Speaker 1: Cools Media.
Speaker 2: Hello, and welcome to Cool People. Did Cool Stuff? Your
Speaker 2: weekly reminder that people do really fucking cool stuff.
Speaker 3: It's in the title of the show.
Speaker 2: I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy and my guest today man,
Speaker 2: my returning guest. One of the first guests I've ever
Speaker 2: had on this show is Jason Petty aka prop aka Propaganda.
Speaker 4: Hey, tell me something good. Yeah, yeah, come on, tell
Speaker 4: me that you love me. Kill Joy.
Speaker 1: I love you.
Speaker 3: Oh, I love you, Sophia.
Speaker 2: I am so excited. I changed topics yesterday. I have
Speaker 2: like basically not slept. I'm kind of manic right now
Speaker 2: because I changed topics about thirty six hours ago, and
Speaker 2: I read an entire history book as well as a
Speaker 2: whole bunch of other texts in order to do this.
Speaker 3: Oh oh, but it's gonna be worth it. I believe it. Manna.
Speaker 4: You're gonna tell me about some sort of horrible atrocity
Speaker 4: that is gonna get me so sad, And then there's
Speaker 4: gonna be a turn, because there's gonna be a really
Speaker 4: dope person that's gonna pop in and lead us to freedom.
Speaker 2: Honestly, yeah, this was gonna happen. Yeah, And I also
Speaker 2: figured it's been a minute since I've had a musician
Speaker 2: as a guest, and so I thought I'd do an
Speaker 2: episode about music. Oh man, Originally, originally I was gonna
Speaker 2: cover this man, Alan Lomax. Have you ever heard of
Speaker 2: Alan Lomax?
Speaker 3: No, help me out.
Speaker 2: All right, he is the guy who recorded folk musicians.
Speaker 2: He's a white guy who went down and recorded folk musicians,
Speaker 2: especially black musicians in the South. And he's like kind
Speaker 2: of caused the folk revival and did all the shit,
Speaker 2: and like rock and roll exists because of Alan Lomax,
Speaker 2: according to various people. Okay, but along the way, I
Speaker 2: was realizing I was covering about how when he was
Speaker 2: seventeen and he was with his dad, he went and
Speaker 2: recorded a prisoner went by the name of Led Belly.
Speaker 3: Oh, Led Belly is a different story, and.
Speaker 2: That is the better story. So this week, yes, okay,
Speaker 2: hard covering Honey Ledbetter.
Speaker 4: I'm a little I'm a little familiar with this one. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 4: I thought you might be. Yeah, all right.
Speaker 2: Led Belly is the king of the twelve string guitar
Speaker 2: and one of the most influential musicians in American history yep,
Speaker 2: and also one of the most maligned people in American history,
Speaker 2: like the way his story is told. A bunch of
Speaker 2: white people did a lot of fucking myth making about him. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and they were not polite.
Speaker 3: When they did it.
Speaker 2: But I forgot to introduce with Sophie's here. Hey Sophie,
Speaker 2: I'm here.
Speaker 3: Return of.
Speaker 1: I'm here, I'm here.
Speaker 2: I'm so excited to do this, Like I feel like
Speaker 2: this is like first year cool We blue did cool stuff.
Speaker 2: Oh Man, almost uncomplicated. He is a complicated man, but
Speaker 2: less complicated. I'm like uncomplicating him from history instead of
Speaker 2: more complicating than from history.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: You know what's crazy is first year of cool people.
Speaker 1: You didn't have a dog. Rop didn't have a dog,
Speaker 1: and I only had one dog.
Speaker 2: Right, I had a puppy. I had a tiny barkie puppy.
Speaker 2: First year, I.
Speaker 5: Definitely didn't have a Okay, you did not have your
Speaker 5: pug and I did not have Truman.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: True.
Speaker 2: There is twice as many dogs in this room as
Speaker 2: there was when we started.
Speaker 1: That's what I'm saying. The stats are great.
Speaker 3: This is a glow up. Yeah.
Speaker 4: What I love about what you're about to do is
Speaker 4: one of the things that is infuriating is that.
Speaker 3: The word infuriating.
Speaker 4: Infuriating makes me furious is when there's this myth making. Obviously,
Speaker 4: all stories have a perspective and an agenda, like you're
Speaker 4: trying to accomplish something, and when it happens in history,
Speaker 4: you know, the obvious ones are like, well, either trying
Speaker 4: to usurp or present power. You know, yeah, totally right.
Speaker 4: But then the real story be so much more interesting.
Speaker 4: And if you just tell the real story, it's so
Speaker 4: much more compelling than the shit you ate up. And
Speaker 4: and oftentimes you making it up makes it so obvious
Speaker 4: what Joe problem was. And now you look silly. Yeah,
Speaker 4: you know, especially in music. But it's just like you
Speaker 4: just you're white supremacists and you just want to believe
Speaker 4: that everything you make is better, but you stole it all.
Speaker 2: Well, what's what's wild about this story is that they
Speaker 2: are blatant about the theft. If you go back far enough,
Speaker 2: it's like when early colonists came to white the colonists
Speaker 2: came to North America and we're like, well, of course
Speaker 2: this used to be yours, but it's mine now I
Speaker 2: took it from you. That's what people did to this man.
Speaker 4: Yes today, why submitted for the tap in episode, we're
Speaker 4: talking about the Hanna Nashoni and Red Jackets letter, and
Speaker 4: Benjamin Franklin goes, Yeah, their democracy is better than ours.
Speaker 4: We should model at democracy after theirs. They figured out
Speaker 4: how to have a representative government.
Speaker 3: We should just do what they did.
Speaker 2: Like you, I wish we had, or even better, I
Speaker 2: wish people just fucking joined them. Yeah, that's what he
Speaker 2: left them in charge. We should have just joined him.
