Neil V. Rosenberg

Lead Belly Reissues as Sound Documentary: From Item to Event

We are fortunate to have Lead Belly’s Last Sessions available. It is not only a document of an important figure in American music, it is also a document of an important moment in the history of sound recordings. Originally published in 1954 by Folkways Records, it consisted of ninety-four separate items, mainly songs, on four twelve-inch LP records in two doublesleeved albums that were replaced after the first printing by boxes. In 1994 Smithsonian Folkways republished it in this four-CD boxed set that adds two previously unissued songs and some additional notes while retaining the original notes and sequencing. Each CD contains both sides of one original LP. This is the first time it has been reviewed in this journal. Following its reissue, Smithsonian Folkways released the three-volume Lead Belly Legacy series that brings together another ninety-four titles. Some of these are reissues, while others were previously unissued. Almost all were recorded prior to Last Sessions, the set on which this review focuses. The story of the famous African American singer and guitarist Huddie Ledbetter has been told in print more than once, most recently by Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell in their 1992 biography, the most authoritative and detailed account to date (The Life and Legend of Leadbelly, HarperCollins, 1992). Born in Louisiana in 1888, Ledbetter was “discovered” by John A. Lomax and his young son Alan in 1933 while recording African American folksongs for the Library of Congress at the Louisiana State Prison in Angola. He was serving a sentence for assault with intent to murder. He had acquired the nickname “Lead Belly,” based on the syllables of his last name, during an earlier prison term in Texas. In his later years the name would be spelled as one word—when this record set was originally released, the title was Leadbelly’s Last Sessions. Ledbetter preferred the two-word form and, according to Sean Killeen, “never referred to himself as Lead Belly [in] either two words or one. . . . [T]his was his professional name, . . . his exterior persona” (Lead Belly: More Than a Name, Lead Belly Letter 2[1] [1992]:5). One of the first songs the Lomaxes recorded him singing was “Irene,” his version of a folk recomposition of Gussie L. Davis’s “Irene Good Night,” a pop song from 1886. It was, perhaps, the best-known piece in his repertoire. Scant months after his death in late 1949, it was featured on a hit record by the Weavers, a group from the same New York folk-music scene he had found fame in during the 1940s (there are two versions of “Irene” on Last Sessions: disc 3, track 15; disc 4, track 7). This was the first of a number of posthumous hits that made him an

From the Sound Recordings Review Editor: The Classification of Traditional Instrumental Music

ists over the years. Perhaps this is because, beyond the simple fact that in-depth study requires discourse in languages of music that many folklorists are not conversant with, it combines questions of both popular and material culture. Other complications arise because of the ways in which instrumental music-the abstract product of interaction between human body and material artifact-can be so easily deand recontextualized; ways that remove it from the familiar company of song texts and dance movements in relatively informal contexts, taking it away from ostensibly traditional settings. Nevertheless instrumental music identified as having traditional connections is extensively represented, and thus recontextualized, on recordings. In this essay I consider instrumental music from a wide variety of

Mountaineer Jamboree: Country Music in West Virginia.

Mountaineer Jamboree is a description of commercial country music in West Virginia and a portrait of its practitioners, summarizing the accomplishments of hundreds of artists who flourished from the late twenties to the present. Italso concerns cultural and geographic categories and boundaries. Ivan Tribe begins by inveighing against the musical boundaries drawn by the Anglophile scholars who gathered folk songs earlier in this century, including West Virginia collectors John Harrington Cox, Louis W. Chappell, and Patrick Gainer. These men felt that commercial country music was antithetical to and destructive of the folk music derived from the British Isles. Tribe, like the more recent generation of folklorists, argues that country music is a part of a continuum with noncommercial domestic folk music, and, in any case, itis the music actually produced and consumed by most of the citizens of West Virginia and its neighboring states. Commercial country music dates from the twenties, when folk artists first appeared on the new medium of radio and were added to the roster of performers on phonograph records. Not all artists appeared on discs; many more limited their work to radio and personal appearances. Tribe reports that this latter category has been omitted from most of the writtenhistories of country music, since these works have generally been based upon a study of phonograph records, the most durable documents of the art form. This book outlines the careers of such characters as Cowboy Loye and Cap, Andy, and Flip —