, clarinet; Jim Robinson, trombone; Slow Drag Pavageau, bass; Lawrence Marrero, banjo; Alton Purnell, piano; and Baby Dodds on the drums.
Dodds, who was the brother of famed clarinetist Johnny Dodds, had the most impressive credits up to that time. He had gone to Chicago in the 1920's and played with King Oliver and Louis Armstrong; later he backed up Jelly Roll Morton, and made records with most of the famous New Orleans musicians during the Jazz Age. Though they were relatively unknown at the time, the rest of the band members were some of New Orleans finest who went on to establish fine reputations during the traditional jazz revival which started on that autumn evening — in New York — and continued well into the 1950's.
Four hundred people turned out for the opening night at the Stuyvesant Casino, a large ballroom on Second Avenue near East 9th Street, which had mostly been used for ethnic wedding receptions until that night. The Casino was close to where Huddie lived on East 10th Street, an easy walk, and he hung out at the Casino a lot during the band's second booking between April and May. He sat in with the band on several occasions. Included in the crowd on opening night, and probably on many subsequent nights as well, were names connected to Huddie Ledbetter — Fred Ramsey, Charles Edward Smith, Moses Asch. The night was, by all reports, a great success.

The Casino is decorous - the audience is mostly well-behaved youngsters - and simple, in ornamentation as well as in operation. You pay a dollar at the door, go upstairs, sit at whatever table or bench is vacant, and listen. If music is not sufficient food, there are beer and sandwiches, which you fetch yourself from the bar or buy from the Casino's only waiter, the politest and most thoughtful man of his breed I have encountered in some time.
There are, in fact, only two real drawbacks to the whole thing. The piano on the stand is in such a state of decay that Carmen Cavellero shouldn't even have to play "Til the End of Time" on it, and on some nights there is a gathering of intelligentsia that is so intense and audible about this careful reconstruction of another way of life that it is a considerable handicap to those who would rather just sit and listen to the music. (The New Yorker, 20 Oct 45)
Ralph J. Gleason was a writer on the New York scene in the 1940's. A couple of decades later he established a reputation with the national magazine, Rolling Stone, and various other prestigious musical journals. He was introduced to Ledbetter one night at the Stuyvesant Casino, and had this to say of the meeting:
Bunk and New Orleans jazz were intellectually chic that winter and their nightly sessions at the ancient East Side Hall, once the scene of a famous gangland shooting in the early days of New York Mafia wars, were an essential part of everyone's tour of New York. All the musicians and artists and writers from James Jones to Leadbelly stopped there.
Leadbelly sang a couple of numbers with the band (Art Hodes was on the piano that night and it was impossible
for a piano to accompany Leadbelly because he didn't sing standard 12-bar blues, in fact, his blues varied from night to night in bar structure as his whim dictated). But most of the time he stayed at the bar.
The Stuyvesant Casino at that time was an incredible place. Admission was low and it was packed with Greenwich
Village types, the kind that were then called Bohemians and later evolved into the Beatniks and, still later, their descendents became hippies. Beer was cheap; there was only one waiter and you could stall there all night without spending any money past the admission charge.
The bar was always packed and Leadbelly was pressed up against it, surrounded by a coterie of fans. He was not
a tall man at all, but he was broad and chunky and gave the impression of terrific strength. He didn't smile much
and implicit in standing next to him was the fact that you were standing next to a convicted murderer. It gave the
crowd an added edge of excitement, like standing next to Little Augie Pisano or Tony Bender.
I was introduced to him by a friend from the Coast, and then he went on with his conversation. Suddenly, Leadbelly said, very loud and clear, "Don't fool with me, boy; I don't play." Everybody stopped talking. The silence
was achingly oppressive. People slowly began backing away. Suddenly he was no longer that fascinating blues and folk singer with a prison record, but a murderer. He'd killed and he might kill again. And when he said "I don't play," you believed him. Somebody stuttered an apology and everything quieted down. But they all — myself included — looked at him differently from then on. (Gleason)

On Wednesday, September 4th, 1946, Huddie attended a benefit for the National Negro Congress in New York City. He is pictured in a Daily World photo with his guitar strapped on, posing with Sonny Terry, Cisco Houston, and the activist-singer-actor, Paul Robeson. Robeson has been described by his grand-daughter as a renaissance
man. He is the only black face in his graduating class from Harvard Law School in 1923; he was an outstanding athlete in high school and college — he played football at Princeton and was good enough to play professionally when he needed the money; without any particular training, he became a concert artist and a stage and screen actor. His most outstanding roles were in Eugene O'Neill's "Emperor Jones" and "All God's Chillun Got Wings," as well as a Broadway "Othello" with Uta Hagen and Jose Ferrer during the war. He was a linguist, an historian, and an outspoken champion of the rights of African Americans. For this he was labelled a communist; Ledbetter, had he lived a little longer, may have had his moment in front of an Un-American Activities Committee, too, but he was nothing like as outstanding a target as Robeson.

Thursdays that September, at 6 p.m., Huddie was once more singing his songs during a fifteen-minute program on WNYC. On September 29th, a Saturday night, he was concertizing at New York's Town Hall, playing 12-string guitar, accordion, and piano on a variety of folksongs, blues, spirituals and work-songs. He was also aided in the concert by Edith Allaire, "American ballad singer"; Sonny Terry; Cisco Houston, who sang some cowboy songs; guitarist Brownie McGhee who played along on "Irene, Goodnight;" Sue Remos, a dancer from the West Coast; and jazz bassman "Pops" Foster.

