Blacks at Harvard by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Discrimination & Race Relations
ISBN: 9780814739778
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 1993-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

I am opposed to segregation in any form. I am likewise opposed to class legislation of any description. But if Heflin or Blease succeeded in having passed a law requiring all anomalous Negroes to wear on their exterior garments and on the windshield of their automobile a sign, “colored,” I should comply most willingly.

World Tomorrow (1927)

Leadbelly with his guitar ca. 1947

LEADBELLY

Huddie William Ledbetter was born outside Mooringsport, Louisiana, on 21 January 1885. He learned music from his mother (a choir director) and two musical uncles, and became known as the best guitarist and singer in the region by the age of 16. After his first marriage he moved to Texas, where he met the famous bluesman “Blind” Lemon Jefferson, who performed with him and taught him many songs.

Quick to anger, Ledbetter spent three stretches in prison for murder or assault (1918-25; 1930-34; 1939-40). It was during his second imprisonment that folklorists John and Alan Lomax discovered him while they were recording songs among Southern chaingangs. The musician acquired the nickname “Leadbelly” because, in Alan Lomax’s words, “he had guts of steel and could outwork, outsing and outlast anybody else on a job.”

Ledbetter accompanied the Lomaxes on a 6000-mile round of recording and performing, winding up in New York City and starting a professional career. He captivated both children and adults, and his visit to Harvard was followed by appearances on many college campuses. He had an unsurpassed ready repertory of some 500 songs of all types, many original with him. Fortunately, he recorded an enormous number of them for commercial release. He also did a series of radio programs in New York, and his singing graced a number of Hollywood films. Tennessee Williams, in his play Orpheus Descending, hailed Leadbelly as the “greatest man that ever lived on the twelve-string guitar,” and the legendary Woody Guthrie called him “the best living folksinger.”

Not long after a visit to Paris, Ledbetter succumbed to Lou Gehrig’s disease in a New York hospital on 6 December 1949. He was the subject of a biographical novel, The Midnight Special (1971), by Richard Garvin and Edmond Addeo, and of an effective film biography, Leadbelly (1976), starring Roger E. Mosley and directed by the eminent black man-of-many-arts Gordon Parks.

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