The Sonic Color Line by Stoever Jennifer Lynn;

Author:Stoever, Jennifer Lynn;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York University Press

4.

“A Voice to Match All That”

Lead Belly, Richard Wright, and Lynching’s Soundtrack

When Richard Wright met Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter in August 1937, both men faced artistic crossroads. Ledbetter had just returned to New York City after spending several months in Shreveport, Louisiana, trying to support himself and his wife, Martha Promise, even as the newly released Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly by John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax sold for 3.50 dollars a piece. Ledbetter had received only ten dollars total for contributing his life story, name, and over forty-five songs to the volume. Even though LIFE reported in April 1937 that Ledbetter “may well be on the brink of a new and prosperous period,” it remained to be seen that summer.1 Financially destitute, Ledbetter struggled to break his exploitative five-year contract with John Lomax that guaranteed Lomax 50 percent of Lead Belly’s profits (along with full control over his bookings). Unhappy playing for the white academic audiences Lomax had preferred for Ledbetter since his release from Angola Prison in 1934—including a gig at the Modern Language Association’s annual meeting—Ledbetter had yet to transition to the leftist folk crowd that comprised his fan base into the 1940s.2 Ledbetter’s visible and sonic performance of the historical legacies, economic inequities, and the social indignities of Jim Crow made Northern black urban audiences uneasy—not to mention the middle-class concern over what white America would make of the hustlers, unfaithful lovers, gamblers, and drunks populating Lead Belly’s repertoire—resulting in slight black press coverage.

Himself no stranger to poverty, exploitation, and criticism, Wright also faced harsh challenges as a black professional writer. Having arrived in New York City just two months before meeting Ledbetter, Wright began to second-guess leaving his Great Migration home of Chicago, especially after his transfer to the New York Writer’s Project fell through, and he begrudgingly became the Daily Worker’s full-time Harlem correspondent. Wright liked the paper in theory—the Daily Worker regularly employed black workers and addressed black issues—but the job meant taking a pay cut and reintegrating himself into the communist network after seriously questioning the party line. The pace and workload also interfered with his own writing; in the six months Wright occupied the Harlem desk, he filed forty signed articles (and an estimated 100-plus anonymous pieces), and he regularly complained of twelve-hour days.3 What is more, Wright found himself writing what he considered tedious propaganda. On the rare occasion he covered cultural events instead of the news beat, Wright scholar Michael Fabre noted, the tone of Wright’s articles markedly changed; readers caught glimpses of the passionate skill Wright would soon bring to Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son, and 12 Million Black Voices.4 His most compelling cultural feature, “Huddie Ledbetter, Famous Negro Folk Artist, Sings the Songs of His People,” published August 12, 1937, provided Wright with a public site to work through the most prominent theme of his early fiction: the price young black men paid in the United States for the quality he described in Ledbetter as the “inability to take injustice and like it.

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