LEAD BELLY OFFERSâ FOLK-MUSIC OF THE SOUTH
Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter), old-time American
folk-singer from the deep South appearing with six guest
artists, gave a concert of folk music last night at Town
Hall. To use Lead Belly's own phrase — he talks only in
verse — it was "fine as wine" throughout and gave a fairly
comprehensive picture of the genre.
Playing his own accompaniments on various
instruments, including the twelve-string guitar, the
accordion and the piano, Lead Belly sang spirituals,
reels, blues and work-songs from the levees, the railroads
and the fields.
The authenticity of his renderings gives the songs he
sings their interest, both historical and musical. (Lead Belly Offers)

In his 1971 autobiography, "Pops" Foster was clear about his dislike for Huddie, even if he got some of the facts wrong. Foster was a bassist from New Orleans who played at the Town Hall concert and with many of the early stars of jazz.
"Leadbelly's wife's name was Irene (sic) and the tune of his 'Irene' got to be a big hit. As soon as it did he died. Leadbelly was a mean and evil guy. He was in the penitentiary three times for killing guys and every time he played his way out." (Foster 153)
"Pops" found Huddie difficult, but not impossible, to accompany. He said that he and pianist Willie "The Lion" Smith were the only two people who could play with him. According to Foster, Ledbetter, and other blues singers like Josh White, had no musical training and therefore had no idea which key they were playing in. And, because they generally played solo, they were incapable of keeping time.
"When Willie and I would play with them kinda guys, he'd come around to say, 'We got a hard date today, Pops. A lot of those guys can't even tune their instruments.' "
He was talking about a different musical genre, of course. Clearly Ledbetter was capable of playing with other musicians; he did it regularly at hoots and get-togethers with the folk song crowd. But jazz was a different thing. Many of the jazz players came out of a brass band tradition in which an ability to read music was taken for granted. Many of the jazz groups depended on strict arrangements where the musicians were taken on as "sidemen" to play a particular part, whereas the folk musicians were, to varying degrees, anarchic. Ledbetter had been brought up playing for dances, but he hadn't done that much since he left his audience in Louiosiana and Texas, so his rhythms may have become variable. In fact, playing for dances as a single, his rhythms were probably always variable. Like many successful dance bands — Bob Wills' Texas Playboys for instance — he had a tendency to speed up his tempos for the sake of exciting the dancers.
In his critique of Ledbetter's music, Pops Foster didn't take all that into account. Somehow, his dislike for the music was mixed up with his dislike for the man. He was at Ledbetter's apartment one day, talking to one of Moses Asch's partners about making some records, when there was a scuffle between two men outside on the landing. One man, whom Foster identified as "Leadbelly's son-in-law," had insulted the other's wife and sought refuge at Ledbetter's door.
At any rate, Huddie commenced beating the man over the head with a poker, while Foster and the man from Asch made their getaway. When Huddie went to court for assaulting the man, Foster had to go and testify. The judge fined the other man and told him he had no business being in Ledbetter's house.
Pops Foster: “When Leadbelly would get mad he'd just sit and grit his teeth. One time I told him he'd have to play a chord on his guitar or we couldn't make no record. He just sat and started gritting his teeth. I told him he could grit his teeth all day, but if he didn't play the chord we couldn't play with him. He finally played it. Leadbelly was just and evil man. I just made records with him and never hung around with him at all.” (Foster 154)
"Pops" Foster, incidentally, also intensely disliked legendary clarinettist Sidney Bechet.

Chapter 8: Bourgeois Blues (1935-44)

Some people wished they had seen the last of Huddie and Martha Ledbetter. As John Lomax said at the end of the biographical section of his book, "What the future holds for these two Negroes, only time will tell" (Negro 64). Huddie wrote to Lomax using an Excelsior Laundry address, in Shreveport, indicating that Martha may have got her old job back. Blues Who's Who refers to this period of Huddie's life, 1935 to 1937, as "working in Shreveport out of the music business" (317). This may well be true.

1935 stands out as one of the most eventful years in Louisiana history, but this had nothing to do with music: Senator Huey P. Long, Louisiana’s all-time favorite politician, was shot down on September 8th in a corridor of the Capitol he was responsible for building. He died in hospital in the early morning of the 10th, ten days after his 42nd birthday. A few months earlier Long had revealed the existence of a plot to kill him, but this would not have surprised anyone. Huey’s popularity came at a cost; he had many wealthy and influential enemies who resented his “Share the Wealth” ideology which advocated a cap on the amount of money a person could accumulate.

To Ross Russell, a jazz writer who owned a record store in Hollywood in the 1940's, Huddie Ledbetter "dropped out of sight" for ten years after leaving John Lomax (Russell 12). Then he turned up in Hollywood. This was very much a West Coast perspective, however. In fact, during those ten years Huddie did a tremendous amount of recording, appeared on many radio programs, and worked clubs and concerts, primarily in the New York area.
According to the Lead Belly Letter, Martha and Huddie returned to New York City at the beginning of 1937. They were with a new agent/manager named John W. Townsend, and were staying with Townsend and his mother at an address in the Bronx. Townsend is referred to as a gas station operator from Dallas.

During the winter of 1936-37, Alan Lomax expanded his folk song collecting to Haiti; he would eventually collect folksongs around the world. From 1936 to 1942 Lomax was "Assistant in Charge" of the Archive of Folk Song of the Library of Congress to which he and his father and numerous collaborators contributed more than ten thousand field recordings. During his lifetime, he collected folk music from the United States, Haiti, the Caribbean, Ireland, Great Britain, Spain, and Italy, assembling treasure trove of American and international culture.
The elder Lomax (as we have seen) had had enough of his protege, but on 12 June 1937, Alan brought Huddie to Washington where he supervised some recordings at the Library of Congress. During their visit to the capital, Martha and Huddie encountered an instance of racial discrimination similar to that they had experienced in New York two years earlier, and Huddie wrote about it in one of his most enduring songs, "The Bourgeois Blues." Credit for co-authoring this song is unstintingly given to Alan Lomax.

Me and Martha was standing upstairs,
I heard a white man say, "Don't want no colored up there,
Lord, it's a bourgeois town
Ooh, it's a bourgeois town
I got the bourgeois blues,
I'm gonna spread the news all around.

Home of the brave, land of the free,
I don't want to be mistreated by no bourgeoisie,
Lord, it's a bourgeois town. . .

The tune for "Bourgeois Blues" is similar to Memphis Minnie's "Dirty Mother For You" of January 1935. It's not difficult to figure out what Minnie means when she sings “He's a dirty mother for you, he don't mean me no good.” Huddie was probably delighted with the unstated reference to Minnie's song himself, but he tended not to be openly raunchy or offensive in his lyrics. About this same time, he was explaining to Alan that "tight like that" was a description of the way people held each other when they danced, while Alan was pretty sure it had something to do with the female anatomy.
There are fourteen titles in these Washington sessions; these include the blues standard "Hello, Central" and two takes of a topical song, "The Hindenburg Disaster." The explosion of the zeppelin Hindenburg at its mooring, which caused the deaths of thirty-six people, took place on 6th May, 1937, at Lakehurst, New Jersey. "New York City" was also recorded. It's a re-working of a song Huddie had recorded for the American Recording Company two years earlier, a song which was never released during the his lifetime. "Kansas City Papa" is the original, and the refrain,
Kansas City - ain't it a pity?
is changed to
New York City - ain't that a city?

