I have long been obsessed with the history of Ledbetter or “Lead Belly” as he was more popularly known, a prison convict who the ethnomusicologist John Lomax, along with one of his sons, Alan, visited in order to record some of the specific Black American folk songs they were researching in the specific period where they did this. I remembered that Ledbetter had been incarcerated at a large prison but forgot that it was Angola, one of the most evil places on earth that should not exist (it’s near New Orleans and is a prison that was built over what used to be a plantation. As the author asserts, “The penitentiary was built on the grounds of multiple plantations in West Feliciana Parish, including one named Angola, that had been owned by Isaac Franklin, a notorious domestic slave trafficker.”)

And even though the horrific system of convict leasing had ended by the time Ledbetter was sentenced to Angola in 1930, “… the conditions under which the labor of Black men, women, and even children were exploited persisted.”

One cannot read a biography or any detailed work about Ledbetter and separate him from the history of Louisiana at the time, and of the atrocious conditions Black people were exposed to.

The photographs in this volume will be of particular importance and interest to those who have examined Ledbetter’s life and longed for more context, and more evidence in the archive.

As the author of “Bring Judgment Day” points out, for those who have studied the Lomaxes and their interactions with Ledbetter, there’s a lot of bad history. I can recall one instance in which after they helped free him from prison after appealing to the state governor, they went with him on a kind of travelling show and booked him on live musical appearances, but the archive holds evidence that John Lomax in particular may have taken more of Ledbetter’s earnings or split them unfairly with him. There was also another instance of a time when they had all arranged to stay overnight at the home of a white friend of John’s and the friend said that the Lomaxes were more than welcome to stay there but that Ledbetter could not.

This book will also be important to folks who are doing or have done research into the era of “Ma” Rainey and other Black performers in the early 20th century.

Additionally, the book also chronicles the Lomaxes and many of the trials they encountered while on their journeys to record as much American folk music as they could.