
Leadbelly. 1976. USA. Directed by Gordon Parks. Screenplay by Ernest Kinoy. With Roger E. Mosley, Paul Benjamin, Madge Sinclair. DCP. 126 min.
Posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame almost 40 years after his death, Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter was “discovered” in Angola Penitentiary (named after a slave plantation in Louisiana) when folklorist/musicologists John and Alan Lomax recorded a selection of his blues and folk renditions, helping spread a voice that would influence artists such as Kurt Cobain, Led Zeppelin, and Janis Joplin. The 12-string guitar virtuoso would end up touring Europe before his premature death, but his life—as beautifully sung in his recordings and depicted in Gordon Parks’s biopic—was a story of survival and resistance against the white supremacy and Jim Crow laws that took every inch of his freedom, but could not extinguish his legendary music.