Speaker 3: They figured it out. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Huddy led better because he actually his stage
Speaker 2: name was Led Belly with a space in it, but
Speaker 2: he he preferred going by Huddy, and sometimes his friends
Speaker 2: would call him Led, but his name wasn't Led Belly,
Speaker 2: that was his stage name. His story gets into so
Speaker 2: much shit and specifically, I'm sure there's versions of this
Speaker 2: that have happened before, but this is the earliest I
Speaker 2: have read about the making and methodologizing of the scary black.
Speaker 3: Man an American culture.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and some of the like early incredible depths of
Speaker 2: appropriation of black music. One that I can tie into
Speaker 2: both colonization and slavery more directly than I realized. Like
Speaker 2: I can basically say, like this is how a sharecropper
Speaker 2: got share cropped on music. Yes, yes, yes.
Speaker 4: Knowing how this story ends makes me go, yeah, that's
Speaker 4: an incredible Yeah, it's an incredible analysis.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I'm really excited this story has. I mean,
Speaker 2: he dies at sixty, right, but he fucking he makes it,
Speaker 2: and he makes it through the worst shit, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And I could be overly polite and say mainstream culture
Speaker 2: has always been downstream of Black American culture, but in
Speaker 2: Huddy's case, the kid of a Confederate soldier is going
Speaker 2: to hire him without paying him and use him to
Speaker 2: try and get copyright on as many black songs as possible,
Speaker 2: especially songs written by prisoners who are being essentially enslaved
Speaker 2: because during after Reconstruction with the Jim Crow laws, they
Speaker 2: were like, how do we make black men keep working
Speaker 2: for us for free?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: And so I'm gonna go with my colonization metaphor, even
Speaker 2: though the like downstream of black culture is also.
Speaker 3: Part of it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, but I want to start. Do you know
Speaker 2: a Huddy Ledbetter as the first person we have a
Speaker 2: recording of saying explicitly and directly stay woke.
Speaker 4: No, I knew it was like great grandfather's slaying, Like
Speaker 4: my great grandfather said it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's old as fun.
Speaker 3: It's so old. But I didn't know he was the
Speaker 3: first one. That's crazy.
Speaker 2: We're gonna do a whole Okay, we're gonna start with
Speaker 2: stay woke because this is a Yes, this is my
Speaker 2: first deep dive, even before we get to the rest
Speaker 2: of it. All right, Marcus Garvey returning character of the
Speaker 2: pod founder of Pan Africanism and the red, black.
Speaker 3: And Green flag.
Speaker 2: Yeah, complicated figure from a lot of people's point of view,
Speaker 2: but for sure, really fucking interesting. And I eineteen twenty
Speaker 2: three he wrote a book of aphorisms. He was like,
Speaker 2: these are some sayings I like, and one of them
Speaker 2: was wake up Ethiopia, wake Up Africa. And so that's
Speaker 2: the oldest that people point to about like this idea of.
Speaker 3: That's where I point out is market Yeah, totally and
Speaker 3: that phrasing it clearly means be woke. Right.
Speaker 2: But in nineteen thirty eight Led Belly said it for
Speaker 2: the first time on a recording and he said he's
Speaker 2: talking about the Scottsboro Boys. When we talked about that
Speaker 2: in a second, he said, quote, I advise everybody be
Speaker 2: a little careful best, stay woke, keep their eyes open.
Speaker 3: Dang, I didn't know him.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I just don't remember great Grant granting him. You
Speaker 4: got to you gotta stay woke, young brother, you gotta
Speaker 4: stay woke. Yeah, hey, okay.
Speaker 2: And it's so funny because it's like it's now the
Speaker 2: fucking culture Warship one hundred years later.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, literally redefined and used as a weapon
Speaker 4: against us so fresh. We should have never like conceited
Speaker 4: the definition. And now this is where we are.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, any.
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, totally and and honestly, I frankly think a
Speaker 2: big part of that is because like white, well meaning
Speaker 2: lefty people started using it one ironically, Like I think
Speaker 2: that's part of how it broke containment.
Speaker 3: And I'm not I don't know.
Speaker 2: I'm actually gonna talk about how that happened in the
Speaker 2: sixties in a second, okay, but first the Scottsboro Boys.
Speaker 2: I hate to start off with this, just like, fucking
Speaker 2: here's some racist shit that happened. Because this is what
Speaker 2: Ledbetter was talking about. I think it's useful framing, especially
Speaker 2: when we're going to talk about what happened to Ledbetter
Speaker 2: was that he got called basically like the scary, violent,
Speaker 2: savage black man who happens to be really good at music. Yeah,
Speaker 2: you know, yeah, the Scottsboro Boys. Some people call it
Speaker 2: the case the lead of the civil rights movement. You
Speaker 2: could say that about a lot of cases, because there
Speaker 2: was a lot of things yas shit. Yeah, And it
Speaker 2: started with racist hobos and I didn't know that part.
Speaker 2: Nineteen thirty one is kind of the peak hobo era.
Speaker 2: In the Great Depression, people rode freight trains around illegally
Speaker 2: trying to find jobs. My granddad was a hobo in
Speaker 2: the nineteen thirties. It's March nineteen thirty one, and it's Alabama,
Speaker 2: and there's a box car with like twenty something people
Speaker 2: in it. Nine of them were black teenagers aged thirteen
Speaker 2: to nineteen, and some white boys picked a fight with
Speaker 2: the black kids and lost.
Speaker 3: They lost that fight. They lost. They were run out
Speaker 3: of the box car.
