Lead Belly

Please, Gov'ner Neff, be good an' kind, An' if I can't get a pardon, will you cut

my time? If I had you, Gov'ner Neff, like you got

me, I would wake up in the mornin' and set

you free.

This plea, crooned in a soft baritone over the twanging of a cracked and patched guitar, once swayed Texas' Governor Pat Morris Neff into granting a pardon to the coal-black, swampland Negro who sang it. The Negro, Huddie ("Lead Belly") Ledbetter, self-styled "King of de twelve-string guitar players of de worl'," had been sentenced seven years before for murdering another Negro in a brawl over a woman. Out of jail, Lead Belly combined his career of gin, women and song with a job in a Houston Buick agency. Five years later, in 1930, Lead Belly was jugged again, this time in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, convicted of stabbing six Negroes in a fight over a can of whiskey. But again Lead Belly's minstrelsy came to his rescue. Texas' eminent Folklorist John A. Lomax, poking about the jails and slums of Louisiana in search of folk ballads, heard Lead Belly sing, found him a walking encyclopedia of salty Negro "sinful songs" and ballads. At Lomax' suggestion Lead Belly was pardoned again.

Taking Lead Belly north with him to Manhattan, Folklorist Lomax gave him a first shove up the ladder by presenting him in a concert before radio scouts, theatrical agents and pressmen. Lead Belly prospered, bought himself a new guitar, drawled his rhyme-sprouting improvisations in concert halls and over the air. In 1935 he sent for his best girl, swarthy Martha Promise, a Shreveport, La. laundress, and married her in one of the "shoutin'est" suburban weddings Manhattan's Negro colony had ever seen.

But last week it was the old story. Standing in Manhattan General Sessions, greying, 54-year-old Lead Belly once again heard a jury pronounce him guilty. Offense: stabbing and slashing Henry Burgess, another Negro, at a party in a Westside rooming house.

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