Lead Belly

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Lead Belly

Q: What is the blues?

The blues is a form of secular folk music created by African Americans in the early 20th century, originally in the South. Although instrumental accompaniment is almost universal in the blues, the blues is essentially a vocal form. Blues songs are usually lyrical rather than narrative because the expression of feelings is foremost.

Q: Where did the blues get its name?

In the 19th century the English phrase blue devils referred to the upsetting hallucinations brought on by severe alcohol withdrawal. This was later shortened to the blues , which described states of depression and upset, and it was later adopted as the name for the melancholic songs that the musical genre encapsulates.

Q: How did the blues begin as a musical genre?

The origins of the blues are poorly documented, but it is believed that after the American Civil War (1861–65), formerly enslaved African Americans and their descendants created this genre while working on Southern plantations, taking inspiration from hymns , minstrel show music, work songs and field hollers, ragtime , and popular music of the Southern white population.

Q: Why is the blues considered the “Devil’s music”?

In the early 20th century the blues (among several other popular genres of music) was considered seductive and destructive by parents and clergy who worried that such “Devil’s music” was a dangerous and sinful influence on children.

Q: How does blues music sound?

The blues has a distinct melancholic and somber tone, which is achieved through vocal techniques such as melisma, rhythmic techniques such as syncopation , and instrumental techniques such as “choking” guitar strings on the neck or applying a metal slide to the guitar strings to create a whining voicelike sound.

American musician

Also known as: Huddie William Ledbetter, Leadbelly

Written by Pat Bauer, J.E. Luebering•All

Fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Apr 9, 2025 • Article History

Quick Facts

Also spelled:: Leadbelly

Byname of:: Huddie William Ledbetter

Born:: January 23, 1889?, Jeter Plantation, near Mooringsport, Louisiana, U.S.

Died:: December 6, 1949, New York, New York

Awards And Honors:: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum (1988)

Lead Belly (born January 23, 1889?, Jeter Plantation, near Mooringsport, Louisiana, U.S.—died December 6, 1949, New York, New York) was an American folk-blues singer, songwriter, and guitarist whose ability to perform a vast repertoire of songs in a variety of styles, in conjunction with his notoriously violent life, made him a legend.

Early life

Born Huddie William Ledbetter in Louisiana, Lead Belly was musical from childhood. He played accordion, 6- and (more usually) 12-string guitar, bass, and harmonica. He led a wandering life, learning songs by absorbing oral tradition. For a time he worked as an itinerant musician with Blind Lemon Jefferson, who was an important influence. In 1918 Lead Belly was imprisoned in Texas for murder. (He acquired his nickname Lead Belly, a play on his surname, at about this time. Its exact origins are unclear.) According to tradition, he won his early release in 1925 by singing a song for the governor of Texas when he visited the prison.

“Discovered” by folklorists and first commercial recordings

After resuming a life of drifting, in 1930 Lead Belly was convicted of attempted murder and imprisoned in the Angola, Louisiana, prison farm. There he was “discovered” by the folklorists John Lomax and Alan Lomax, who were collecting songs for the Library of Congress. A campaign spearheaded by the Lomaxes secured Lead Belly’s release in 1934, and he embarked on a concert tour of eastern colleges. Subsequently, the Lomaxes published 48 of his songs together with commentary (Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, 1936).

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Lead Belly performed and recorded extensively. His first commercial recordings were made for the American Record Corporation, which did not take advantage of his huge folk repertoire but rather encouraged him to sing blues. He settled in New York City in 1937. He struggled to make enough money, and in 1939–40 he was jailed again, this time for assault. After he was released, he briefly worked with Woody Guthrie, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, and others as the Headline Singers, performed on radio, and, in 1945, appeared in a short film. In 1949, shortly before his death, he gave a concert in Paris.

Death and legacy

Lead Belly died penniless, but within six months his song “Goodnight, Irene” became a million-record hit for the singing group the Weavers; along with other many other of his songs, among them “The Midnight Special” and “Rock Island Line,” it became a standard.

Lead Belly’s legacy is extraordinary. His recordings reveal his mastery of a great variety of song styles and his prodigious memory; his repertoire included more than 500 songs. His rhythmic guitar playing and unique vocal accentuations make his body of work both instructive and compelling. His influence on later musicians—including Eric Clapton, Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin, and Kurt Cobain—was immense.

Lead Belly was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame (1986) and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (1988). In 2015 the Smithsonian Institution’s Smithsonian Folkways record label released a five-CD box set of his recordings.

When was Lead Belly born?

Lead Belly, it can seem, has as many birth dates as he had songs in his repertoire. January 15, January 20, January 21, January 23, and January 29 are all often claimed as his day of birth, while 1885, 1888, and 1889 are his commonly stated birth years. The U.S. Department of Defense has published what it identifies as Lead Belly’s draft card from World War II, completed and signed by him; it uses the birth date January 23, 1889. (It also identifies his place of birth as Freeport, Louisiana, a place that does not exist but is understood to refer to Shreveport.) The year 1889 also appears as Lead Belly’s year of birth on his gravestone in Mooringsport, near Shreveport.

J.E. Luebering Pat Bauer The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

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Written and fact-checked by The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica

Last Updated: Mar 21, 2025 • Article History

Key People:: Stevie Ray Vaughan; Taylor Hicks; Jimi Hendrix; Aretha Franklin; Mavis Staples

Related Topics:: Mississippi Delta blues; rhythm and blues; British blues; boogie-woogie; Chicago blues

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What is the blues?

Where did the blues get its name?

How did the blues begin as a musical genre?

Why is the blues considered the “Devil’s music”?

How does blues music sound?

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blues, secular folk music created by African Americans in the early 20th century, originally in the South. The simple but expressive forms of the blues became by the 1960s one of the most important influences on the development of popular music—namely, jazz, rhythm and blues, rock, and country music—throughout the United States.

Form

Although instrumental accompaniment is almost universal in the blues, the blues is essentially a vocal form. Blues songs are lyrical rather than narrative; blues singers are expressing feelings rather than telling stories. The emotion expressed is generally one of sadness or melancholy, often due to problems of love but also oppression and hard times. To express this musically, blues performers use vocal techniques such as melisma (sustaining a single syllable across several pitches), rhythmic techniques such as syncopation, and instrumental techniques such as “choking” or bending guitar strings on the neck or applying a metal slide or bottleneck to the guitar strings to create a whining voicelike sound.

As a musical style, the blues is characterized by expressive “microtonal” pitch inflections (blue notes), a three-line textual stanza of the form AAB, and a 12-measure form. Typically the first two and a half measures of each line are devoted to singing, the last measure and a half consisting of an instrumental “break” that repeats, answers, or complements the vocal line. In terms of functional (i.e., traditional European) harmony, the simplest blues harmonic progression is described as follows (I, IV, and V refer respectively to the first or tonic, fourth or subdominant, and fifth or dominant notes of the scale):

Phrase 1 (measures 1–4) I–I–I–I

Phrase 2 (measures 5–8) IV–IV–I–I

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Phrase 3 (measures 9–12) V–V–I–I

African influences are apparent in the blues tonality, the call-and-response pattern of the repeated refrain structure of the blues stanza, the falsetto break in the vocal style, and the imitation of vocal idioms by instruments, especially the guitar and harmonica.