Lead Belly - The Smithsonian Folkways Collection [5CD Box] (2015) FLAC Beolab1700
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Lead Belly - The Smithsonian Folkways Collection
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Artist...............: Lead Belly
Album................: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection
Genre................: Blues
Source...............: CD
Year.................: 2015
Ripper...............: EAC (Secure mode) / LAME 3.92 & Asus CD-S520
Codec................: Free Lossless Audio Codec (FLAC)
Version..............: reference libFLAC 1.3.1 20141125
Quality..............: Lossless, (avg. compression: 38 %)
Channels.............: Stereo / 44100 HZ / 16 Bit
Tags.................: VorbisComment
Information..........:
Posted by............: Beolab1700 on 19/03/2015
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Tracklisting
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CD 1
Irene (Goodnight Irene)
The Bourgeois Blues
Fannin Street (Mister Tom Hughes Town)
The Midnight Special
John Henry
Black Girl (Where Did You Sleep Last Night)
Pick a Bale of Cotton
Take This Hammer
Cotton Fields
Old Riley
Rock Island Line
The Gallis Pole
Ha-Ha This a Way
Sukey Jump
Boll Weevil
Scottsboro Boys
Governor O.K. Allen
Governor Pat Neef
There’s a Man Going Around Taking Names
On a Monday
You Can’t Lose Me, Cholly
Keep Your Hands Off Her
We Shall Be Free
CD 2
Alabama Bound
Almost Day
Fiddler’s Dram
Green Corn
Sally Walker
Bring Me a Little Water, Silvy
Julie Ann Johnson
Linin’ Track
Whoa, Back, Buck
Shorty George
Ham and Eggs (Previously Unreleased)
Moanin’
Out On the Western Plain
Noted Rider
Meeting at the Building
Good, Good, Good (Talking, Preaching)/We Shall Walk Through the Valley
Ain’t You Glad (The Blood Done Signed My Name)
I’m So Glad, I Done Got Over (Previously Unreleased)
The Hindenburg Disaster
Ella Speed
Haul Away Joe
Old Man
Sweet Jenny Lee
Jean Harlow
Laura
Queen Mary
CD 3
Good Morning Blues
Sail On, Little Girl
Easy Rider
Poor Howard
Duncan and Brady
How Long, How Long
T.B. Blues
Jim Crow Blues
Pigmeat
John Hardy
Outskirts of Town
4, 5, and 9
In the Evening (When the Sun Goes Down)
Red Cross Store Blues
Diggin’ My Potatoes
Blind Lemon
When a Man’s a Long Way from Home
Alberta
Excerpt from The Lonesome Train
National Defense Blues
Hitler Song (Mr. Hitler)
Big Fat Woman
Been So Long – Bellevue Hospital Blues (Previously Unreleased Original Song)
CD 4
WNYC Folk Songs of America – Lead Belly (Previously Unreleased): a. Grey Goose, b. Boll Weevil, c. Yellow Gal, d. Ha-Ha This a Way, e. Leaving Blues, f. Irene (Outro)
WNYC Folk Songs of America – Lead Belly and the Oleander Quartet (Previously Unreleased): a. Almost Day, b. Blues in My Kitchen, Blues in My Dining Room, c. I Went Up on the Mountain, d. Good Morning Blues, e. Baby, Don t You Love Me No More, f. T.B. Blues, g. Irene (Outro)
If It Wasn’t For Dicky (Previously Unreleased)
What’s You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire w/ Anne Graham (Previously Unreleased)
Rock Me – Hide Me in Thy Bosom w/ Anne Graham (Previously Unreleased)
Packin’ Trunk Blues (Previously Unreleased)
Leaving Blues
How Come You Do Me Like You Do? (Previously Unreleased)
One Dime Blues (Previously Unreleased)
I’m Going to Buy You a Brand New Ford (Previously Unreleased Original Song)
Jail-House Blues
Shout On
Come and Sit Down Beside Me
Red River (Previously Unreleased)
CD 5
Yes, I Was Standing in the Bottom
Ain’t Going Down to the Well No More (Version 2)
Everytime I Go Out (Previously Unreleased Original Song)
Go Down, Old Hannah
Black Betty
Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out w/ Bessie Smith(Previously Unreleased)
Stewball
Ain’t It a Shame to Go Fishin’ on a Sunday
Relax Your Mind
Princess Elizabeth (Previously Unreleased Original Song)
Silver City Bound
The Titanic
House of the Rising Sun
It’s Tight Like That
Diggin’ My Potatoes
Springtime in the Rockies
Backwater Blues
Didn’t Old John Cross the Water
De Kalb Blues
They Hung Him on the Cross (Version 1)
They Hung Him on the Cross (Version 2)
In the World
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Prestige box sets of pre-rock music that out-price the casual fan or curious newcomer tend to emphasize an artist’s importance and influence, carefully delineating his or her legacy across subsequent generations of followers. You listen because it’s good for you, is the implication, which is certainly worthwhile as far as that goes. But rarely is this type of retrospective quite as much fun as Lead Belly: The Smithsonian Folkways Collection. It’s not only the first full career retrospective of one of the most significant musicians of the twentieth century. It’s also a blast.
