Murderous Minstrel

In Texas a black buck known as Lead Belly murdered a man. He sang a petition to Governor Pat Neff and was granted a pardon. Back in the Louisiana swamplands, where he was born Huddie Ledbetter, his knife made more trouble. He was in State Prison at Angola when John A. Lomax, eminent ballad collector, stopped by last summer and asked the warden if he could please hear Lead Belly sing.

John Lomax arrived in Manhattan last week to lecture on ballads and with him was Lead Belly, wild-eyed as ever. The Negro had been pardoned again because Mr. Lomax had made a phonograph record of a second petition and taken it to Louisiana's Governor Allen. Lead Belly was released from prison on Aug. 1. Month later when Mr. Lomax was sitting in a Texas hotel he felt a tap on his shoulder. It was Lead Belly, saying: "Boss, here I is." His knife bulged in his pocket. In his hand was a rickety green-painted guitar held together by string.

Wearing overalls and a blue hickory shirt over a yellow one, Lead Belly sang in Manhattan last week for University of Texas alumni. And John Lomax was nervous. Theatrical agents and radio scouts insisted on hearing his protege, who had been out on a wild 24-hour rampage in Harlem. Until it was time for him to sing Lomax kept his hell-raising minstrel locked up in a coat room. But the performance went off without mishap. Lead Belly's voice is rich and clear. He plays and sings with his eyes closed, taps single time with one foot, triple with the other. He claims that most of his songs are his own. He sang about when "me and a bunch of cowboys had that famous battle on Bunker Hill," and again about the Negro who "throwed his jelly* out of the window.' The minstrel was proudest when he chanted the petition which won him his first pardon. The refrain:

I am your servant, composed this song;

Please, Governor Neff, let me go back home.

I know my wife will jump and shout When de train roll up and I come steppin' out.

Please, Governor Neff, be good an' kind, Have mercy on my great long

time, I don't see to save my soul; If 1 can't get a pardon, try me in a parole. . . .

Please, Governor Neff, be good and kind, And if I can't get a pardon, will you cut my time?

If I had you, Governor Neff, like you got me, I would wake up in the mornin' and set you free.

And I'm going home to Mary--po'

Mary.

*A "jelly" in the Louisiana swamplands means a very fat woman. Many of Lead Belly's songs are in Lomax's excellent book, American Ballads and Folk Songs (Macmillan, $5).

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