Speaker 2: And if you're a fucking hobo, you're not supposed to
Speaker 2: fucking lose a fight and then go run off and
Speaker 2: tell the fucking cops, the police. Yeah, fuck you pick
Speaker 2: a side, are you crime or not?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: They ran out of the box car, went off to
Speaker 2: tell the cops, and an angry mob was waiting for
Speaker 2: the train. At the next stop, teens were arrested for assault.
Speaker 2: But there were two white women in the box car
Speaker 2: two and they were also hoboeing looking for work, so
Speaker 2: presumably sex work. And the two were going to get
Speaker 2: arrested and charged with vagrancy and like solicitation and sex
Speaker 2: crime shit, And they were like, oh, no, those black
Speaker 2: teenagers absolutely raped us, that's what happened. Yeah, And they
Speaker 2: were rushed off to the doctor who found no evidence
Speaker 2: that that happened, just absolutely none. The only evidence in
Speaker 2: this case was these two women. That's the only evidence.
Speaker 2: All but the youngest of the black teens was sentenced
Speaker 2: to death. The all white jury actually wanted to sence
Speaker 2: the thirteen year old to death, but the judge was
Speaker 2: a softy and only wanted to put everyone.
Speaker 3: Else to death.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this became a national issue. The International Labor Defense,
Speaker 2: which was the legal wing of the American Communist Party,
Speaker 2: teamed up with the NAACP to fight for their defense.
Speaker 2: And it's kind of a thing that doesn't get talked
Speaker 2: about that a lot of the early Basically, the NAACP
Speaker 2: and like the Communist Party were like two of the
Speaker 2: biggest organizations in.
Speaker 3: The twenties and thirties.
Speaker 2: Yeah, fighting for like what later became the civil rights movement.
Speaker 2: And eventually the convictions were overturned, but not before some
Speaker 2: of these people were sentenced four different times. Like they
Speaker 2: kept getting new trials and they kept being like, well,
Speaker 2: you got a new trial, but we still want to
Speaker 2: kill these kids.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: They were imprisoned for decades, and even when their rape
Speaker 2: charges would get overturned in the end, they'd still be
Speaker 2: in prison for like fighting a bailift during all the bullshit.
Speaker 2: It wasn't until fucking twenty thirteen that they were posthumorously pardoned.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Man, I got a lot of thoughts, but yeah, yeah,
Speaker 3: we have these.
Speaker 4: Flashpoints in culture and then you get invited to like
Speaker 4: help their leadership team of some organization, company, religious parachurch, whatever.
Speaker 3: Process and like get woke if you will. Yeah, and
Speaker 3: then you're like, I don't even know where.
Speaker 4: To start, because just throw a rock in any decade
Speaker 4: and there's this and then you say, okay, you asked
Speaker 4: me a question like well, why don't you just call
Speaker 4: the police?
Speaker 3: Why don't you trust the justice system, And it's like.
Speaker 2: Yeah, pattern recognition. Yeah, because of pattern.
Speaker 4: Pattern recognition, I saw I learned, and some I learned
Speaker 4: in therapy with with like couple's therapy, which is like yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: your your partner doesn't trust your emotions or your words,
Speaker 4: they trust your patterns.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 4: Until you change the patterns, the nervous system isn't going
Speaker 4: you know what I'm saying, So like it's it's it's
Speaker 4: pattern I mean, because I got jumped, we dog walk
Speaker 4: these dudes who attacked us. Yeah, and and these white
Speaker 4: white women saw it. Yeah, white women, Yes, you saw it.
Speaker 4: So why you think we won't trust white women. I'm like, well, you.
Speaker 2: Saw this, Yeah, you saw all that happen.
Speaker 3: You saw all this happen.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: And the judge said, I think these little boys is innocent.
Speaker 3: I don't know what's going on.
Speaker 4: Oh but you gotta I gotta wait, I gotta go back,
Speaker 4: Like okay, so but I'm still you you found me
Speaker 4: innocent multiple times.
Speaker 2: How am I still in jail?
Speaker 3: Yeah? I don't understand how I'm still in jail.
Speaker 2: Yeah, well it's because you punched someone while you were
Speaker 2: being put in a cage for something you didn't do.
Speaker 2: So yes, so excuse me, yeah.
Speaker 3: For not trusting the system?
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah, yeah, and so when fucking Honey Ledbetter in
Speaker 2: nineteen thirty eight, he says, stay woke. It means keep
Speaker 2: your fucking wits about you. Remember that you live in
Speaker 2: a fucking racist society, and remember that they're fucking after you. Yes,
Speaker 2: and he said it as one of the most important
Speaker 2: musicians of his era. By the time, he said nineteen
Speaker 2: thirty eight, he is one of the most important musicians. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and he had experienced racism in the South, but also
Speaker 2: from the very fucking white people who are ostensibly helping
Speaker 2: and build his career. Yeah, but I want to keep
Speaker 2: tracing this woke thing just because it's a fascinating please
Speaker 2: do and the.
Speaker 4: Thing is too like I like, please don't use your
Speaker 4: train of thought because it's so important. But like specifically
Speaker 4: as a musician and as myself as a black musician,
Speaker 4: I mean up until very recently, and I would even
Speaker 4: argue even currently, like all black music is political. Yeah,
Speaker 4: like it's it's it's all a protest, even if it's
Speaker 4: just for fun.
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying, Like that the fun is
Speaker 3: a protest. Yeah, you know.
Speaker 4: Like so it's just like our tradition is like the
Speaker 4: hip hop it's from the same stream that we're talking
Speaker 4: about right now. It's like, yeah, absolutely, it's all political, like, yeah,
Speaker 4: I don't know what to tell you anyway, go on, yeah, well.
