In 1933, John Lomax and his son Alan, traveling through the South to collect folk songs,met a prisoner in Louisiana's Angola Prison Farm named Huddie Ledbetter. Ledbetter had arrived in prison in 1930 for attempted homicide, and it had not been his first time behind bars. In 1915, Ledbetter had been sentenced to a chain gang. He escaped, but three years later, in January of 1918, he was imprisoned in Texas for killing one of his relatives in a fight over a woman. He was released in 1925, after writing a song for the governor petitioning for his own release. This meeting of the "ballad hunter" and his teenage son would become legendary, as it would introduce the world to the folk icon known as Lead Belly.
Lead Belly was released from prison a year after first recording for Lomax. At the time, Lead Belly and Lomax believed that the release was the result of another song petitioning another governor for leniency, this time as a record with a b-side of Lead Belly's iconic "Goodnight Irene", but it has since been shown that Lead Belly was scheduled for release due to time served and good behavior. Initially unable to find work upon his parole, he became Lomax's driver and assistant as Lomax continued seeking out and recording traditional folk music for the Library of Congress. When he went to New York with Lomax, the press learned of his story, and he became a sensation. Time Magazine even did a newsreel about the "singing convict" for their News On the March series.
Lead Belly would eventually become a fixture of the New York folk scene, appearing on radio shows hosted by Alan Lomax and Nicholas Ray (who would gone on to direct Rebel Without A Cause"), recording for Columbia, RCA, the Library of Congress, Capitol Records and Moses Asch, who would go on to found the Folkways label. Famous for his enormous 12-string guitar, Lead Belly either wrote or helped to popularize many of the songs that became folk standards, such as "Midnight Special", "Goodnight Irene", "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?", "Black Betty", "Cotton Fields" and "Gallis Pole".
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