The Kansas City song takes a completely different attitude to the New York song. Kansas City is viewed from the perspective of a country bumpkin who comes away shaking his head at the strange goings on in the big city. It's an archetypal song; it could've been about Dallas or Shreveport, but it happened to be about Kansas City, which was a mecca for Negro jazz and blues players in the 1920's and 30's. Huddie may never have visited Kansas City at the time he sang the song, though there is hearsay that he visited his ex-wife Elethe there at some point. The verses are folk couplets which may have been used in any number of similar dance tunes. It has all the earmarks of a number played at a country supper.

Funniest thing that I ever did see
Polecat climbing up a 'simmon tree
In Kansas City. . .

The New York song, on the other hand, is specific to that city and
bespeaks a real attraction to the place.

It's one thing folks I ask you to do
Catch a bus and ride up Fifth Avenue
In New York City. . .

Although the melody and rhythm has not changed, it has become a song for a New York audience.

Pineville, in the coal-veined hills of Kentucky, 1938, is the setting for the recording of three religious songs ("Old Time Religion," "Get on Board," and "Rock of Ages"), which were deposited in the Library of Congress. Huddie is accompanied by his own guitar, by the singing of Martha, and by Jim and Sarah Garland (Dixon & Godrich 384). Pineville is in the Appalachian Mountains near the point where Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky meet. The Garlands sang songs and took activist stands on behalf of the coal miners who were attempting to get a better deal from the mine owners at the time. The local law enforcement officers were in the employ of the mine owners, (a common theme in alternative American history), and there were violent clashes between the sides. Jim Garland's mother was Aunt Molly Jackson, also a folksinger and union activist.

On October 10th 1938, in New York City, Felix Greene of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) had the foresight to record twelve tracks of Leadbelly: Boll Weevil, I'm Goin' Mother, Go Down Ol' Hannah, Prison Holler, (Baby) Take a Whiff on Me, Irene, Jail-House Blues, Old Reilly, Ox Driver's Song (1), Ox Driver's Song (2), Julie Ann Johnson, Governor O.K. Allen. Because of the alternate take of the Ox Driver's Song, we can assume these were the total recorded.  Even the excellent biography on Leadbelly by Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell doesn't have this session listed and we do not know if they were ever broadcast at the time. It would have counted as Leadbelly's first radio broadcast, if it had taken place. And on the BBC at that!  

The idea of documentary recordings was just getting underway — some of the late-1938 Library of Congress recordings begin with a dialogue between the "informant" (sounds a bit like a law enforcement term) and the "collector" and end with a song; others continued the informal dialogue throughout the record. As many as seventy-five recordings were made of Aunt Molly Jackson, for instance, and funds for making some of these records available at cost to musicologists and others interested in grassroots music were supplied by the Carnegie Corporation. Leadbelly recorded about 200 sides for the Lomax's Library of Congress collection.
The folk music also reached some 15,000,000 young listeners via [Alan] Lomax's "Well-Springs of America" Series broadcast on Columbia's School of the Air. Begun in 1939, as the series continued it became more and more a survey of a state or an area, and radio listeners began paying tribute to this documentary approach by writing: "I like to listen to the songs about the unknown heroes of labor and the farms," or, regarding programs of Negro songs: "In them one sees courage and a rhythmic dignity." Folk singers are guests and contribute to material used in the script, but Lomax frequently sings too. Though he's mostly known as a collector, he felt he was accomplished enough a performer to entertain the King and Queen of England at the White House in 1939.

A potential Last Straw to the Leadbetter story was added in the late spring of 1939, and a lesser man may have bowed under the burden. On March 5, during a party at a West 52nd Street address, he was arrested, accused by one Henry Burgess of stabbing and slashing him a dozen times. Huddie countered that he did indeed stab Burgess, but only in self-defense, and pled Not Guilty in magistrate's Court. He was freed on bail of $1000 which was posted by Alan Lomax through the National Surety Corporation. On March 13th, the New York City court cabled the Caddo courthouse in Shreveport for Leadbelly's criminal record.
A week later Huddie appeared before a Grand Jury, describing himself as a "musician, song composer, and dancer." The deputy District Attorney, now familiar with the accused's past, asks that he "not be allowed to sing his way out of this one."
That same evening, March 20th, 1939, he played at the Savoy Club on Lenox Avenue in Harlem.
Three days later the Grand Jury indicted him for "assault, second degree, carrying a dangerous weapon after prior conviction." Again, he pled Not Guilty and remained free on bail, pending trial.
On March 26th he performed at the Labor Stage of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Theater on West 39th Street.

Then, on 1 April, 1939, Alan Lomax supervised an important recording session for Musicraft in New York, (Russell 14). Important to Huddie, certainly, because it resulted in the commercial release of a now rare 78 r.p.m. album which included "Frankie and Albert," called by John Lomax, Lead Belly's "Ninth Symphony, [his] small opera with stage directions" (Negro 192). "Fannin Street" and "Bourgeois Blues" were also recorded and released; the public at last had an opportunity to listen to Leadbelly on home phonographs. Important, also, because it took place in the midst of his legal troubles and resulted in what many believe to be the best recordings of his career. He recorded fifteen sides for Musicraft, accompanying himself on guitar and tap dancing. Oh for a filmed version!