Speaker 2: No, I mean even like I don't want to like
Speaker 2: go hard defending Marcus Garvey. Right, But one of the
Speaker 2: reasons that Marcus Garvey, because sometimes I guess a lot
Speaker 2: of shit is is I'm going to oversimplify things, get
Speaker 2: something's wrong. He was more of a proponent of black
Speaker 2: capitalism than most of the people by the late sixties
Speaker 2: who are interested in black power.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Right, But trying to build wealth looks really fucking different
Speaker 2: when you're having your wealth systematically stripped away.
Speaker 3: From you every time you get it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, everything is either reinforcing power structures, are trying to
Speaker 2: build new ones, you know.
Speaker 4: Totally, and then what are you going to do? Like
Speaker 4: you like, okay, so we're going to go back to Africa.
Speaker 4: You mean, the second largest land mass on the planet.
Speaker 3: What part are you from? I don't know, it was
Speaker 3: part of you from?
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 4: I think my ancestors was from these four different tribes.
Speaker 4: Now that's a nation. Somebody is because the people drew
Speaker 4: a line.
Speaker 3: Nobody drew a line.
Speaker 4: So like, I think, I don't know when I left,
Speaker 4: we weren't Nigerian.
Speaker 3: Because there was no sustinct as Nigeria.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, totally, we were Igbo. And now like, so
Speaker 4: where are we going to go? I don't know, Yeah,
Speaker 4: go to I'll hear you like, yeah, let's go there.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah. So the word hipster kind of originally means white
Speaker 2: person trying to be black. Okay, in the middle of
Speaker 2: the twentieth century, that's how it was being used.
Speaker 3: Basically, I didn't know that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a fuck. I like cited this properly. In
Speaker 2: episode like two years ago, a black author from I
Speaker 2: think the nineteen forties was talking about the BEATNICKX was
Speaker 2: talking about this.
Speaker 3: Either way, that's dope.
Speaker 2: And so the word hippie comes from that, right, It
Speaker 2: comes from people who are like, like, white people are
Speaker 2: trying to be cool because like, yeah, black people are cool.
Speaker 2: I don't know if you knew that.
Speaker 3: I'm sure that no one's ever put that on you. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I don't put that on you before. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Although in their defense, most people we call hippies didn't
Speaker 2: call themselves hippies.
Speaker 3: They called themselves freaks.
Speaker 2: But black authors were very aware of how white people
Speaker 2: were copying their style and their language in order to
Speaker 2: be hip.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So there's this piece from nineteen sixty two in New
Speaker 2: York Times Max magazine from a black author named William
Speaker 2: Mellon Kelly about appropriation. Doesn't use that word. It's about appropriation,
Speaker 2: and it's called if you're woke, you dig it, And
Speaker 2: it doesn't bother saying what woke means in this piece
Speaker 2: that's called that, it just assumed that the audience is
Speaker 2: familiar with woke as black slang.
Speaker 3: You absolutely know what we mean, Yeah.
Speaker 2: That white people are starting to use. And in it
Speaker 2: he conjectures that a lot of black slang started with
Speaker 2: slaves speaking code to confuse the white slavers. He says, quote,
Speaker 2: my grandmother told me that ofe, a word for white man,
Speaker 2: was foe in pig Latin.
Speaker 4: Yeah probably, Yeah, like, no, I don't have another argument,
Speaker 4: you know, Yeah, totally.
Speaker 2: It also gets into how black use of the Southern
Speaker 2: accent survived the Great migration of black people leaving the
Speaker 2: South in part to be able to maintain a cultural
Speaker 2: identity separate from whiteness when they went places. And it
Speaker 2: talks about code switching, doesn't use the word code switching,
Speaker 2: but it like talks about code switching is the thing
Speaker 2: I've read about that. Okay, But there's one piece in there,
Speaker 2: one bit of slang or a verbal mannerism. I guess
Speaker 2: that I had no idea came from black culture. I
Speaker 2: will never be surprised when something comes from black culture.
Speaker 2: But that's one I didn't know. Do you know the
Speaker 2: word using using the word like it's like punctuation.
Speaker 3: Yes, from black people?
Speaker 6: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Oh god, see I didn't know that either.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: No, I was goa pulls.
Speaker 4: I got a few I could pull out of, like
Speaker 4: out the tank, like like yeah, well, everybody puts your
Speaker 4: hands together. That's from Harlem Renaissance. That's shit black people.
Speaker 4: That's our slang with hands together. But yeah, I didn't know,
Speaker 4: like what was one of them?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 2: The uh the example he uses two white women taught
Speaker 2: walking out of the like Boston Symphony, and one of
Speaker 2: them says to the other, wasn't it like exhilarating nineteen
Speaker 2: sixty two? Everybody?
Speaker 1: Wow?
Speaker 3: Oh man, these jab percys.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yes, so woke hit a more wide audience, including
Speaker 2: a wider black audience, as I understand from what I've
Speaker 2: read in the late aunts and early teens. In two
Speaker 2: thousand and eight, Erica Badu saying I'd stay woke in
Speaker 2: the song Master Teacher.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: In twenty twelve, she tweeted stay Woke in support of
Speaker 2: the band Pussy Riot from Russia.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 2: Then it got hashtagged and response to the murder of
Speaker 2: Trayvon Martin and Florida yep. Then when cops and ferguson
Speaker 2: Missouri murdered Michael Brown in twenty fourteen, became associated with
Speaker 2: the Black Lives Matter movement, and then it became a
Speaker 2: right wing boogey man, especially after the twenty twenty Uprising.
Speaker 4: But I would even say, even to your point, even
Speaker 4: to that, like if you woke, you could dig it. Yeah,
Speaker 4: is this understanding that we already knew it? Admitt Yeah.
Speaker 4: So even from that first song of Erica singing that, right,
Speaker 4: we all thought of our dads. Yeah, Like she's like,
Speaker 4: she's talking the way our dad's talked.
