Huddie Ledbetter, better known by the prison moniker Lead Belly, was a musical genius born in the southern United States just as Jim Crow laws were starting to bite. He fell foul of an unapologetically racist legal system and ended up serving on a chain gang in 1915, later doing time in state penitentiaries in Texas (1918-25), Louisiana (1930-34) and at Rikers Island in New York (1939).

Sheila Curran Bernard takes as her focus the years 1933 to 1935 when, after years of imprisonment, Ledbetter took an academic, John Lomax, to be his manager and organise his entrance into the larger musical world of northern America. She reveals for the first time what a catastrophically bad decision that was, because Lomax’s greed and racism led him to treat Ledbetter as little more than a chauffeur, making him dependent on what could be raised by passing round the hat at the end of concerts – a sum averaging, she notes, 50 cents a day.

Lomax called Ledbetter ‘my convict negro’, making him dress up in his old prison uniform, and told audiences that Ledbetter had a reputation for being drunk, irascible and violent. The newspapers went crazy: ‘Sweet Singer of the Swamplands Here to Do a Few Tunes between Homicides’ was one headline in the Herald Tribune, and as recently as 2019 the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (to which Ledbetter was inducted in 1988) described him as ‘a man possessed with a hot temper and enormous strength’.

It was all lies. Huddie’s best friends never saw him drunk and insisted he didn’t start trouble, adding: ‘He loved children and he loved people.’ His wife described him as a gentle man. What makes him exceptional is that his musical brilliance survived 11 years within the most brutal prisons in the US. Three prisoners died in the chain gang of which he was part in May 1932. Whippings were frequent, on bare skin with leather straps; three blows were enough to break the skin, most prisoners screaming by the sixth or seventh blow.

It says much about his strength of mind that, despite such terrors, he applied to the state governor for a pardon – granted in August 1934. But then this was a man of exceptional quality. He stored in his head countless songs which, over the course of the next century, would permeate the culture. ‘Midnight Special’ has been covered by Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Abba, among many others; ‘Goodnight, Irene’ by Tom Waits, Ry Cooder, Bryan Ferry, Rod Stewart and Nick Cave.

Bernard aims to demonstrate the extent to which Ledbetter was a victim of a racist legal system and, when he was released from prison, of an exploitative manager who deprived him of all but the barest means of existence. She has written a revelatory volume that rescues its subject from misconceptions that still circulate, enabling us to see more clearly a composer and performer who was the peer of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Bessie Smith, who both performed with him.

But this is a work of academic research which most readers will find difficult, disjointed and hard to navigate. That is hardly Bernard’s fault – her book is designed for the specialists who will make use of her 40 pages of annotations and the five-page list of sources. It’s easy to imagine a life of Lead Belly from birth to death which tells the story of how a young man with an irrepressible musical gift found his life derailed by a series of rigged trials in a racist country and later went on to become a widely admired singer and composer. Perhaps Bernard’s book will encourage someone to commission it.