Early last year John Avery Lomax, crack compiler of U. S. folk songs, arrived in Manhattan with a big, wild-eyed Negro known as Lead Belly (real name: Huddie Ledbetter). John Lomax' protègé was a murderer, but he was also a natural-born minstrel. From a Texas jail he won his pardon by singing a petition to onetime Governor Pat Neff. In the Louisiana swamplands his knife made more trouble. Again he was imprisoned, again got out with a song when John Lomax made a phonograph record of it, submitted it personally to the late Governor Allen.
Lead Belly was in Manhattan last week...
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