Speaker 3: So she was already referencing our old hits. Yeah. So
Speaker 3: we just thought as like, oh, yeah, you married, you
Speaker 3: bring them back.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like you're bringing it back.
Speaker 4: So we was all ready for us a reclaiming of
Speaker 4: sixties black slang.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so it already wasn't We didn't invent it.
Speaker 4: We knew we didn't invent this phrase, right, right, so
Speaker 4: like we knew we were again Yeah, we were referencing
Speaker 4: our grandparents.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, Well do you know what our grandparents also
Speaker 2: had to deal with in the middle of their audio entertainment,
Speaker 2: I mean got to got to deal with in the
Speaker 2: middle of their audio entertainment advertisers.
Speaker 3: All right, much like these ones.
Speaker 2: And we're back, all right. And so the first quote
Speaker 2: stay woke we have on a recording is the blue
Speaker 2: singer named led Belly you preferred to go by Hoddy
Speaker 2: or sometimes just lead.
Speaker 3: And let's talk about him. Let's talk about him, honey.
Speaker 2: Led Better was born probably on January twentieth, eighteen eighty nine.
Speaker 2: You get back into the nineteenth century of poor folks,
Speaker 2: especially poor folks of color.
Speaker 4: Yeah, good, look, you do your best. Yeah, it's also
Speaker 4: a survival tactic. Side note, Oh, honestly, that makes sense. Yeah,
Speaker 4: it's a survival tactic to be like No I was No.
Speaker 4: I was born in eighteen twenty six in Negative Louisiana.
Speaker 3: You know, yes, making up stuff yet.
Speaker 2: No, No, honestly, that makes a lot of sense because
Speaker 2: he's later at some point gonna he's gonna break out
Speaker 2: of prison and change his name, which.
Speaker 3: Is pretty cool.
Speaker 2: Yeah you could do that. Yeah, Yeah, You're just gonna
Speaker 2: make some shit up when you do that, you know.
Speaker 3: Yep.
Speaker 2: And eighteen eighty nine is a rough time to be
Speaker 2: born black in Louisiana. Woo reconstruction is firmly over, and
Speaker 2: the air of Jim Crow has begun.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: His parents were Wesley Ledbetter Junior from North Carolina and
Speaker 2: Sally Pooh led Better from Louisiana. They'd both been born
Speaker 2: into slavery and wound up sharecroppers as kids, and after
Speaker 2: Hodey was born, they adopted a girl named Australia whose
Speaker 2: parents had died, and I think they had more kids
Speaker 2: besides this as well. Nineteenth century names, especially, honestly, names
Speaker 2: from black culture will be like, yeah, just not names
Speaker 2: you here.
Speaker 3: Yeah Australia. Okay, that's pretty crazy.
Speaker 4: I was like, yeah, yeah, never thought about a name
Speaker 4: and a child Australia.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And his parents they they bootstrapped themselves. I know,
Speaker 2: the whole phrase bootstrap, like picking yourself up by your bootstraps.
Speaker 2: The whole point is that that's impossible. Yeah, you know,
Speaker 2: but his parents did about as well as anyone in
Speaker 2: their position could. Yeah, and they did that with help
Speaker 2: of infrastructure built by and for black people about getting.
Speaker 4: Land, yeah, because reconstruction was working. Yeah, like that was
Speaker 4: the it was actually working.
Speaker 3: So yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I sometimes get really really upset when I think about,
Speaker 2: like we like almost I'm sure it wouldn't have been perfect.
Speaker 2: We almost had as racial America, Like.
Speaker 4: We kind of solved it, like we accidentally solved the problem.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, and then people realized that they like could
Speaker 2: just break the law in order to fucking oppress black
Speaker 2: people and know, yeah, oh city worked.
Speaker 3: Yeah you better. We gotta put the genie back into
Speaker 3: bottle guys.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah. Oh and that's what happens to his parents too, unfortunately,
Speaker 2: Like but like all right, we'll get to that.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: So a black man that they knew a family friend
Speaker 2: had just moved to Texas and bought thousands of acres.
Speaker 2: The historian I read didn't know where the hell that
Speaker 2: person got the money. My guess just from doing the
Speaker 2: show too much around that time, and in that part
Speaker 2: of Texas, like the Texas Louisiana kind of area, The
Speaker 2: Colored Farmers Alliance was a really powerful movement that specifically
Speaker 2: existed to get land into black people's hands by like
Speaker 2: loaning them money right and doing it non exploitatively.
Speaker 3: And it was like a black lead movement.
Speaker 2: That's my best guess about where this person might have
Speaker 2: gotten the money, and that farmer immediately now it was
Speaker 2: thousands of acres isn't going to work?
Speaker 3: Thousands of acres?
Speaker 2: Yeah, immediately let the leadbetters come and share crop for him,
Speaker 2: but without ripping them off, because part of the reason
Speaker 2: the sharecropping system was so fucked up is it was
Speaker 2: just basically like how exploitative can we make these contracts?
Speaker 3: Yeah? You know.
Speaker 2: And so it helps his parents buy sixty eight and
Speaker 2: a half acres of land on a seven year loan.
Speaker 2: They finished paying it off seven years and they were
Speaker 2: able to build themselves a decent life.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, that's way shorter an average mortgage.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: I was like, must be nice. Yeah, like seven years
Speaker 3: were okay?
Speaker 2: Yeah for sixty eight and a half acres.
Speaker 3: Yeah, my kid's a second grader. I paid off the house.
Speaker 3: It's great.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, totally. They're like, all right, now we fucking
Speaker 2: raised most of our own food, and they live somewhere
Speaker 2: where there's like no white people in twenty miles and
Speaker 2: like MT's be nice. Yeah, now he ledbetter, had a
Speaker 2: nice childhood by what he says, like they worked hard
Speaker 2: as fuck.
