Leadbelly

Another of the movies that I had the chance to DVR during one of the recent free preview weekends was a biopic I didn't know had been made, Leadbelly. It's going to be on again tomorrow morning at 5:15 AM on Flix, and again Friday on the SHOxBET channel that's a collaboration between Showtime and Black Entertainment Television.

The movie starts off in 1933, at Angola Prison in Louisiana. Huddie Ledbetter (Roger E. Mosley) is a prisoner there on the labor gang, when a visitor from up north comes looking for him. John Lomax (James Brodhead) is an ethnomusicologist, looking for authentic folk songs and the people who make them; Ledbetter's reputation apparently precedes him enough that such a northern college professor would come all the way to Louisiana to record him for posterity. This gives Huddie, who got the nickname "Lead Belly" (he spelled it with a space although a lot of sources, including the title of the movie, give it as one word) the chance to go back in time and reminisce about his life....

OK, that's a standard movie technique, but then it's a standard because it works reasonably well for a movie like this, especially when the subject of the movie is already known for something. Flash back a quarter century or so. Huddie's parents Wes and Sally (Paul Benjamin and Lynn Hamilton) are sharecroppers in western Louisiana. Huddie already has a talent for music, but he's also got a problematic personal life; after a girlfriend suggests that he's knocked her up, he decides that he's going to go to Shreveport, the biggest city nearby, and one that has a district where he might be able to become successful as a singer.

Not that it's going to be easy; Huddie ends up in the lobby of a brothel run by Miss Eula (Madge Sinclair). But she takes a liking to him and he's able to get work playing music, at least until there's a raid that forces Huddie to flee. He goes to Texas but his legal difficulties follow him. Even though he tries to live as a farmer under an assumed name, his musical prowess on the 12-string guitar and his penchant for getting into trouble follow him.

Eventually, he's imprisoned for manslaughter after stabbing a man to death, and spends several years in prison. But he's on the work detail for a function hosted by the governor, Pat Neff, and Huddie sings a topical song for the governor basically asking for a pardon. The governor says that his final act in office will be to grant that pardon. (Neff had, like many politicians, campaigned as being tough on crime, and couldn't well pardon somebody convicted of manslaughter until he was a lame duck.)

Obviously, Huddie does get that pardon, since he has to make it back to Louisiana to wind up in prison there for Lomax to find him. Interestingly, the final act in Ledbetter's story is largely passed over in the movie, with just a title card at the end pointing out that he did become a successful singer getting to sing on the stages in the big cities.

Ledbetter is a biopic about a man with whom I was vaguely familiar, knowing at least that he was a blues singer, although not knowing too much more about the man. The movie is interesting, albeit it rather formulaic. Gordon Parks directed, and since he started off as a still photographer it's not surprising that there are a lot of nice-looking montages here, many of them presented with Ledbetter's songs. In getting top-notch performances out of the cast he's not quite as successful, although it's probably worth noting that nobody here became a really big star, with Mosley's turn on Magnum, P.I. probably being the biggest.

Still, a movie like Leadbelly is a good jumping-off point for learning more about the life of an interesting and relatively little-known figure in American music. It doesn't seem to be on DVD at all, but it is on various streaming services.