Leadbelly (Zeeuwse Maatschappij N.V., Brownstone Productions, David Paradine Productions, Paramount, 1976)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2026 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, June 4) my husband Charles and I watched two films on Turner Classic Movies that was part of a night of films about the blues (more or less). The first one we watched was Leadbelly, a 1976 biopic of the great African-American blues singer, born Huddie Ledbetter (1888-1949), written by Ernest Kinoy – who’d later address the Black American experience from a different perspective as the principal screenwriter for the TV mini-series Roots – and directed, stunningly, by Gordon Parks. Gordon Parks (1912-2006) was a still photographer for Life magazine (the first African-American to hold that job) who branched out into film direction in 1969 with an adaptation of his own autobiographical novel The Learning Tree. In 1971 he got the plum assignment to direct the pioneering Blaxploitation film Shaft, an enormous hit. One of the ironies behind Shaft is that the communal apartment lived in by the Black militant group “The Lummumbas” has a living room dominated by a giant poster of Malcolm X – printed from a photo Parks had shot of him for Life. When Charles and I saw Shaft I noted that most of the Blaxploitation films seemed to have been directed by people who didn’t know a camera from a dildo. Parks was the great exception; scene after scene of Shaft was planned and executed by a director who was a master of photography. Parks later directed the immediate sequel, Shaft’s Big Score, and another movie called The Super Cops co-written by Shaft’s creator, Lorenzo Semple, Jr. He looked set for a major career as a filmmaker when he took on Leadbelly’s story for Paramount and a bizarre array of “independent” production companies including one with the African-sounding name “Zeeuwse Maatschappij N.V.” There was also a credit to Paradine Productions, the company owned by British-born TV host David Frost, who actually co-produced the film. Alas, Leadbelly ran into political troubles at Paramount; the studio management that green-lighted it was fired while Parks was still in post-production and the new people in charge gave the film limited promotion and didn’t leave it in theatres long. The fiasco seems to have derailed Parks’s directorial career; his only subsequent credits as director on imdb.com were an episode of PBS’s drama series American Playhouse and Moments Without Proper Names, a documentary about Parks himself.

It’s a pity, because though the film has one major flaw (more on that later), Leadbelly is a stunning piece of work. Parks and his cinematographer, Bruce Surtees, manage to make the past-is-brown look work even with a mostly Black cast; I’ve previously complained that the past-is-brown look is particularly annoying when the protagonists are Black because their brown skins tend to blend into the brown backgrounds and make them difficult to see. That wasn’t a problem with this film, in which Parks and Surtees manage the feat of making the Texas countryside (Leadbelly was a Louisiana native but the film was entirely shot in Texas, where Leadbelly led much of his pre-stardom life and got a long sentence to a chain gang under the name “Walter Boyd”) glow with beauty while Kinoy’s script didn’t short-change the perpetual burden Southern Blacks lived under the region’s racism. Black Southerners lived their lives in the all too vivid awareness that not only their liberties and livelihoods but even their lives were lived under the suffrage and tolerance of whites. Lynch mobs could and often did literally kill Blacks any time they wanted to, with total impunity. They’d even boast about it afterwards, saying they had a “great barbecue” the night before when they’d hanged a Black person from a tree and set the corpse on fire, often after cutting off pieces of the body and trading them as grisly souvenirs. Incidentally there’s continuing confusion as to both Leadbelly’s stage name and his real one; he didn’t like the name “Leadbelly” and insisted when he played live on being introduced as “Huddie Ledbetter.” Also the name “Lead Belly” was usually spelled as two words during his lifetime but the spelling “Leadbelly” became more common after his death. And I’d always assumed his real first name was pronounced “Huddie,” as it’s spelled, but the actors in the film use “Hoodie,” with the double-o pronounced in the long style, as in “smooth.” Kinoy’s script for Leadbelly tells the legend of Leadbelly’s life and in particular his involvements with prostitutes (one of his guitars is a present from Miss Eula, played by Madge Sinclair, madam of a whorehouse on Fannin Street in the red-light district of Shreveport, Louisiana, who takes him as her lover after she catches him grabbing a freebie from one of her women) and lowlifes in general. Leadbelly is shown making his living mostly from playing for tips in bars and challenging all comers to guitar-picking duels. One of them beats him with a 12-string guitar (until then Leadbelly had played only six-stringed guitars but later he buys the man’s 12-string and becomes a master of that instrument).