Speaker 3: His parents were.
Speaker 2: Waking up at one or two in the morning to
Speaker 2: clear land for farming, but they lived twenty miles from
Speaker 2: the nearest white people. They got to do their own
Speaker 2: thing with a bunch of other black families in the region,
Speaker 2: and they rode five miles to get the mail once
Speaker 2: a week, and they read the newspaper. When his father
Speaker 2: had been married, he hadn't been able to sign his
Speaker 2: own name. He did an ex and was like witnessed
Speaker 2: by somebody, you know. But now he read everything that
Speaker 2: he could, and the local shopkeeper kept the whole week's
Speaker 2: worth of papers for him. So cool, so when he
Speaker 2: would show up, he'd be like, all right, I gotta
Speaker 2: read everything, gotta know everything.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The family would fish in the lake, play music on
Speaker 2: the shore, and just lived fucking decent lives despite poverty.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Two of his uncles were somewhat renowned musicians in the area.
Speaker 2: What were called songsters, which is a word I hadn't
Speaker 2: run across before. Yeah, these are the local folks who
Speaker 2: could entertain people. Yeah, no recordings, You're like, who can
Speaker 2: plays a nice songs? Two songsters in the family, Yeah,
Speaker 2: sing a song, singing man Yeah yeah. And later in
Speaker 2: life people are going to play up just basically like
Speaker 2: this is not the word they used, but they just
Speaker 2: played up how gangster led belly was right. They're like
Speaker 2: the whole thing was basically like they're accusing of being
Speaker 2: of him at being gangster rap before that was a thing. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And he's a violent man. He's mean and angry and dangerous.
Speaker 2: And to spoil some of the ending, when he dies,
Speaker 2: people come out and talk about him and they're like,
Speaker 2: he was an incredibly common, peaceful man who de escalated
Speaker 2: so many fights and if you punched him, he'd fucking
Speaker 2: stab you. Yeah, like, yeah, he believed in self defense.
Speaker 2: He's a country boy. He just a country boy child
Speaker 2: of a sharecropper. Yeah, who used to play.
Speaker 3: At the lake.
Speaker 4: But I beat you ass if you like, yeah, like,
Speaker 4: which is what you want all your sons to be?
Speaker 2: No, I know this is like yeah, Like I reading
Speaker 2: about it, I'm like, yeah, all right, Like fuck absolutely,
Speaker 2: like this is absolutely a decent role model, like in
Speaker 2: his earlier life if he could have been more committed
Speaker 2: to the women he was with. But like there's that,
Speaker 2: you know whatever, not anyway, whatever, Yeah, yeah, and who
Speaker 2: doesn't want to be dangerous to the people who are
Speaker 2: dangerous to us?
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 2: Yes, Like honestly, that's one of the main things I
Speaker 2: talk about with like trans shit is I'm like, I'm like, yeah, no,
Speaker 2: I try not to be afraid.
Speaker 3: I try to be scary. That's my plan, you know.
Speaker 4: Yes, there's a phrase in the streets which is like
Speaker 4: stay dangerous where it's just like I need you like
Speaker 4: that is my Yeah, my greatest tool of defense is
Speaker 4: to seem dangerous.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yes, I remember once I was in this I was
Speaker 2: taking this martial arts class. I was very classed differently
Speaker 2: than everyone else in this class, and one of the
Speaker 2: you know, people are like, oh, how do you stay
Speaker 2: safe or whatever? And I was like, oh, when people
Speaker 2: like you know, call me slurs on the street, I
Speaker 2: pull a knife. And to be clear anyone who's listening
Speaker 2: to this, I never did that. That would have been illegal.
Speaker 2: But theoretically what I would have done if someone caused me,
Speaker 2: you know, caused me a fagot.
Speaker 3: Is like pull a knife on them.
Speaker 2: And they were like, they were like, well, what do
Speaker 2: you do if they come after you? And I was like,
Speaker 2: oh no, then I run like first, I'm really scare them.
Speaker 2: I'm not gonna get in a knife fight. That's dumb.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's very it's very inefficient. Too.
Speaker 2: Was like that's called front and I was like, yeah,
Speaker 2: no that's what they did. It works really well. Yeah,
Speaker 2: that's exactly what it is. And then if they catch
Speaker 2: up with me, I fight. I never well whatever anyway, No, my.
Speaker 4: Friend's granddad used to say, a good run beats a
Speaker 4: bad stand any day.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so young Young soon to be led belly. He's
Speaker 2: a studious kid. He got to go to school until
Speaker 2: eighth grade, at which point he had to come home
Speaker 2: and work on the farm because there's work that needed doing.
Speaker 2: He was respectful and friendly, and his family fucking loved him,
Speaker 2: and he loved his family. And he was a musical prodigy.
Speaker 2: And so people are like, oh, he was just naturally talented. No,
Speaker 2: he worked his ass off. Yeah, like he sat by
Speaker 2: the fire and did the well. His first instrument was accordion.
Speaker 3: I didn't know that.
Speaker 2: Wow, yeah, no, his his family bought him an accordion,
Speaker 2: a wind jammer.
Speaker 3: He called it. One of the button accordions is diatonic
Speaker 3: instead of fully chromatic. Swahili, you just spoke to Swahili.