The trial took place at the beginning of May, and though the big news in New York concerned the opening of the World's Fair, the Herald Tribune found space for an article on the entertainment page. It included a capsule biography which was the usual mixture of fact and fiction:
In 1930 Lead Belly “stabbed six Negroes in a fight over a can of whiskey” and was sentenced to a ten-year term at Angola . . . . It was there that Dr. John A. Lomax, curator of folk songs for the Library of Congress, "discovered" him. . . .“Once again a song addressed to the state Executive Mansion won a pardon for Lead Belly”. . . . Dr. Lomax arranged a singing tour which lined Leadbelly's pockets and enabled the Negro to marry his lady-love, Martha Promise. ("Lead Belly Adds")
Britain's King George VI graced the cover of Time Magazine for 15 May, 1939, an issue which reported the cementing of the Rome-Berlin Axis (21). The King and Queen of England were embarking on a visit to America which included hearing Alan Lomax sing Leadbelly songs to them at the White House. Ledbetter would have sent his regrets that he could not be there himself because of his legal problems, and there was also a story in that same issue (76) sketching his progress from the Texas penitentiary, through his incarceration in Angola for "stabbing six negroes in a fight over a can of whiskey," to being pardoned by the State of Louisiana "at Lomax's suggestion."
“But last week it was the same old story. Standing in Manhattan General Sessions, greying, 54-year-old Lead Belly once again heard a jury pronounce him guilty. Offense: stabbing and slashing Henry Burgess, another Negro, at a party in a Westside rooming house. ("Lead Belly" 77)

On May 4th he was convicted of assault, third degree; the jury recommended clemency. On May 15th, Judge George L. Donnellan sentenced him to one year, with a recommendation of mercy. His prison sentence began on May 20th and ended after six months on November 20th. Huddie had been on his best behavior at the prison on Riker's Island in New York's East River, and for the last ten years of his life, he never again went to prison.
During the hot European summer that year, Hitler's Germany unleashed its military might on Poland to set off the Second World War, though America was not to become a combatant until the end of 1941, two years and three months later.


Eyewitness: One night there was a concert in a grade school auditorium on the West Side [of Manhattan], downtown on Hudson Street, in the area now known as TriBeCa, the Triangle Below Canal Street. It was one of those cramped, high-ceilinged halls common to the old schools built before World War I. The event was a fund-raising event of some kind, I can't remember now just what, but probably a strike. The Almanac Singers were on the stage singing a song about Harlan County in the Virginias, where so much blood was shed. "Blood on the Ground" was the refrain. Lee Hays led them. Later, Alan Lomax sang some of the songs he learned from Leadbelly and others, and an Irish poet was on the program, too; I'm ashamed to have forgotten his name as well.
Then Leadbelly came on. It was the difference between day and night. He had it. He was billed as the King of the 12 String Guitar and the minute he hit (not stroked) those strings, you knew it was the truth. And when he opened his mouth and hollered, the sound of his voice seemed to acquire your ears, and the rest of you — with force. He made sound assume a weight I have never heard another voice approach. It was staggering. And even though I recall a microphone, it was really long before the era of sound enhancement, it was more like a little electric juice added to make the sound carry further, not really sound louder.

After the woes of 1939, 1940 turned out to be one of Leadbelly's best career years, and during the next few years, he was associated with a number of folk singers who based themselves in New York City. These included Pete Seeger and Lee Hays, who were part of the Almanac Singers and who eventually formed the popular 1950's group The Weavers; Woody Guthrie, who also sang with the Almanacs; Cisco Houston, Oscar Brand, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGee and Josh White.
1935 publicity photo courtesy of the Estate of Josh White and the Josh White Archives.
Josh — or Joshua — White was born in South Carolina in 1915, the son of a preacher. In the early 1920's he started leading around blind street singers, including, so he claimed, Blind Lemon Jefferson. White was apparently much more of a rambler than Huddie Ledbetter ever was. He went to Chicago in the early 1930's and did some recordings as the "Singing Christian." He moved to New York, did some odd jobs, and in 1940 landed a bit part in the Broadway production of “John Henry,” which starred Paul Robeson. White played the part of "Blind Lemon." “John Henry” closed after only seven performances, but Josh White's career was underway. He did the same kind of things as Ledbetter during the war years — he had a fifteen minute weekly radio program, recorded for Columbia, and worked regularly at the Cafe Society Downtown; for a time he shared the Village Vanguard gig with Huddie — but he was a smoother, more sophisticated entertainer and thus more acceptable in the New York night club scene. He sang at President Roosevelt's inaugural in 1940, and twice more at the White House during the war. Huddie's itinerary in Washington never included the White House.
Woody Guthrie came from Okemah, Oklahoma, and during the Great Depression he witnessed first hand the plight of the dust bowl farmers and the massive migration of "Okies" to California, where the streets were supposedly paved with gold. Guthrie went to California, too, and got on radio station KFVD in Los Angeles singing hillbilly music. There he met Ed Robbin who was a news commentator working for the left wing newspaper, The People's World. Guthrie started writing a daily column in the paper, "Woody Sez."
I always read the radical papers over my program and took sides with the workers all I knew how. I drew pen sketches for the Peoples World and learned all I could from the speeches and debates, forums, picnics, where famous labor leaders spoke. I heard William Z.Foster, Mother Bloor, Gurley Flynn, Blackie Myers, I heard most all of them and played my songs on their platforms. (Guthrie 4) Woody was introduced to Will Geer, the actor, who was doing benefits to raise money for the migratory labor camps. Woody came along and dived into the struggle. He became a close friend of Will Geer and his family. Through Will, Woody started to make a living singing at fund-raising parties around Los Angeles.

Pete Seeger: Will sent me a copy of Woody's mimeographed songbook, “A Slow Train Through California,” and told me I sure ought to meet Woody when he came to New York. I did meet him in March of 1940 at a midnight folk song session held on the stage of a Broadway theater. It was again a benefit for the California migratory workers. “The Grapes of Wrath,” [by John Steinbeck,] had been published a year before, and in New York many of us felt that we wanted to learn more. Will Geer was MC of the show. Burl Ives was on it, also Leadbelly, Josh White and there was Woody. A little short fellow with a western hat and boots, in blue jeans and needing a shave, spinning out stories and singing songs that he had made up himself. (Seeger 42)

