Why is Lead Belly such an important figure in Americas music?
With the advent of radio and recording, music became an industry rather, than just a tradition. Lead Belly sits between those two worlds. In Lead Belly’s music you don’t hear songs that were written to be popular. You hear the songs that people sang throughout their entire lives. It’s the music that you grow up with; that your mom or dad sings to you when you’re a baby. Lead Belly wrote about all of the parts of life that were worth writing– teenage songs for falling in love; going to work songs; falling out of love songs; somebody goes bad songs; getting older songs. He was the last of that generation that sang stories that you would have heard going back thousands of years. I joke about it at my shows, I say, “You know, before people came here and paid people to sing, everybody used to sing.” I say this is what I learned from Lead Belly– that in all of the cultures that we come from, songs were things everybody did, as well as dances, I mean we all took part in some way in this stu
