Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Lead Belly, was a folk-blues giant whose music and persona transformed American culture. He sang what he lived (poverty, prison, violence) in songs like ‘Gallow’s Pole’ and ‘Black Betty,’ but
Huddie Ledbetter didn t like to be called "Lead Belly." One of his relatives told me. Florida Combs was his second cousin, and spoke with the authority of great age and seriousness.
The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, the Association for Cultural Equity, and the Charles Joyner Institute for Gullah and African Studies at Coastal Carolina University are pleased to announce that the entirety of John A. Lomax's historic South Carolina recordings made between 1934 and 1940 under the aegis of the Library of Congress' Archive of Folk Song are now freely available online via the Lomax Digital Archive.