Sheila Curran Bernard – Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly’s Truths from Jim Crow’s Lies

In Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly’s Truths from Jim Crow’s Lies, Sheila Curran Bernard has penned a stunning rebuttal of the mythology surrounding American music legend Lead Belly that reveals painful details about America’s racial history.

Known worldwide as Lead Belly, Huddie Ledbetter (1889–1949) is an American icon whose influence on modern music was tremendous – as was, according to legend, the temper that landed him in two of the South’s most brutal prisons, while his immense talent twice won him pardons. But, as this deeply researched book shows, these stories were shaped by the white folklorists who ‘discovered’ Lead Belly and, along with reporters, recording executives, and radio and film producers, introduced him to audiences beyond the South. Through a revelatory examination of arrest, trial, and prison records; sharecropping reports; oral histories; newspaper articles; and more, the author replaces myth with fact, offering a stunning indictment of systemic racism in the Jim Crow era of the United States and the power of narrative to erase and distort the past.

Sheila Curran Bernard is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, author, and educator. The recipient of an NEH Public Scholars award, she is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University at Albany, State University of New York. (Full disclosure: Sheila is also NWPL librarian Liza Bernard’s sister!)

“A beautiful tribute to Lead Belly’s legacy. This book will forever change the way we think about one of America’s most iconic musical legends and one of its most misunderstood.” — Talitha L. LeFlouria, author of Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South

“Sheila Curran Bernard is the first to give us a biographical book on Huddie Ledbetter as he really was: a complicated man tactically negotiating a complex, racist, and overwhelmingly unforgiving world.” — Gustavus Stadler, author of Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life

+++

Co-hosted by the Yankee Bookshop, this event is free and open to the public. Books will be available for purchase and signing. Registration is appreciated but not required. Please email Programs@NormanWilliams.org for more information.