On March 3, Will Geer organized a "Grapes of Wrath Evening" to benefit the "John Steinbeck Committee for Agricultural Workers," a show that changed the course of Woody's career and, perhaps, of American music as well. It was held at the Forrest Theater, home of "Tobacco Road" and featured "American Ballad Singers and Folk Dancers:˘ Will Geer, Alan and Bess Lomax, Aunt Molly Jackson, Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie, the Pennsylvania Miners and the Golden Gate Quartet." Most of the performers — notably Leadbelly and Aunt Molly Jackson — had appeared in New York before, but usually for small, often academic gatherings. There had been other "folk" music recitals, but this would be remembered as the first really important one, the first before a large, mainstream audience. [Alan Lomax noticed Woody for the first time, here.] (Klein 142))
A week later Woody was down in Washington, D.C., recording with Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress, and staying in the Arlington, Virginia, home that Lomax and his wife shared with radio (later, film) director Nicholas Ray. The Library of Congress recording sessions took place on 21, 22, and 27 March, 1940, with Lomax playing the part of a radio interviewer. He then worked up an abbreviated version of the script he'd used in Washington, and put together a program on Woody forhis "Columbia School of the Air" program for 2 April.
But at the rehearsal on the day before — April Fool's Day — Guthrie got into an ornery mood and refused to comply with the simplest direction from CBS's George Zachary. Finally, Zachary exploded and Guthrie walked out with Lomax hot on his heels. Lomax didn't quite know how to handle his feisty protégé, so he avoided the subject as the two walked downtown to Huddie and Martha's place in the East Village. There, they spent a racous evening singing and drinking, tumbling into bed quite late and quite loaded. It was a double bed, and Alan made sure that Woody was securely sandwiched between himself and the wall, and couldn't get out. Next morning they rose early, breakfasted, and went up to the CBS studios where the program was broadcast without a hitch. Woody was a natural on the radio, and he had had a great deal of experience in Los Angeles, too.
About this time, [end March, 1940] Woody started his "Woody Sez" column in the Daily Worker. It appeared in a small box on the Entertainment page.
[Woody spent] a good many nights on the Murphy bed at Huddie and Martha Ledbetter's apartment, awed by the older man's ability and in love with his language. "I heard Leadbelly say the other day, 'I woke up this morning and the blues was falling down like midnight rain,'" he wrote in his column. It was difficult to tell what Leadbelly thought of Woody, although he appeared to enjoy his company. But then, it was difficult to tell what Leadbelly thought of any white man; he was unalterably servile in their presence, and addressed them formally as "Mr. Alan", and even "Mr. Woody." (Klein158)
3 May, 1940, Woody recorded his "Dust Bowl Ballads" at RCA Victor Camden, New Jersey studios.
Between the 15th and the 17th of June, Huddie was in the recording studio for RCA Victor in New York. "Midnight Special," "Pick a Bale of Cotton," and "Rock Island Line" were recorded, with vocal backing by the very smooth sounds of the Golden Gate Quartet. It was an interesting counterpart to Leadbelly's rougher style. There were also several solo sides released on Victor's Bluebird label. These included "Roberta," which he had cut for A.R.C. in 1935, but which was yet to be released; "You Can't Lose Me, Cholly," a two-step which dated back to his sukey jump days; and "Good Morning Blues," possibly his best-known blues (Dixon & Godrich 385).

All Negroes like blues. Why? Because they was born with the blues.
When you lay down at night, turn from one side of the bed all night to the
other and you can't sleep, what's the matter? The blues got you. They
want to talk to you. You got to tell 'em something, and here's what you
got to tell them:
Good morning blues, blues how do you do?
Good maaaaw-ning blues, blues how do you do?
I'm doing alright, good morning, how are you? (Early Leadbelly)

The fourth and final session for Victor took place on Monday, June 17, 1940. That Wednesday, June 19, Huddie made a recording with Woody Guthrie which Guthrie’s widow, Marjorie, says was possibly an audition for a radio show (Caplan, liner notes). It sounds as if the two are sitting around the house with a home recorder, but there was no tape in those days, so it must have been recorded direct to disc. Guthrie is heard throughout as the narrator as Huddie sings a bunch of songs from Louisiana, including a field "holler" and "Whoa, Back, Buck!" (Early Leadbelly). In the latter song, he sings "whoa, Cunningham" instead of "whoa, God-DAMN," which he had sung to the intellectual black-tie gathering in Philadelphia five years earlier. The saltier lyrics wouldn't play for a radio audition.
Around this same time, Guthrie actually had a job singing a couple of songs a week for the Model Tobacco network radio program. He was paid $200 per week, which was quite a lot of money in those days, especially
for Woody Guthrie. According to Pete Seeger, he could have kept the job and had a successful commercial career if he had sung the songs he was asked to sing. But that was not in Guthrie's nature and he quit after about a month.
In the meantime, Pete Seeger went down to Washington, D.C., and worked for Alan Lomax at the Library of Congress. Woody Guthrie came to the capital several times, either to record songs or to sing at a club or a meeting, and he and Seeger became fast friends. Early in the summer of 1940, Woody arrived in a newly acquired Plymouth ("It really splits the breeze," he said), Pete quit his job — "such as it was" — and the two of them set out for parts unknown, singing whenever they could in support of striking workers. In Oklahoma City they contacted the local Communist Party organizers, Bob and Ina Wood, who got them to perform for Hooverville poor and for striking oil workers and the unemployed Workers' Alliance. Woody wrote the "Union Maid" in Oklahoma, and they dropped in on Woody's wife and kids, who lived in a shack in Pampa, in the Texas Panhandle. Here they parted company, Pete heading west, and Woody going back to Oklahoma City after about a week at "home." He picked up Bob Wood and some of his political associates and drove them to New York for the big Communist Party convention in Madison Square Garden. In his "Woody Sez" column, he wrote,
“After we got out of the Holler Tunnel, I says, Well, Boys, what do you think of her? One old boy in the back said, I bet I sunburn the roof of my mouth — but it'll be worth it — he looked out the window as we drove down the street and he said, God amighty, dadburn my hide, is ALL of them people here for the convention? — Another ol boy said, Well, yeah, but they just don't KNOW IT yet."
Woody was so filled with the Party spirit that he gave Bob Wood the Plymouth, so he'd have something to get back home with. It was the official car of the Oklahoma Communist Party for several years after that. (Klein 163)