Speaker 2: But anyway, going, yeah, yeah, yeah, I used to play
Speaker 2: accordion on the street, so that's my I don't know
Speaker 2: what you just said, but I believe yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2: It doesn't play every note in the scale. It plays
Speaker 2: certain ones, and it's used much more in like creole
Speaker 2: music and all of that kind of stuff as compared
Speaker 2: to like French music, is like the bigger accordions.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So his cousin teaches him guitar when there's still little kids,
Speaker 2: and he is really good, and he sits by the
Speaker 2: fire and he does it over and over and over
Speaker 2: again until he gets it right. He loved dancing. He
Speaker 2: would tap dance for the family. Soon enough, as a
Speaker 2: young teen, he's getting asked to play all the local
Speaker 2: parties and at the school and all that shit. So
Speaker 2: he and his cousin, Edmund, the one who got him
Speaker 2: into guitar, they're playing Saturday nights out in the town,
Speaker 2: including at the white owned stores, and he starts bringing
Speaker 2: in money for folks, which I think it's still possible
Speaker 2: to make a living as a musician. But I don't
Speaker 2: know if you knew this prop it's hard.
Speaker 3: It's yeah, man, it's news to me. Man. I was, yeah,
Speaker 3: pretty crazy, man, I was really hard. Yeah.
Speaker 2: I remember the first timesode I gave me money for
Speaker 2: playing a show. I have been playing shows for like
Speaker 2: ten years. Someone was like, here's forty bucks, and I
Speaker 2: was like, holy shit.
Speaker 4: Wait what Yeah, he got in a drink ticket and
Speaker 4: gas money. You're like, oh, you're paying me for yeah?
Speaker 3: Wait it get to you to pay me for this.
Speaker 2: Yeah, as far as I can tell before, recorded music
Speaker 2: is everywhere actually a little easier. Yeah, Like you still
Speaker 2: have to be fucking good and you still have to
Speaker 2: work your ass off. But he's like fifteen and bringing
Speaker 2: in money for his family. Yeah, but his cousin drops out.
Speaker 2: His cousin is like, no, these parties are too wild.
Speaker 2: I'm not into the drinking and cussin. I like church.
Speaker 3: And so he stopped playing out and he became a deacon.
Speaker 3: Likely story, Harry Black story.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so Honey was on his own and he's traveling
Speaker 2: around on his horse booker, and he kept his horse immaculate.
Speaker 2: He would wash it down all the time. How glossy
Speaker 2: his horse was. Yeah know like we've been we've been
Speaker 2: cleaning our whibs.
Speaker 3: You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 2: They was horse.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you gotta keep it clean.
Speaker 2: Baby, Yeah. Oh yeah.
Speaker 5: No.
Speaker 2: Later he's like later in his life, he kind of
Speaker 2: yells at a younger musician. He's like, why are you
Speaker 2: playing dressed up? Like shit, you gotta wear a fucking suit.
Speaker 2: You gotta come do take your suit jacket off when
Speaker 2: you play. Oh man, you gotta come.
Speaker 3: Is this not fair?
Speaker 1: I'm turning red?
Speaker 3: Oh spooky like that. We've been cleaning our whips.
Speaker 4: Yeah, baby, you know you got candy paint.
Speaker 3: And you feel me.
Speaker 2: There's this Irish song, this Irish fucking rap band called
Speaker 2: the Rubber Band.
Speaker 3: That's their joke. They're like a joke band.
Speaker 2: But their song is like I got a horse outside,
Speaker 2: And it's like trying to pick up on a woman
Speaker 2: by being like leaving her like I think her mom's
Speaker 2: funeral and is like, no, I can't kick you in
Speaker 2: a car, but I got my horse outside.
Speaker 4: The horse outside. Yeah, what's that band that goes right
Speaker 4: itself in? In medieval times? They're like an uh Irish like
Speaker 4: rap group. They're like, uh, I wrote the whipping in
Speaker 4: medieval times. I signed up whipped bitch in the medieval times.
Speaker 4: It's all in the medieval times. It's pretty funny. Yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 4: anywhere you are.
Speaker 2: So young. Ledbetter is not afraid of the rough and
Speaker 2: tumble life. He is not like preferring church.
Speaker 6: He does.
Speaker 2: Actually he goes to church, I think his whole fucking life.
Speaker 2: But like this isn't like he doesn't mind he's playing
Speaker 2: in brothels when he is fifteen years old. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: his whole life. He particularly enjoys playing music for kids.
Speaker 2: He is like both wholesome and rough in every measure,
Speaker 2: and it's part of why he's so fascinating.
Speaker 3: Love it.
Speaker 4: And also every all the great, all the best musicians
Speaker 4: are at church, so like you got to go play there.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 2: No, And actually a lot of when they're later they're
Speaker 2: collecting songs from people. A lot of people are like, no,
Speaker 2: I'm not going to play secular music for you. Yeah,
Speaker 2: like yeah, like no, we play religious music. That's like
Speaker 2: it's weird. We played for church. We played for the church.
Speaker 2: It's all yeah, parties called Suki Jumps paid him fifty
Speaker 2: cents to play when he was fifteen, which is jumps.
Speaker 4: You're a suki jump, suki jem No, I've heard it
Speaker 4: all Suki suki Now.
Speaker 3: I heard that. I never heard of, right, suki.
Speaker 2: Jump, So suki jarre so ridiculous.
Speaker 1: I can't All right.
Speaker 2: This part is perfect. So first of all, fifty cents
Speaker 2: is about seventeen bucks. Yeah, okay, so it's not paying him. Incredible,
Speaker 2: but they're going to fifty so'll not getting paid. Okay,
Speaker 2: all right, I never heard of a suki jump, so
Speaker 2: I looked it up. Suki is old slang word for
Speaker 2: an enslaved person, s uk e y ooh. So a
Speaker 2: suki jump in the nineteenth century was a party by
Speaker 2: and for the enslaved people. Okay, so it's entire thing
Speaker 2: is this is the party for black people who are enslaved.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Now, I'm going to tell you something that is probably
Speaker 2: not going to shock you. The twenty first century band
Speaker 2: called the Suki Jump Band that I found while trying
Speaker 2: to look up suki jumps is all white people. Of
Speaker 2: course it is, Yeah, of course it is, at least
Speaker 2: by looking at the photos. Yeah, one of them is
Speaker 2: either not white or is just a white person dressed
Speaker 2: up like free to Callo, But no one is black
Speaker 2: in this picture, just.
