Lead Belly Overture

liner notes This recording is a testament to two men, the Louisiana African-American musician and composer, Lead Belly, and a New York recording engineer and record company owner named Moses Asch. Their partnerrship created a lasting document of Lead Belly's wide repertoire. The songs Lead Belly recorded for Asch had a great influuence on the folk music revival to come in the 1950s and 1960s and have become standards that are sung in schools and around the camp fire. Whenever possible, we have carefully transferred and reissued these recordings from the original acetate masters that came to the Smithsonian with the acquisition of the Moses and Frances Asch Collection in 1987. When the acetate no longer existed, we used the best possible source we could find for the song. After decades these recordings can again be heard the way they sounded in the early 1940's, for in the original massters you can still hear the ringing of the guitar and thumping of the bass. Lead Belly (1888-1949) was born Huddie Ledbetter in Louisiana and during the sixty years of his life became a truly amazing repository for all types of Ameriican folk and popular music. He had an amazing capacity for memorizing any song after hearing it once. Lead Belly spent a large portion of his adult life in prison until he was "discovered" on a Library of Congress recording trip by John Avery Lomax. Lomax arranged an early release for Lead Belly and took the singer to New York City. Lead Belly traveled with Lomax and his son Alan"for a number of years until they parted ways in New York City, a long way from Lead Belly's LouisianaaTexas roots. We won't go into detail on Lead Belly's .Iife, for much has been writtten before. We recommend the Charles Wolfe and Kip Lomeli biography, The Life and Legend of Leadbelly (New York: HarperCollins, 1992), as a fine account. It was at this point that Lead Belly met someone else who wouId prove to be instrumental in his life. Moses Asch (1905-1986) was a radio engineer in New York who had started a small record company, Asch Records, to supply local hi-fi stores with recordings of Jewish perrformers and cantors. Asch was a friend of Sy Rady, a Broadway producer, who intro" duced him to Lead Belly. Lead Belly was unhappy about the way the Lomaxes preesented him to the public. They would stress his prison background, even going so far as to dress him in convict clothes on stage. Lead Belly was a proud man who wanted more than anything to be a musician and if possible a movie star. The way Lead Belly was being portrayed also irritated Asch. "To me, Lead Belly was the most formal human being that ever existted. His clothing was always the best pressed, the best. His shoes were $60 shoes in 1947! Where he might not have had much money to come home with, he had to have a cane. Lead Belly treated himself as a noble person, and when he recorded knowing that this was for people to understand what he stood for, he recorded exactly the same way" (Asch to IllY Young). Asch and Lead Belly underrstood each other and became friends. Lead Belly's records were the first records Asch made in the folk music field and marked the beginning of a long and imporrtant career. Asch went on to document the sounds of the world in an extensive collecction of sound recordings on Asch, Disc and Folkways. Lead Belly made some of the most important music of his career in Moe Asch's tiny studio. Asch envisioned himmself as a documenter and didn't like to interfere with the music. He thought of himself as "the pen with which these artists write" (Asch to IllY Young). Lead Belly had made a number of 78 rpm recordings for RCA Bluebird, Columbia, and Capitol, but none of them was commmercially successful. Major record compaanies didn't know what to do with him and tried to sell him as a blues musician. Lead Belly's large repertoire included children's play party songs, blues, American folk songs, prison songs, accordion pieces, cowboy songs, and the pop songs of the day. This didn't fit the preconceived notion of a Southern black man with a guitar. It was Asch who let Lead Belly record anyything he wished, and Lead Belly kept cornning back to Asch's studio when his flirtations with stardom failed.