By the middle of February, 1935, the maelstrom of publicity that greeted the Lomaxes and Ledbetter at the start of the year is waning. Hoping to raise some attention and funds, John Lomax plans an ambitious performing tour of upstate New York. His relationship with Ledbetter reaches a breaking point, however, with Lomax claiming to be in fear for his life. By the end of March, the Ledbetters are boarding a bus for Shreveport. But Lomax’s need to control Ledbetter continues, leading Huddie and Martha to suspect that they are being cheated. A battle between lawyers representing the Ledbetters and John Lomax ensues, and is not fully resolved for two years.

Despite the publicity, reporters do not investigate the arrest, just five years earlier, that landed Ledbetter in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. This chapter does so, looking at his arrest in Mooringsport on January 15, 1930 and at the protracted, but ultimately unsuccessful, legal battle waged on Ledbetter’s behalf by a white law firm. On the basis of the evidence, and unpublished drafts of the Lomaxes’ book, it seems that the Lomaxes, too, had reason to doubt the story as edited for their book.

In a major correction to the Ledbetter legend, this chapter explores a series of events and trials that led to Huddie Ledbetter being sentenced to a chain gang (a road work crew) in 1915, despite his parents turning over 30 acres of land – nearly half of their hard-earned farm – to a white law firm they hired to defend him.

On December 9, 1949, Huddie Ledbetter died in a New York hospital at the age of sixty. This chapter briefly looks at the life that he and Martha remade after their permanent return to New York in early 1936. It also looks at damage caused to Ledbetter’s career by the November 1936 publication of Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly, as well as all of the Lomax-driven publicity over the previous two years. In 1939, an altercation at a party hosted by the Ledbetters leads an unsympathetic prosecutor and judge, citing false narratives about Lead Belly, to incarcerate him yet again, this time at Rikers. Released later in 1939, he and Martha continue to build a new life. Over time, Huddie Ledbetter builds a celebrated (but not remunerative) career with significant impact on the folk and labor movements as well as the ongoing evolution of American musical forms, including rock and roll.

In another correction to the Ledbetter legend, this chapter explores in depth the events of 1917 and 1918 that resulted in Ledbetter’s incarceration, under the alias “Walter Boyd,” in Texas state prisons. After spending two years at the Shaw State Farm near DeKalb, he is transferred along with other Black men to the Imperial State Farm at Sugar Land, and it is there that he comes into contact with Texas Governor Pat Neff. In January 1925, as Neff leaves office, he responds to Ledbetter’s pleas and grants him a full pardon.

In their 1936 book, Negro Folk Songs as Sung By Lead Belly, folklorists John Lomax and his son Alan presented a section, “Lead Belly Tells His Story,” as reliable autobiography. Research has demonstrated that the words presented as Huddie Ledbetter’s (Lead Belly’s) were not transcribed from speech, but written and edited by the Lomaxes, building on and augmenting stories Ledbetter allegedly told them. This book sets out to explore, through primary source research, a more accurate story of Ledbetter’s early life up through his months spent traveling and working with the Lomaxes.

John and Alan Lomax first encountered Huddie Ledbetter at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola in the summer of 1933, while they were recording songs for a book eventually titled American Ballads and Folk Songs. A year later, they recorded him again, including an appeal he made to Louisiana governor O.K. Allen. This chapter explores the history of Angola, conditions there during Ledbetter’s incarceration, and Ledbetter’s extensive efforts to achieve his own early release.

Moving into New York City, the Lomaxes and Ledbetter are eager to cash in on the interest in the performer. Everyone from Macmillan publishing to The March of Time (the radio show and its brand-new newsreel) seek to engage in contracts with Lomax on Ledbetter’s behalf. Fearful that Ledbetter will find his own opportunities in Harlem, the Lomaxes relocate to a borrowed farmhouse in Connecticut, 50 miles from the city, and John has Ledbetter sign a management agreement. In exchange, Ledbetter’s fiancée Martha Promise is brought north from Shreveport for a well-publicized wedding. Amidst the chaos of the March of Time film shoot, Lomax has Ledbetter sign a revised management contract, adding a cut for Alan and reducing Ledbetter’s share.

This chapter traces the rigorous intellectual work of philosopher-pedagogues José de la Luz y Caballero, Félix Varela y Morales, and Enrique José Varona, demonstrating their shared anti-authoritarian pedagogy, exemplified not only in how they transformed the teaching of philosophy and science at the University of Havana, but also in their liberal and republican views of politics and their model roles as public intellectuals engaged in the righting of social ills. The analysis demonstrates that the three men’s philosophical and pedagogical arguments were modernizing and progressive for their time and might therefore appear to challenge the class and racial interests supporting the tyrannical regime imposed by Spain on the island. At the same time, the chapter complicates this view of their contributions to education and philosophy with examples of their periodic blind spots with regard to authoritarian abuses around them or their failures to speak out against such abuses.

This chapter unpacks the hegemonic attitudes within the extensive anticolonial project of Cuban feature-length and documentary film from 1959 to 1989. The chapter first explores the centrality in and contributions to the New Latin American cinema movement of Cuba, the Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC), and Cuban film directors Julio García Espinosa, Tomás Gutiérrez Alea, Humberto Solás, and Santiago Álvarez. At the same time, the chapter makes visible the many accomplished though lesser-known creative agents who helped shape these directors’ model of auteur esthetics, demonstrating how films by Sara Gómez and Nicolás Guillén Landrián also constitute fundamental and critical contributions to the Cuban cinematic canon of the period, which typically privileged the contributions of white men.

This chapter on Cuba’s avant-gardes of the 1920s and early 1930s focuses on writers associated with the Grupo Minorista and the Revista de Avance, examining their cultivation of porous intellectual communities and the attention they paid to everyday expressive forms in seeking to translate Cuban orality into writing. These writers, the chapter argues, sought new ways of characterizing Cuban experience and identity, engaging critically with their surroundings and positioning themselves as consequential cultural actors. The chapter portrays the Minoristas’ approach to the tertulia as an affective assemblage that thrives on difference and artful disagreement, welcomes international visitors, and, while being capacious enough to include women, clings to gender stereotypes. It also draws connections between the group’s tertulias and the international cosmopolitan interactions forged by the conversational qualities of the Revista de Avance, with a literary and linguistic “art of eavesdropping,” stylistic self-consciousness, interstitial participant-observer positions, and hierarchical views of culture projected by such Minorista writing as the crónicas and essays of Jorge Mañach.

This chapter argues that reading music and musicians is fundamental to understanding Cuban literature and its temporality, geography, and community-formation. After tracing some of the standard ways in which critics have aimed to connect music to the literary, the chapter suggests more social approaches to what it might mean for literary or cultural studies scholars to take music in more fully as part of social life. This conception of the social, the chapter argues, is not one to which a new or revolutionary socialism aspired after Cuba’s revolution, but rather something more ancient, less prescribed, more improvisatory, and experienced with others. Attention to popular music and the worlds it forges through the chapter’s analysis of a postrevolutionary musical primer, as well as to lyrics, sounds, and even visuality, grounds the chapter’s conception of music as an entrée into epochs beyond the historical confines of a particular musical entity or event. The complete somatic experience of music’s nuance, irony, submerged histories, happenings, and temporal overlaps can enliven and expand what literary scholars might conceptualize as an individualized “close reading.”