![]() Transported me into a world I’d never known. "That record changed my life right then and there. "Somebody – somebody I’d never seen before – handed me a Lead Belly record with the song ‘Cottonfields’ on it,” recalled Bob Dylan in his 2017 lecture to the Noble (Prize) Foundation. Those same early recordings that preserved his music and the word “woke,” found their way into the imagination of another young artist of some note. Lead Belly was inspiring many musical forms of that day. Therefore, no Lead Belly, no Beatles,” as recounted by Smithsonian Magazine. “skiffle craze” and eventually inspired new skiffle groups across England, such as Liverpool’s The Quarrymen, then led by an aspiring singer-songwriter named John Lennon.īy 1960, the group would evolve into The Beatles, and its lead guitarist, George Harrison, would one day tell an interviewer, “If there was no Lead Belly, there would have been no Lonnie Donegan no Lonnie Donegan, no Beatles. Lead Belly influences Rock 'n Roll's greatest bandĭonegan became “the king” of the U.K. ![]() The driving rhythms of Lead Belly’s version of “Rock Island Line” would in the 1950s inspire an early British pop singer named Lonnie Donegan, who adopted the song’s musical style called skiffle, a mash of American folk, blues and jazz. All white people reading this and learning the name Huddie Ledbetter for the first time, should know that they have likely felt his influence, far more than they could have imagined. In a way that history has of surprising us, Lead Belly would become essential to white culture in America and Great Britain. He traveled the byways of Louisiana, Alabama and Texas singing his songs and confronting white bigotry and its violence against Black people. It’s believed to be the first recorded instance of the word.Īs Huddie Ledbetter used “woke,” it meant that when you’re a Black person traveling through a deeply racist state such as Alabama, you need to know what you’re dealing with – a highly refined form of evil. While first recording his song "The Scottsboro Boys," about nine African-American young men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama, Lead Belly admonished listeners to, “Best stay woke!” The archivists recorded on aluminum discs Lead Belly and his 12-string guitar, preserving what would become some of the great Blues standards such as “Cotton Fields,” “Goodnight, Irene” and “Rock Island Line.” 'Woke' emerges with a song about race and suffering That project took library archivists to Louisiana where they discovered a little-known African American blues singer named Huddie William Ledbetter or “Lead Belly.” There’s a good chance none of us would know the word today had the Library of Congress not set out in the 1930s to preserve American folk music in the South. “I don’t like the term ‘woke’ because I hear, ‘Woke, woke, woke.’ It’s just a term they use, half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is.” This week the word “woke” is igniting a family spat within the 2024 Republican primary for president, pitting Donald Trump against his former apprentice, Ron DeSantis.ĭeSantis, the Florida governor, uses the word frequently to describe an ideology steeped in identity politics that has taken over our universities, media, large corporations, medicine, arts, entertainment and sports. A battle over 'woke' in the Republican Party primary It’s one of the great words in American English and it should be preserved in its purest form.Īt the moment it is being hijacked by politics – first by white liberals, then by white conservatives. The word woke is seminal to our larger culture in ways most of us have never understood. You don’t have to be African American, however, to feel its history. Less than 10 years ago, “woke” was a word so deeply layered with history and meaning it could evoke years of pain suffered by descendants of slaves living in Jim Crow America. Someday when the cultural moment that many have called “The Great Awokening” is finally, mercifully, over, Americans of all races should fight to give African Americans their word back.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |