Uptown guy way down with Lead Belly
A look inside the apartment of blues archivist John Reynolds
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“I had never heard a voice like Lead Belly’s,” says John Reynolds. He’s sitting in his tiny apartment in the shadow of Tudor City, his bed surrounded on all sides by filing cabinets and towers of books, a placid golden Buddha gazing out over the room’s houseplants. A desk is wedged between more shelves and buried under sheaves of photocopies, photographs, and collected clippings of Reynolds’ lifelong interests. They range from Danish school bags (which Reynolds began importing in the late ’60s) to forgotten ’50s singing group The Bell Sisters to Japanese bamboo umbrellas. And then there’s Huddy “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, a Louisiana-born ex-con who seismically shifted 20th-century music with his 12-string guitar and bellowing voice.
Reynolds remembers that voice from the first time he heard a cover of “Goodnight, Irene” lilting out of every radio, some eight months after Lead Belly succumbed to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (a.k.a. Lou Gehrig’s Disease) in the winter of 1949. At the time of his death, Lead Belly’s profound art was all but unknown outside of folk and left-leaning Greenwich Village circles. Since then, he’s become a treasure to every generation after. Years ago, we had Kurt Cobain singing “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” from Nirvana’s Unplugged. Now comes art-book titan Steidl’s tome Lead Belly: A Life In Pictures, which draws heavily from a half-century of Reynolds’ own collection of every picture, article, artifact, and tangential scrap that bears Lead Belly’s stamp.
Long ago, fresh out of high school, Reynolds tracked down Lead Belly’s widow, Martha Ledbetter, in Alphabet City and began a friendship with the family that continues into the present with Lead Belly’s favorite niece, Tiny Robinson. He kept up the correspondence in the face of much razzing from his friends. “They were always saying, ‘Oh, fuck Lead Belly. Why are you always talking about him? Who cares?’”
On a pilgrimage in 1959 to visit Lead Belly’s grave, Reynolds, not long out of the Navy, found Martha Ledbetter’s cousin, who drove him deep into the rural country of Louisiana to a plot of earth marked only by a lead pipe sticking out of the dry earth. “Because she had young daughters and I was a white sailor,” Reynolds remembers, “every time a car passed, I had to duck down. Lest the neighbors think she was pimping out her daughters.” He also hung out with folk artist Odetta around the same time; rifling through his papers, Reynolds only just found an old letter from the recently deceased singer. “It was dated 1958,” he says. “With Odetta writing: ‘I’m glad you started on your Lead Belly book.’”
It’s easy to imagine how it could take half a century to assemble as much as Reynolds has. At times, Lead Belly: A Life In Pictures feels like a portable—though still hefty—model of the cramped apartment it grew out of. On Reynolds’ walls, the same as on the page, it’s touching to peer beyond Lead Belly’s thuggish backstory (he did time on murder charges, among other things) and see the legend entrancing a roomful of kids while squeezing an accordion. Somewhere in this tiny room is a letter sent by Woody Guthrie with a holiday wish that the Ledbetters make “a shit pot full of money.” A folder filed away holds all the FBI “Un-American Activities” documents with Ledbetter’s name on them. Other priceless mementos include an invitation to President Franklin Roosevelt’s Inaugural Ball in 1941 and a cringe-inducing Life Magazine article headlined “Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel.”
As if to prove that Lead Belly is not trapped in the last century, Reynolds opens up his MacBook to show a pristine video of Lead Belly on his wedding day, his hair glistening with blackness as he serenades his new wife with “Goodnight, Irene.” How old must this video be to show Lead Belly before his hair went white? Reynolds laughs. Lead Belly, he says, always self-consciously applied shoe polish to his hair so as to hide his true age.