When Earl Robinson (whose "Ballad for Americans" had been performed by Paul Robeson in 1939) brought [Huddie] to Camp Unity, the Communist Party's summer retreat, [he] shocked and disheartened the audience with his songs about knife fights and "high yaller" women — those weren't the kinds of things they wanted to hear from a progressive Negro. After Robinson explained the problem, Leadbelly returned to win over the crowd with "Bourgeois Blues" and several of his other political songs. [Klein 148]
Woody Guthrie
So Woody was back in New York in good time for the release of his "Dust Bowl Ballads" on Victor in July, 1940. Howard Taubman, writing in the New York Times, grasped hold of some part of the significance of the songs:
“These albums are not a summer sedative. They make you think; they may even make you uncomfortable. . . . The albums show that the phonograph is broadening its perspective, and that life as some of our unfortunates know it can be mirrored on the glistening disks. [NY Times: July 40]
[Woody] spent a good deal of time with Leadbelly that summer, and also with Aunt Molly Jackson and her clan, all of whom lived on the Lower East Side. He took great pleasure in their gruff integrity and wrote in his column: "[They] all come to Leadbelly's house almost every day. . . . Molly is the woman Leadbelly. She is in her cotton apron what Leadbelly is in his bathrobe. She talks to him exactly as to her reflection in the mirror. He speaks back to her like the swamplands to the uplands, the same as his river would talk to her highest cliffrim. She loves him in the same half-jealous way that he loves her, because he sees and feels in Aunt Molly the woman who has found in her own voice the same power on earth that he has found. [Woody Sez: Summer 40]
From time to time, they would all sing on WNYC New York's [municipal] radio station and one of the few places around where pure, undiluted folk music could be heard. Woody did a series of programs that summer with Sarah Ogan and Jim Garland, and mounted a successful campaign to get Leadbelly a weekly show of his own. [Klein 165]

In August, Huddie was down in Washington, D.C., making glistening disks for Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress. Lomax had recently had a great success with several hours of music and interviews with Woody Guthrie and with Jelly Roll Morton, the New Orleans-born pianist who claimed to have invented jazz. The Morton recordings resulted in a book, “Mr. Jelly Roll,” which was published several years later; but more immediately, the recordings led to a resurgence of interest in Morton shortly before his death. Morton was renowned as a great talker.
Huddie was obviously a much more difficult interview for Lomax. He was inclined to answer with stories and rhymes, many of which he had probably told repeatedly until they had become little performances. Lomax's reaction tended to be much like that of his father, John: he easily lost patience and constantly interrupted the interviewee. While the result was dramatic, it emphasized the same glibness that Lomax exhibited on the Guthrie recordings, and was short on the social history he was presumably aiming for.

Lomax: These records are being made by Huddie Ledbetter from Shreveport, Louisiana, in the Coolidge Auditorium in Washington, D.C., on August 23rd, 1940. Lead Belly's about . . . how old are you, Huddie?
Ledbetter: Fifty-one.
Lomax: [repeating this information] Lead Belly's fifty-one years old; he's been playing guitar all his life, pretty much; has wandered all over Texas and Louisiana; now is living in New York down on the East Side, and making some kind of a living with records and playing at parties, and demonstrating for peace whenever he gets a chance to. [The war in Europe was now about a year old, and France had fallen to Hitler’s Germany about ten weeks previous.]

Woody Guthrie, meantime, was moving towards a paying gig with CBS. Alan Lomax was scripting, and Nicholas Ray preparing to direct, a network folk music series called "Back Where I Come From." The scripts, according to Canadian expatriate folksinger Oscar Brand, "demonstrated the power of contemporary comment in song." (68) A half-hour pilot featuring Woody, Burl Ives, the Golden Gate Quartet, and emcee Clifton Fadiman, was aired on 19 August.
CBS couldn't find a sponsor for the show, but the higher-ups at the network seemed to like the idea and were ready to go ahead with it regardless. Potential sponsors may have been frightened off by the unfamiliar music, the radical politics of some of the participants, the integration of blacks and whites, or the combination of all three ingredients. The show began running regularly in late September for fifteen minutes on Monday, Wednesday and Friday evenings. After a few weeks, Woody started challenging Nicholas Ray on various artistic decisions. He was especially vehement on the subject of Leadbelly, who was given only an occasional, subservient role on the program and, worse, often had to hear a smoother, more accessible black singer, Josh White, perform his songs so that white America could understand the words. [Klein169]
On New Years' Eve, some of the cast from "Back Where I Come From" piled into Woody's Pontiac and went up to Nyack, NY, to play a fund-raiser at Will Geer's new house (only Will Geer would have a fund-raiser on New Years' Eve). A good slice of Broadway was there that night, dressed to the nines in gowns and tuxedos, and Woody got ornery drunk. He sang three or four songs rather poorly, his eyes closed throughout.
"Why do you have your eyes closed?" Geer asked.
"All them white shirts and diamonds are blinding me," sez Woody.
The ride back to the city was accomplished at speeds ranging from 20 to 80 miles per hour, although the speed at any given moment had little to do with the difficulty of the road. When they reached Harlem, Woody insisted on screeching to a stop at each corner and asking pedestrians, "How do we get from here to the United States?" Leadbelly, in the back seat, scrunched down and mumbled, "Please, Mr. Woody, please . . ." [Klein172]

The Almanac Singers in 1941 were Pete Seeger, who initially called himself Pete Bowers "to protect" his father, Charles, who worked for the Roosevelt administration; Lee Hays, and Millard Lampell. They rented a loft on Fourth Avenue near Union Square, just a block from Communist Party HQ. Earl Robinson, the folk-oriented composer was a member of the party's Cultural Section and was a great supporter, but the Almanacs were a little too free-wheeling for the diciplined party core. On 24 March, the Daily Worker ran its first big article about them, an account of "Bowers" and Hays appearance at the League of American Writers conference.
Below: Pete Seeger singing for the opening of the Washington, DC, Labor Canteen in 1944: sponsored by the Federal Workers of America. Note the presence of First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in the center of the picture.

