The Smithsonian Folkways Collection

The recordings of Lead Belly, made between his discovery in prison in 1933 by the folklorists John and Alan Lomax and his death in 1949, have been remastered, repackaged and reissued extensively over the years, but this 108-track set, housed in a handsome 140-page coffee-table book with extensive notes and historic photos, supersedes all previous releases to serve as the definitive primer. Born on a Louisiana plantation in 1888, Huddie Ledbetter was a hard man who served time for murder. Yet, accompanying himself on a 12-string guitar, he also became perhaps the 20th century's greatest repository of folk and blues songs, many of them traditional, but all given his own unique touch of vernacular genius. Those songs have since been covered by a host of rock artists including the Beach Boys, Ry Cooder, Led Zeppelin, Van Morrison and Nirvana, as well as being sung by just about every American folk singer of the last 70 years.

As you’d expect, his best-known songs from those illustrious covers are all present and correct – ‘Goodnight Irene’, ‘The Midnight Special’, ‘Cotton Fields’, ‘Rock Island Line’, ‘House of the Rising Sun’, ‘Gallis Pole’ – but they are only a taster of what is on offer here. Drawing on his legacy from his first sides, recorded in prison by the Lomaxes, to his final sessions in New York in 1948 (and including 16 previously unreleased recordings), the set makes no claim to be comprehensive – Lead Belly's repertoire really was that vast. But it is a finely calibrated overview of his career and also serves, as the liner notes point out, as ‘a survey of American popular song spanning 200 years.’ With the hiss and crackle of the original, fragile acetate masters now miraculously eradicated by digital transfer and clean-up, what emerges is a voice that not only has indisputable historical importance but which sounds astonishingly vigorous and vibrant in the here and now: the myth made man again, the life breathed back into the legend.