Huddie William Ledbetter was born on Jeter Plantation at Mooringsport, in Caddo Parish. Sources give his birth year as 1885, 1888 and 1889, the last on his grave marker. His parents, Sally and Wes Ledbetter, were farmers, and an uncle, Terrell Ledbetter, taught him accordion and a little guitar. By 1904, according to the National Park Service, he was spending nights in St. Paul's Bottom, Shreveport's red-light district, where Fannin Street ran past saloons, brothels and dance halls. The district was later renamed Ledbetter Heights for him. He picked cotton between Dallas and Shreveport on weekdays and played parties on weekends. Around 1913 he spent about eight months with Blind Lemon Jefferson and then bought the twelve-string guitar he became known for.
Two sentences
In 1915 he was jailed for assault in Harrison County, Texas, and put on a chain gang. He escaped and lived as Walter Boyd. Governor Pat Neff pardoned him in January 1925 after he sang for the governor at Sugar Land prison. He lived in Shreveport and Houston until 1930. That year, after a fight in Mooringsport, a Louisiana court gave him six to ten years of hard labor for assault with intent to murder, and the sentence began on February 25. He was sent to Angola.
The song for Governor Allen
In July 1933 John Lomax and his son Alan, collecting songs for the Library of Congress, came to Angola, and Warden L. A. Jones recommended Ledbetter. When they returned on July 1, 1934, he recorded fifteen performances, among them two more takes of "Irene" and a new song, "Governor O.K. Allen," a plea to commute his sentence. At his request the Lomaxes carried the recording to the governor's office in Baton Rouge. He was released on August 1.
What freed him is disputed. Ledbetter and the Lomaxes both promoted the version in which his singing won his freedom a second time, as it had with Neff. Warden Jones wrote in 1939, "He received no clemency, and his discharge was a routine matter," and credited the good-time law. Historians disagree about whether the petition mattered, since Ledbetter had already written to the governor himself. In 1937 Life ran a photo essay that told the story of the two pardons and captioned a picture of his hands, "These hands once killed a man."
Goodnight, Irene
He reached New York on December 31, 1934, and married Martha Promise in Connecticut in January 1935. His records sold poorly while he lived, though he influenced Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. After muscle problems that were diagnosed in Paris in late 1948 as ALS, he died on December 6, 1949. The next year the Weavers' recording of "Goodnight Irene" was a number-one hit across the country. He is buried in the Shiloh Baptist Church cemetery at Mooringsport.
A bronze statue of him by Jessie Pitts Jr., dedicated in 1993, stands at Texas and Marshall streets in downtown Shreveport, in front of the library. The music hall that later sent the Louisiana Hayride out over the radio is the Shreveport Municipal Auditorium.