Lead Belly: Midnight Special

Henry Blanke in New Orleans

Huddie William Ledbetter, aka Lead Belly, was a hard, rough man prone to violence who spent a portion of his life in prison. He was also one of the most influential figures in the history of American music.

In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech Bob Dylan recounted that someone once gave him a Lead Belly record that ‘transported me to another world… It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in the darkness and all of a sudden… was illuminated. It was as if someone layed hands on me.’ Legions of artists paid similar tributes. George Harrison remarked: ‘If there had been no Lead Belly, no Lonnie Donegan; no Lonnie Donegan, no Beatles.’ Ry Cooder has brilliantly reinterpreted his music.

Younger readers may know the song Midnight Special from Creedence Clearwater’s cover on Willie And The Poor Boys; Lead Belly in fact did not write it. Its provenance goes back to at least 1905. He probably first heard it sung by inmates while incarcerated in the Imperial Farm Prison in Sugar Land, Texas, circa 1918. But he added a stanza of his own and his version is the most deeply expressive and influential. Any kind of deep dive into Lead Belly is far outside the scope of this short piece, but a bit of background may prove illuminating.

Huddie Ledbetter was born on a Louisiana plantation in 1888 or 1889 – the records are unclear. When he was five his parents moved to Texas and became landowners. He married in 1908 and, having taught himself the guitar and other instruments, found work as an itinerant musician. In 1918 he was convicted of murder and sentenced to 30 years in Sugar Land prison. In 1925 he wrote a song pleading for clemency and was pardoned by the Governor of Texas.

Please think on that for a moment. The man writes a song that so moves the Governor that he is released from prison. But being of an irascible and violent temper, in 1930 he is convicted of attempted murder in Louisiana. However, it is difficult to know the extent that the racism of the Southern legal system played in these events. And so to the song.

Yonder come Miss Rosie [his wife or lover?] / … I know her by her apron and the dress she wore/ Umbrella on her shoulder/ Piece of paper in her hand/ ‘Well, I’m callin’ that captain [warden]/ Turn a-loose my man.’

Lead Belly is behind bars in a brutal prison. He must be imagining the woman he loves pleading for him. ‘Let the Midnight Special shine its ever-loving light on you.’ The Midnight Special was an actual passenger train from Houston. As it passed the jail its lights flashed through the prisoners’ cells. They must have envisioned it carrying them to freedom, to salvation. But then the grim reality sets in…

When you gets up in the morning

When that big bell ring

You go marching to the table

You meet the same old thing

Knife and fork are on the table

Ain’t nothing in my pan

And if you say a thing about it

You have trouble with the man

As much as Lead Belly and the others must have longed to hop the Midnight Special he knew the train came from and returned to Houston. He had learned from bitter experience that there ‘You better walk right/ And you better not squabble/

And you better not fight’ or a red-neck sheriff ‘would take you down/ You can bet your bottom dollar/ That you’re Sugar Land bound.’

The final stanza of the song is sad, strange and surreal. He sings of a girl named jumping Little Judy who brought jumping to the whole world. But she comes to tell him that his wife was dead which starts him whooping, hollering and crying in grief. His prison time would seem that much longer. All of that in a three-minute song.

Lead Belly sang in a resonant tenor and played an oversized 12-string guitar with finger picks allowing him to simultaneously play bass lines and strum melodic accompaniments to his vocals. (Kurt Cobain once tried unsuccessfully to buy one of his guitars.) This style of 12-string finger-picking was closely emulated by Pete Seeger and other latter-day folk singers.

On the 1940 recording of Midnight Special the rich vocal backing is supplied by the Golden Gate Quartet, a professional gospel group featuring Willie Johnson, William Langford, Harry Owens and Orlandus Wilson. But because their vocal stylings were extremely polished Lead Belly had to teach them to sing the way prison inmates would.

The album on which the song and others of his appear was arranged by ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax who had discovered Lead Belly in Louisiana’s notorious Angola Prison. Lomax and his son John traversed the rural South and visited prisons to record traditional folk music for the Library of Congress. In 1934 they successfully petitioned the Governor of Louisiana for his release and brought him to New York where he became a star in the burgeoning folk music scene along with Woody Guthrie, Josh White and Sonny Terry. Later he toured the United States and Europe and was introduced to a wide audience. He came to be recognised as America’s greatest country blues and folk artist.

Huddie Ledbetter died in 1949 of ALS (a form of motor neuron disease) and was buried with his Stella 12-string guitar. His folk, blues and work songs Goodnight Irene, In the Pines, Rock Island Line, Take This Hammer, Good Morning Blues, The Bourgeois Blues, Midnight Special and many others comprise a body or work unparalleled in American music. Are they unique expressions of the African-American experience? Absolutely. Have they impacted much of popular music in this country and abroad? Undoubtedly. But what is more, his songs are America.

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