Although the audio was prerecorded and Leadbelly is lip-synching,Three Songs By Leadbelly is the only performance footage of Leadbelly (aka Lead Belly) in existence. Hard to believe that someone of his stature was so under-represented in the world of film. He died in 1949, more than a half a century after Louis Lumiere’s creation of the first motion picture.
The three pieces of films strung together for this film originated as a folklore research film in 1945, shot by Blanding Sloan and Wah Ming Chang, then edited by Pete Seeger of The Weavers.
The one-reeler is a mite over ten minutes of which 8 minutes is the research footage. It opens with shots of the rural south & of the Shilo Baptist Church in Morningsport, Louisiana, with Leadbelly on the soundtrack humming & strumming the plaintive “Where Did You Sleep Last Night?” behind the opening credits.
Seeger recounts: “I think that [cameraman Blanding Stone] recorded Leadbelly in a studio the day before then he played the record back while Leadbelly moved his hands and lips in synch with the record. He’d taken a few seconds from one direction and a few seconds from another direction, which is the only reason I was able to edit it. I spent three weeks with a movieola, up in my barn snipping one frame off here and one frame off there and juggling things around. I was able to synch up three songs: ‘Grey Goose’, ‘Take This Hammer’ and ‘Pick a Bale of Cotton’”
Here’s “Three Songs By Leadbelly” in all of its faded glory.