In April, the Almanacs started having Sunday afternoon rent parties, a long tradition in the black community, but rather revolutionary among New York's white Bohemian set.
They were joyous, free-form affairs, attended by most of the folk musicians in the area: Leadbelly, always immaculate in his suit and tie; Aunt Molly Jackson and her clan; Burl Ives; Blind Sonny Terry, the harmonica player; Richard Dyer-Bennett, who sang the classic ballads in artsy, academic fashion; Josh White. Non-musicians were charged thirty-five cents admission, beer was sold for ten cents a cup, and sometimes as many as a hundred people crowded into the loft — which provided more than enough money to keep the Almanacs afloat. [Klein 190] By the summer of 1941, Guthrie joined the Almanac Singers, and the group went on a American tour which took them all the way to the West Coast. Pete and Woody were the only remaining Alamanacs who made it to Seattle, Washington, by September. A New Deal political club known as the Washington Commonwealth Federation arranged for them to sing for trade unions in the Puget Sound region, and then invited them to their next "hootenanny."
"This was mortally a blowout and one of their most successful hoots. Pete and me aim to put the word Hootenanny on the market." [Klein 205]
It was the first time we had heard the term. It seems they had a vote to decide what they would call their monthly fund raising parties. "Hootenanny" won out by a nose over "wingding." The Seattle hootenannies were real community affairs. One family would bring a huge pot of some dish like crab gumbo. Others would bring cakes, salads. A drama group performed topical skits, a good 16-mm film might be shown, and there would be dancing, swing and folk, for those of sound limb. And, of course, there would be singing.
Pete: "Woody and I returned to New York, where we rejoined the other Almanac Singers, and lived in a big house, pooling all our income. We ran Sunday-afternoon rent parties, and without a second's thought, started calling them hootenannies, after the example of our west-coast friends. Seventy-five to one hundred Gothamites would pay 35 cents each to listen to an afternoon of varied folk songs, topical songs, and union songs, not only from the Almanacs but from Huddie Ledbetter, Josh White, the Mechau family, and many many others — including members of the audience." (Seeger 327)
The Almanacs opened their fall campaign in new quarters: a classic New York town house, selected by Pete Hawes, near the corner of Tenth Street and Greenwich Avenue, in the heart of Greenwich Village. Almanac House, as it came to be known, offered more privacy than the old loft — the top two floors were bedrooms — but less space. The Sunday afternoon concerts, now called hootenannies, were squeezed uncomfortably into the basement.

December 7th, 1941: the Japanese attack Peal Harbor resulting in America’s entry into World War II.

Woody Guthrie wrote that he'd lived with Huddie and Martha for several months back in 1942 at their place on the Lower East Side in New York. "I still sleep a night once in a while at Lead's when I get lost, stranded, strayed and left out in the weather." (Asch & Lomax 16)

LEADBELLY is a hard name (by Woody Guthrie)

And the hard name of a harder man
The name that his mama spoke over him down in the swamps
of Louisiana when he was born was Huddie Ledbetter,
for her husband, Ledbetter, and because she liked the
sound and the roll of Huddie.
I guess that they called him Huddie while he was growing
up from dirty overhalls to knee pants, longer pants,
and I've heard him sing a song about what happened to
him when he did change his knee pants for his long ones
I came to his and Martha's apartment over on East Tenth
Street and I carried my own guitar, and they begged me
to stay, to eat, sleep, sing and dance there in their
apartment of Three little rooms painted a sooty sky
blue and then smoked over with the stains from
cigarets, cigars, of the rich and of the poor
I saw Leadbelly get up in his morning, wash, shave, put on
his bath robe, and Martha would stand up in her tall
way and make me get shaved, bathed, washed, dressed,
while she cooked Leadbelly his breakfast on her
charcoal flat top stove. The stove was older than me,
older than Martha, but not any older than Leadbelly.
I watched him set after breakfast, look down eastwards out
from his window, read the Daily News and the Daily
Mirror, and the Daily Worker
I listened as he tuned up his Twelve String Stella and
eased his fingers up and down and along the neck in
the same way that the library and museum clerk touched
the frame of the best painting in their gallery. It
was not possible for me to count the numbers of folks
that came in through Leadbelly's door there
He never did bother to count you, and Martha tried several
times, but always got lost early in the morning. The
people waking up in the building dropped around the earliest.
Leadbelly picked along on his guitar, just something that
took him back where he come from, and he played at
about half of his power in order to warm up easy and
to get ready for anybody that asked him for a little
number on their way to hunt for coal, or for a job or
work, or to a job of some kind.
I liked Leadbelly's guitar and singing this early morning
speed as well, better in some ways, than the faster
and stronger ones that you have seen him play on your
stages and in your studios.
He had a slow running, easy, deep quiet way about him,
that made me see that his strength was like a little
ball in his hands, and that his thoughts ran as deep
in color as the lights that played down from the sky
and onto his face. (Guthrie)

Pete Seeger wrote that he had been tremendously influenced byHuddie's music and by his unaffectedness. At the time of their meeting, Pete had dropped out of Harvard and was wearing "work" clothes to identify himself with the proletariat. Huddie, he noted, did not need to affect the dress of a man of the people; he was the real thing. Huddie, when he was not at home in his bathrobe, always dressed neatly in a suit and tie, with shined shoes and a fancy walking stick. Seeger recalled,
“he and his wife Martha had a little flat on the Lower East Side [of Manhattan]. Woody Guthrie and I visited him often there, and made music together with him, till the neighbors complained of the noise (Asch & Lomax 7).

After the commercial recordings of 1940, none of which proved financially successful, Huddie was taken up by Moses Asch, the founder of America's most extraordinary record company, Folkways. Asch was just as much a character as the many colorful musicians he recorded. These included all of the folk singers mentioned above as well as hundreds of ethnic performers from around the world, country bluesmen, old time jazzmen, poets reading their poetry, politicians delivering speeches, "frogs croaking, a science series and almost two hundred children's records" (Scherman 111).
Leadbelly's first recordings for Asch were work songs, but it was soon suggested that Asch continue his successful children's series with an album of Huddie's children's songs (Asch & Lomax 5). Many of these were simply the sukey jump, play party songs of his youth in the backwoods of Caddo Parish and Harrison County: "Skip to My Lou," "You Can't Lose Me, Cholly," and the "Cotton Picking Song." (Dixon & Godrich 385). Moses Asch has since written of Leadbelly's way with children. He saw him playing for kids in the playgrounds of Greenwich Village and in a Christmas concert at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the posh Upper East Side:
“It was jam-packed, children all over the place, frantic parents. But the moment Leadbelly started to play and sing, the audience hushed, the children grouped around him as though it was grandfather singing for them, some sang with him, others danced, parents were bewitched. (Asch & Lomax 5)
Both Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger have testified to Leadbelly's wonderful way with children. "Kids adored him," says Seeger. "Here this man who'd been in jail much of his life was just great singing for children" (Scherman 117). Woody, ever the wordsmith, put it this way,
"I've seen him laugh and joke with schoolkids, nursery kids, little toddlers climbing all over his guitar and up and down his arms and legs, and tell them, 'You make me feel new, I'll sing best for you'" (Asch & Lomax 17). Popular singer Maria Muldaur (b. Sept, 1943) remembers, as a child growing up in New York's Greenwich Village, listening to Huddie sing to her and others from his front steps (Prime 12). Much of the recording for Asch, which later showed up on both the Folkways and Stinson labels, seems to have taken place between 1941 and 1943 (Dixon & Godrich 385; Leadbitter & Slavin 189), and there were several sessions that combined the talents of Leadbelly with Woody and Pete, Cisco Houston, Sonny Terry and his long-time partner, guitarist Brownie McGee. During America's war years, 1942 to 1945, Huddie also broadcast on Armed Forces Radio and thus created a small following in Europe, especially in England and France. CBS radio director Norman Corwin believed that folk songs had a much stronger emotional appeal than pop ditties, so he used the likes of Seeger and Leadbelly, Josh White and Burl Ives, as part of the war effort (Brand 81). Huddie, naturally, made up a "Hitler Song," which included the refrain,

