Bring Judgment Day
Reclaiming Lead Belly's Truths from Jim Crow's Lies

A stunning rebuttal of the mythology surrounding American music legend Lead Belly that reveals painful details about America's racial history.

Sheila Curran Bernard (Author)

9781009098120, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 11 July 2024

253 pages
22.2 x 14.8 x 2.6 cm, 0.49 kg

'[A] new and vitally important biographical study…. Lead Belly has, in many ways, remained hidden in the shadows behind myths, half-truths, and, in some cases, willful misrepresentations of him, his times, and his cultural and social significance as a Black musician in an America still rent by 'Jim Crow's lies.'…. Sheila Curran Bernard has exhumed this narrative and reexamined it, exposing (or, more accurately, insisting on acknowledging) the contradictions that have long compromised it.' David Whiteis, Living Blues

Known worldwide as Lead Belly, Huddie Ledbetter (1889–1949) is an American icon whose influence on modern music was tremendous – as was, according to legend, the temper that landed him in two of the South's most brutal prisons, while his immense talent twice won him pardons. But, as this deeply researched book shows, these stories were shaped by the white folklorists who 'discovered' Lead Belly and, along with reporters, recording executives, and radio and film producers, introduced him to audiences beyond the South. Through a revelatory examination of arrest, trial, and prison records; sharecropping reports; oral histories; newspaper articles; and more, author Sheila Curran Bernard replaces myth with fact, offering a stunning indictment of systemic racism in the Jim Crow era of the United States and the power of narrative to erase and distort the past.

Introduction
1. Encounter at Angola
2. Two men from Texas
3. On the road
4. 1915: The State of Texas v. Huddie Ledbetter
5. Frayed nerves
6. 1918: The State of Texas v. Walter Boyd
7. Northern debut
8. Contracts
9. 1930: The State of Louisiana v. Huddie Ledbetter
10. The end of the road
Epilogue.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK]