Your average pre-war blues picker confined himself to the passions and difficulties of the life immediately before him, often singing of crushing slave-labor conditions and the bad choices that often followed that hard day’s work.
Not Lead Belly. Witness “Princess Elizabeth,” a song celebrating the 1947 wedding of a future monarch to Prince Philip, an event that was both literally and figuratively a world away from the piney woods of Huddie Ledbetter’s life in the Deep South.
Almost seven decades later, Princess Elizabeth has, of course, become Elizabeth II — Queen of England since 1952. Even her long-ago coronation, however, found Lead Belly sadly gone, the victim of Lou Gehrig’s disease. “Princess Elizabeth” (then, as now, an unadorned, 12-string-driven celebration of matrimonial pageantry) seemed lost to the ages — until now.
The forthcoming Lead Belly: The Smithsonian-Folkways Collection, a five-disc, 108-track collection due on February 24, 2015, includes “Princess Elizabeth” as one of more than dozen previously unheard tracks. Also included is a sumptuous book dotted with photographs, and archivist Jeff Place’s thoughts on compiling this important set.
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It’s a modern sounding melody for the 40s – like a 60s pop tune. His song “We’re In The Same Boat Brother” shows how Leadbelly could compose in a mid-century folky idiom, as well as save so much music from the days of his childhood and probably earlier.