Lead Belly, Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and American Folk Outlaw Performance by Damian A. Carpenter

Author:Damian A. Carpenter [Carpenter, Damian A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Social History
ISBN: 9781317107071
Google: hLo6DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-10-20T05:01:37+00:00

Part II

Outlaw performance

4The outlaw as performer

Lead Belly, the murderous minstrel

Po’ Howard’s dead an’ gone,

Lef’ me here to sing this song.

—Lead Belly “Po’ Howard” (Lomax and Lomax, Negro Folk Songs 74)

If anybody should come along and ask you, good people,

Who composed this song,

Tell ‘em it Huddie Ledbetter,

He’s done been here an’ gone,

He’s a-lookin’ for a home.

—Lead Belly “The Boll Weevil” (Negro Sinful Songs)

Two movies about American folk musicians were released in 1976: Leadbelly and Bound for Glory. While both Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie made a name for themselves in the same folk music scene during the 1930s and 1940s, the legacy of their lives, music, and experiences were marketed to the public in drastically different ways. The posters advertising the release of these movies clearly demonstrate this difference. Lines from the chorus of “This Land Is Your Land” stretch across the top of the Bound for Glory poster, and below, the advertising copy reads: “The man who wrote these words was Woody Guthrie. His music has become as much a part of America as its mountains, its rivers, its forests and its people. His life has touched all of our lives. This is his story.” The head tagline for Leadbelly reads: “Meet Leadbelly—a real man who’s a winner!” This is followed by: “They chased him down with dogs, chained him in iron, beat him with rawhide, slammed him in the sweatbox. They tried to bury Leadbelly, but Leadbelly wouldn’t lie down” because, as the final tagline proclaims, “You can’t bury a black legend like Leadbelly!” Aside from the almost comical disparity between these depictions of legendary folk musicians, what is striking is the difference between the treatment of Guthrie as a patriotic, rambling musician and the depiction of Lead Belly as a mythic black folk outlaw figure. In fact, someone unfamiliar with Lead Belly could almost miss the fact that he was a musician, that is, if it was not for the dramatic sketch of a bare-chested and mean-faced Lead Belly standing on railroad tracks with his chest out, feet chained, and clutching a twelve-string guitar by his side as if he were John Henry holding his mighty hammer.

Clearly, Paramount Pictures, in its half-hearted marketing push, targeted a black audience in the release of Leadbelly and sought to associate Lead Belly’s story with the popular blaxploitation film genre that emerged in the 1970s. The story of a rambling, black musician negotiating an existence between a violent, frontier-like or marginal culture and a racist society was just the sort of outlaw, anti-establishment narrative that characterized the genre. Forty years earlier, when he first gained national notoriety, Lead Belly’s bad man outlaw persona attracted the curiosity of white, mainstream culture rather than serving as a figure of black protest. While we might find the advertising copy for Leadbelly much too embellished and caricatured, surely the news stories and headlines introducing Lead Belly to New York City and the world sensationalized his story even more so and were equally racialized. A January 3,

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