We have an image of Lead Belly as a somber bluesman, a stoic song collector who wore a perpetually solemn expression like that on the cover of the new 5xCD set. That was, of course, only one side of the musician, who memorized and personalized a vast array of American work songs, play songs, Tin Pan Alley hits, spirituals, blues, ballads, reels, hollers, jigs, calls, and more. He was as much a raconteur as he was a songster, and when he has a chance to tell you all about a song—where it came from, how he heard it, why it sounds the way it does, or how it fits into your everyday life—Lead Belly reveals the dynamism of a great storyteller. When he introduces “Leaving Blues” during a radio broadcast, Lead Belly declaims the nature of the blues with a preacherly cadence, which turns a sad situation into something almost comical. The story lasts longer than the actual song: For him talk is not just crucial to the music, but a kind of music in and of itself.
“Fun” is not the first word applied to Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter because certain aspects of his life were inflated in the 1930s and ’40s and have yet to deflate. He did serve prison sentences for manslaughter—at Imperial State Prison Farm in Texas and Angola in Louisiana, both notoriously brutal institutions—and he managed to sing his way out of them. When he moved to New York City, the press played up his past at the expense of his music; the New York Herald previewed an early performance with the sensationalist headline, “Sweet Singer of the Swamplands Here to Do a Few Tunes Between Homicides”. As archivist and curator Jeff Place points out in the liner notes here, it was an all too common attitude at the time.
Over the course of his relatively short 15-year recording career, Lead Belly met many sympathetic label executives, producers, and fellow musicians who promoted him as a dynamic entertainer and an accomplished songster, but he never truly escaped the condescending “noble savage” stigma attached to him by the liberal elite of the Northeast. Nor did he achieve much popular success during his lifetime. He sold primarily to a small community of folk fans in and around New York, but never made a considerable impact beyond the city. In that regard, he was a man slightly out of time. It was just a few years after his death in 1949 when folk became big business, when the songs he had preserved became mainstays in coffeehouses and concert halls. Without Lead Belly, the folk revival of Dylan, Baez, and Fred Neil would have been very different, and it might not have happened at all.
Lead Belly also left his mark on rock’n’roll. What’s remarkable about this collection is just how familiar many of these songs already are. “Black Girl (Where Did You Sleep Last Night)” is perhaps best known to many via Nirvana’s 1993 Unplugged performance, but there’s also “The Midnight Special” (a hit for Creedence Clearwater Revival, among others) and “Black Betty” (Ram Jam, Tom Jones, Jon Spencer Blues Explosion). “Pick a Bale of Cotton” and “Rock Island Line” formed the foundation of the UK skiffle movement in the 1950s, and Led Zeppelin more or less stole “The Gallis Pole” riff, lyrics, and all. Lead Belly didn’t write all of these songs, but he collected them from a variety of sources—other cotton pickers in Texas, other inmates, other musicians, family members, friends—and put his indelible stamp on them. Most subsequent artists discovered these songs through his versions.
The first three discs of The Smithsonian Folkways Collection are as fine a retrospective as you can find for Lead Belly, showcasing the diversity of his repertoire and the precision of his playing and singing. (For those who don’t have the $100 for this box set, many of these tracks were compiled on Smithsonian Folkways’ Lead Belly Legacy series, any of which makes a fine entry point into his vast catalog.) What distinguishes this collection is its scope: There have been hundreds of Lead Belly comps released over the last half-century, but too few put his best-known material alongside his radio performances and final sessions, which are included on the fourth and fifth discs. Recorded during the 1940s for a folk series on WNYC, his radio broadcasts show him in a looser setting where the distinctions between his patter and his playing seem to disappear. Whether he’s singing solo or accompanied by the Oleander Quartet, he’s an outsize personality on the airwaves, especially during the two 15-minute programs that allow him to regale his imagined, invisible audience with stories as well as songs.
The final disc includes songs from what would be Lead Belly’s last sessions in 1948. His voice sounds noticeably weaker, with an uneasy grain in his syllables that has less to do with age and more to do with the onset of ALS. He’d be dead in a year, but as shaky as his voice may be, it is no less certain in its phrasing, whether he’s rhapsodizing with a Bessie Smith record on “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” or singing “Stewball” accompanied only by backing vocals and handclaps. It’s tempting to read anything called “Last Sessions” as poignant, but Lead Belly brings a very familiar exuberance to “It’s Tight Like That” and “House of the Rising Son”.
It’s fitting that the final track on The Smithsonian Folkways Collection isn’t a song, but a brief monologue called “In the World”, based on a half-remembered conversation from long ago. It makes for a fitting epilogue to this monumental box set, primarily because it reveals Lead Belly’s role as an archivist of American music, passing tunes and ideas along from one person to the next, from one generation to the next. “We all gotta get peace together because we’re in the world together,” he muses. “I never heard nothing like it. Now you got it now.”
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