Trouble Plays a 12-String

Huddy Ledbetter, Lead Belly, master of the 12-string guitar, step on down. Modern music doesn't dust off your work nearly enough, despite your strong ties to almost every genre to emerge since your 1948 death.

I'm not just saying that because he was black; this was a tough hombre, an interpreter of folk songs, a fearsome multi-instrumentalist. When tells Irene "I'll get you in my dreams," the menace behind those words is unshakable. He might be talking about courtship in his dreams, but his tone signals otherwise.

The same goes for "In the Pines," better known to most people as "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?" from Nirvana's Unplugged gig. Cobain doesn't perform poorly; he just can't compete. Lead Belly's original just blows that cover out of the water.

He defied easy classification, thought certainly his association with the John and Alan Lomax lends him to the folk label. He arrived before the blues coalesced into a style, and many of his famous songs came courtesy of the oral tradition, the highly ignored method for spreading music prior to recorded song. If you can't hear the harbinger of rap music in some of these songs, you're just not trying.

The man had a rap sheet. He killed a relative in an argument over a woman, had a notoriously violent temper and as legend has it, played a song for Texas Gov. Pat Neff which led to his parole. He went to jail again in Louisiana for a stabbing. No one really knows the origin of his nickname, whether due to his stamina and toughness or his ability to stomach any rotgut moonshine during Prohibition.

Both Burl Ives and Lead Belly performed renditions of Grey Goose, and it's a wonder how they each manage to make the song their own, Ives' lyrical and sonorous, Lead Belly's punchy and sung with a trickster's wink. His choppy guitar on House of the Rising Sun perfectly balances his delivery, which has none of the blues bombast Eric Burdon made famous.

Before I found his music, I knew Lead Belly through Yusef Komunyakaa's excellent poem, "Villon/Leadbelly." Komunyakaa compares him to the 15th century French poet, noting their daring personalities and violent sides (as noted in this interview, both killed men and were later pardoned).

That's the important lesson given by artists from Villon to Lead Belly. People decry the decline of culture and morals when a rapper like Eminem or Fifty Cent gets popular on rhymes of violence. Those accusations patently ignore the truth of violence in our song, just as we overlook the subversive lyrics to nursery rhymes.

If what they create is sublime, history tends to gloss over the artist's less savory moments. Because what we know of Villon is barely a sketch fleshed out by 600-year-old court records and Lead Belly's own history has many gaps to span, their work becomes the bridge.

The bold and the violent have always been hand in hand in literature and song. In the first half of the 20th century, no artist personified those traits quite like Lead Belly.