This Week in Texas Music History, Blues giant Leadbelly performs his final concert at UT’s Hogg Auditorium
***This Week in Texas Music History is brought to you by Brane Audio***
By Jason Mellard from the Center for Texas Music History at Texas State University.
On June 15, 1949, Huddie Ledbetter, known as Lead Belly, performed his final public concert at the University of Texas Hogg Auditorium. It was a fitting farewell to one of the true giants of American music. Originally from Mooringsport, Louisiana, Ledbetter was playing in Dallas’s Deep Ellum district by the 1910s alongside Blind Lemon Jefferson. While Jefferson went on to fame in early commercial blues, run-ins with the law derailed Lead Belly’s early success, and it was in Louisiana’s Angola Penitentiary in 1933 that Ledbetter’s path crossed with folklorist John Avery Lomax, Sr., Lead Belly’s tie to the University of Texas.
Lomax, too, had early successes behind him—his book Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads popularized “Home on the Range”—but he, too, was struggling in the Great Depression. Lomax was at the prison with his son Alan collecting songs for the Library of Congress and was astounded by Ledbetter’s repertoire and performance.
Once Ledbetter got out, he and Lomax engaged in a brief, uneasy, and unequal partnership that changed the course of popular music. Early, iconic recordings of “C. C. Rider,” “Midnight Special,” “House of the Rising Sun,” and many more were the result. Lead Belly became one of the 1930s’ great heralds of folk song, collaborating with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. In that 1949 Austin concert, Lead Belly led off with a tune he called his theme song, “Goodnight, Irene.” Not many people knew it at the time, but after he passed a few months later, Pete Seeger’s group the Weavers recorded a cover and made it a hit. It was the first of many Lead Belly songs that would redefine trans-Atlantic music. George Harrison has said “No Lead Belly, No Beatles,” for example, by which he meant that the British “skiffle” craze for American folk and guitar exploded after Lonnie Donegan’s 1956 cover of Lead Belly’s “Rock Island Line.” And if we have Lead Belly’s last testament in these 1949 tracks recorded at UT, another artist’s final recorded concert, Nirvana’s on the MTV show Unplugged, ended with Kurt Cobain proclaiming the last song, “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?”, was a cover of his “favorite artist,” Lead Belly. Huddie Ledbetter’s deep legacy resonates still.
Sources:
Sheila Curran Bernard. Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly’s Truths from Jim Crow’s Lies. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Benjamin Filene. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.
Katie Kapurch and Jon Marc Smith. Blackbird: How Black Musicians Sang the Beatles into Being—and Sang Back to Them Ever After. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2023.
John A. Lomax. Adventures of a Ballad Hunter. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2017 [1947].
Richard Pennington, https://richardpennington.com/2012/02/10/lead-belly-at-ut-1949/
John Szwed. Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World. New York: Viking Press, 2010.
