Leadbelly

Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, the great American folk singer and 12-string guitarist who died in 1949 at the age of 60, is evoked in beautiful, soft, dreamlike images in Gordon Parks' elegiacal film, LEADBELLY. Leadbelly's life was hard and violent. He was born black at a time when blacks were "darkies," in the Deep South in which "darkies" were supposed to know their place, which, for Leadbelly's family, was sharecropping. But Leadbelly never did know his place for long. He served one sentence for murder on a Texas chain gang and another sentence on a Louisiana chain gang. In 1939, after he had gained his reputation as a folk singer, he was once more up against the law, this time in New York, where he was sentenced to a year in prison for a stabbing. In the meantime he was always refining his music, which provided the order in a life that was in every other respect chaotic. (Cinemax)