We're gonna tear Hitler down
We're gonna bring him to the ground.

Charles Edward Smith wrote an article entitled "King of the 12 String Guitar," which was published in the fall, 1942, issue of “Jazz” magazine. In the interview for the article, Huddie basically reiterated what he had told Lomax; he stuck to the legend that had been created, even though he had claimed Lomax misrepresented him. Smith was a much more sympathetic ear, however, and he painted Huddie as more of a victim of circumstance than a perpetrator of violence. For the next two years, until the summer of 1944 when Huddie left New York for the West Coast, Frederic Ramsey, Jr., kept tabs on the singer's activities:
"They stretch on and on. He has appeared on major network programs devoted to folk music. With artists like members of the Golden Gate [gospel] Quartet, Sidney Bechet (the Louisiana clarinettist) and Josh White, he appeared in the CBS "Back Where I Come From" series. For several weeks in the 1943-44 winter season, he had a series of his own programmes over WNYC, New York City's broadcast station.
He has appeared at innumerable jam sessions. I remember, particularly, one very fine session at Labour Stage run by [jazz pianist] Art Hodes, when Sidney Bechet turned up on a surprise trip East. Huddie has played on a commercial series with Josh White for NBC, and anytime there is a folk music festival anywhere, Huddie has to be there. Included, among others, was an ambitious one at Town Hall, which was recorded and sent overseas. In Washington also, Huddie appeared at the annual Folk Festivals and at jam sessions sponsored by Nesuhi Ertegun, noted jazz collector, and his brother Ahmed. [Ahmed Ertegun went on to found Atlantic Records] All these were squeezed in between night club engagements and heavy recording schedules! (Ramsey, Vanguard 7)
Put like that, it seems like a busy, successful career; but in fact, Huddie was underemployed in the music business and always had to struggle for the next buck. Martha continued to work in menial jobs just to keep the rent paid and food on the table.
From 25 November, 1941, until the spring of 1944, Huddie performed a great deal at the Village Vanguard, which is located in Greenwich Village on Seventh Avenue at 11th Street. In it's Night Life listings, the New Yorker magazine described the Vanguard as "a low-ceilinged cellar spot, specializing in folk singers." After the war began, the place was often referred to as being "something like an air-raid shelter, except for Huddie Ledbetter singing folk songs." At the beginning, Huddie shared the billing with "Joshua White and other folk singers." At times, he was replaced by Burl Ives or the calypso singer, Belle Rosette, and at other times, Huddie had the place to himself. During his last few months, the listing ran, "a cellar with murals as well as Huddie Ledbetter and the Clarence Profit Trio," a jazz group.
Clarence Profit started a seven year Greenwich Village career at George's Tavern on Grove Street in 1937. He recorded for Decca, Brunswick, and Columbia and also did some performing on 52nd Street. Pianist Teddy Wilson called Profit a true original who was so wrapped up in his music that he neglected his health. Profit died in 1944, cutting short a promising career as well as his regular gig at the Village Vanguard (Driggs & Lewine).
To judge by the entertainment listings for the war years, it was a lively time for jazz lovers in New York. Pete Ammons and James P. Johnson played stride, boogie woogie, and ragtime, and Billie Holiday often sang, at the Cafe Society Downtown; the Cafe Society Uptown featured "Negro entertainment" by Hazel Scott, the Golden Gate Quartet, and pianist Teddy Wilson's Orchestra. Sidney Bechet played Nick's on 7th Avenue at 10th Street (a block from the Vanguard), and the King Cole Trio was on 52nd Street, never far from Count Basie, Duke Ellington and other legendary jazz royalty.
By 1944, Josh White was listing his business address as the Cafe Society Downtown in Sheridan Square, and Burl Ives [pictured in a 1955 photo by Carl Van Vechten]
could be found at the Cafe Society Uptown. Billie Holliday was joined by Coleman Hawkins at the Downbeat on 52nd Street, and the jazz pianists included Art Tatum, Willie "The Lion" Smith, Art Hodes, and Mary Lou Williams, as well as Ammons and Johnson. After Huddie played his last gig at the Village Vanguard, on 2nd April, 1944, he dropped out of the New York club scene. Pete Seeger thinks he was just too "country" for New York audiences. [Photo of Billie Holliday, 1949, by Carl Van Vechten]
On the16th of April, Paul Robeson celebrated his 46th birthday with a monster party at the National Guard Armory, 34th Street and Park Avenue. Among the thousands who turned up for the event were performers Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Mary Lou Williams, Zero Mostel, Mildred Bailey, and Jimmy Durante. Army Intelligence agents were also there to provide information to the F.B.I. The Bureau, looking ahead to the postwar era, was gathering information on possible subversives, and Robeson was a number one suspect. He was a fearless fighter for the civil rights of his fellow African-Americans. On the 23rd of April, Huddie recorded several songs for Moses Asch's "New Play Party Songs" album, and in June he recorded two songs with Josh White, also for Asch. The titles in the latter session were "Pretty Flower" and "Don't Lie, Buddy."

On May 5th, M.E. Barnicle hosted a send off party for Huddie. During the Summer of 1944, while Allied troops were fighting their way from the Normandy beaches to Paris and points east, Huddie departed from New York and headed for California. He felt there might be a better future for him in the Golden State.