The film also features another legendary blues musician besides Leadbelly (Roger E. Mosely, voiced by HiTide Harris; there was some controversy at the time about Parks’s use of an actor who needed a voice double, which may account for Ryan Coogler’s insistence when he made the film Sinners that all the actors playing blues musicians either be able to sing and play for themselves, or be willing to learn): Blind Lemon Jefferson (Art Evans), who barnstorms with Leadbelly through the South. (The real Leadbelly recorded a song called “Blind Lemon,” and in his spoken introduction he says he traveled with Blind Lemon for 18 years and used to lead him around.) They buy a Model “T” Ford from a white man and are so preposterously ignorant of how it works that the white guy they bought it from has to hand-crank it for them to get it to start. Blind Lemon at first insists on driving, saying that he’s not totally blind, but Leadbelly pushes him out of the driver’s seat and takes over even though he’s never driven before in his life either. Blind Lemon keeps talking about his ambition to go to a Northern city like New York or Chicago and make records – which the real Blind Lemon Jefferson did. He became one of Paramount Records’ two biggest Black stars (along with Ma Rainey) and he was so popular that when he died in 1929 Paramount hired impersonators so they could keep cranking out “new” Blind Lemon Jefferson records even after he’d passed. The film depicts Leadbelly as a troublesome prisoner who’s always clashing with authorities and getting either whipped or locked in “the hole.” It’s also relatively accurate in depicting how he got out of prison: in 1925 Texas Governor Pat Hare (John Henry Faulk, one of the most regrettable victims of Hollywood blacklisting, who fought back and had something of a comeback in the 1970’s) ordered Leadbelly to be work-furloughed to play at a fancy whites-only party he was hosting. Hare was so impressed by Leadbelly’s performance, especially of a song he’d written pleading to be let out of prison, that Hare promised to draft pardon papers and sign them on his way out of office – which he actually did. Hare was succeeded by “Ma” Ferguson, who’d run for governor for the first time when her husband was impeached and removed from office by the Texas legislature, and both Fergusons were so famous for pardoning people (including Clyde Barrow of “Bonnie and Clyde” fame) Charles was startled by a story about a well-known prisoner being set free from a Texas prison by a governor other than one of the Fergusons.

Later Leadbelly got re-arrested in Louisiana and also sentenced to a chain gang, where in 1933 he was visited by a folk-music researcher named John Lomax (James Brodhead). Lomax was traveling through the South collecting songs with a portable recording machine, and he visited Louisiana’s notorious Angola Prison. In an earlier scene Leadbelly’s father, Wes Ledbetter (Paul Benjamin), had shown up at the prison intending to bribe the captain of the guards to set his son free. Wes had got the money by selling 15 acres of prime bottom farmland his family had owned since the end of the Civil War (in the movie the farm was in Louisiana; it was really in Texas), and when the captain tells Wes that he can’t buy his son’s freedom, Wes asks if he can at least have the money put in Huddie’s prison account. He’s told he can’t do that either, but then he asks the captain at least to take the money and use it to buy Huddie a 12-string guitar, which the captain does. Ultimately Leadbelly serves his time and is released, though the Lomaxes (John and his son Alan, who joined his father in his folk-song collecting activities and kept on after John died in 1948) put out the story that once again Leadbelly had sung for a governor (O. K. Allen, who ran in 1932 as the imposición stooge for the termed-out Huey Long) and had so moved him he won a pardon. The one flaw in Leadbelly is that it ends just when it’s getting interesting: as good as it is, it could have been even greater if Parks and Kinoy had dramatized the culture shock this unlettered Black blues musician would have faced suddenly plunged into the big white cities of New York and Chicago and confronted with the music establishments there. One of the quirkier parts of Leadbelly’s story was that he actually got convicted a third time in New York in 1939 of stabbing a man in a bar fight, and the judge was blatantly prejudiced against him because of his prior criminal record. Leadbelly served a year in Riker’s Island but managed to continue his career after his release, including making an album in 1940 for RCA Victor (then America’s biggest record company) called The Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs. (This was in the days of 78 rpm records, made of a fragile mixture of shellac and clay, and an “album” meant just that: a group of records packaged in hard cardboard sleeves and bound together like a photo album.) The story of Leadbelly’s encounters with the white-controlled music industry and his later tours, including post-World War II appearances in Europe (the first Black American folksinger to tour there), could have made an even more interesting movie than the one we have – but the one we have is quite good, thank you, beautifully photographed, handsomely directed, sensitively written, and with an excellent performance by Roger E. Mosley as Leadbelly (even though he didn’t do his own singing for the role).