Speaker 3: Like freed To.
Speaker 4: It might actually be Freeda. She had a wild life anyway,
Speaker 4: that's true.
Speaker 2: That's a good point. Yeah, no, yeah, But what you
Speaker 2: might be surprised to know about the Suki Jump Band
Speaker 2: is that the singer of the band is the actor
Speaker 2: who played George g Stanza's fiance on Seinfeld, the woman
Speaker 2: who dies from licking poles in the stamps.
Speaker 1: What wait, wait, wait.
Speaker 3: Okay, okay, we got to draw the band string for us.
Speaker 5: Yeah, you're gonna have to do that, and then I'm
Speaker 5: gonna need you to explain this to our mutual friend
Speaker 5: Sarah Marshall, because that will blow her mind.
Speaker 2: It has been a million years since I watched Seinfeld.
Speaker 2: There's this whole thing where George Castanza is like, I think,
Speaker 2: dating a lesbian and then she dies off screen from
Speaker 2: lick poisonous stamps and he like, I remember that, doesn't
Speaker 2: really care. The actor who played that woman is a
Speaker 2: folk musician who is the lead singer of the Suky
Speaker 2: Chup Band.
Speaker 3: That is the motion.
Speaker 1: Please tell Sarah about.
Speaker 2: Just please, specifically a word for enslaved people having dances
Speaker 2: like I'm not the first to cry appropriation. I do
Speaker 2: believe on some level, culture blends and bleeds into each other.
Speaker 2: But there's yeah, there's there's some borrowing, there's some fucking lines.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, there's some stuff that's like look, man, uh
Speaker 4: I listen, listen. I live in I'm married a first
Speaker 4: in Mexican woman, and I live in Nagelus. I live
Speaker 4: in I grew up in a almost an entirely Latino
Speaker 4: Mexican environment.
Speaker 2: I feel like that's why you dress up as free
Speaker 2: to CALLO.
Speaker 4: Yes, I feel like I got a lot of passes,
Speaker 4: and there are a lot of things that are okay,
Speaker 4: like dressing up like free to call No. I'm just
Speaker 4: like and even me with with biracial children, I just
Speaker 4: feel like there's pot city these conversations I just shouldn't
Speaker 4: be a part of. Yeah, And I'm like, I feel
Speaker 4: like I understand, like I'll get into the Mexico El
Speaker 4: Salvador thing like day little beef, especially when I'm like, Okay, well,
Speaker 4: your borders were drawn by the cognizers, so don't understand
Speaker 4: why y'all like each other.
Speaker 2: Right, totally.
Speaker 3: What that's none of my business.
Speaker 2: Right, It's like you can like think about it and
Speaker 2: read about it. Yeah, there's so many things I don't
Speaker 2: need to have.
Speaker 3: A say in.
Speaker 2: Just exactly. I was like, myless things, Yeah, I don't
Speaker 2: need to have a saying this. Yeah, just like be
Speaker 2: interested in is fine, yes, totally. You know, like you
Speaker 2: should learn the difference to you know, why are the
Speaker 2: borders were drawn at various times by who?
Speaker 3: Like right, like yeah, and.
Speaker 2: So like when I like meet people who are like,
Speaker 2: you know, African American versus Black, I'm thinking about like
Speaker 2: two folks that I used to work with, two like
Speaker 2: older black, an older Black man, an older African American man,
Speaker 2: and both folk are strongly about these identities. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: one was very in a Marcus Garvey and one was
Speaker 2: very not in a Marcus garb. And I was like, man,
Speaker 2: I want to hear both of your sides so badly.
Speaker 2: And I have no fucking opinion. Yeah, I'm just curious.
Speaker 2: I just wanted to hear you talk.
Speaker 3: You're both so smart. Yeah, and like, what do you
Speaker 3: think kill joy doesn't matter at all? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly what I think. Yeah. It it opened my
Speaker 2: eyes to how some people see Marcus Garvey in a
Speaker 2: way that was useful for me. Yeah, you know, yeah,
Speaker 2: but do you know what I do know absolutely nothing
Speaker 2: about oh.
Speaker 3: Man whoever was about to advertise on his show. Yeah,
Speaker 3: I have literally no idea, not a clue.
Speaker 6: Yeah, and we're back.
Speaker 1: Yay.
Speaker 2: So he's a fifteen year old riding a horse around
Speaker 2: in Texas, rural Texas at night by starlightes. So his
Speaker 2: dad buys him a handgun. As you do and over
Speaker 2: and over again, dad is like, you are not to
Speaker 2: go looking for trouble, but if trouble finds you, be
Speaker 2: ready there.
Speaker 4: It is advice. It's great dad advice. Yeah, fucking solid advice.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah, if you're carrying a gun, that has to
Speaker 3: be why you're doing it. Yeah.
Speaker 2: And this actually goes fine for about ten years. This
Speaker 2: wasn't a like and then he immediately ran off and
Speaker 2: did crazy shit. He's going to be as several violent altercations,
Speaker 2: to go to jail many times. Yeah, but he is
Speaker 2: going to prove that he is not a hot headed man.
Speaker 2: He does, however, from a pretty early age, make it
Speaker 2: very clear that he's not very good at being faithful
Speaker 2: to the women that he dates. He had two daughters
Speaker 2: in short secession with one woman named Margaret, just as
Speaker 2: he married another woman named Alifa. Like his first daughter
Speaker 2: with Margaret was born six months after he married Alifa,
Speaker 2: and his second daughter with Margaret was born about a
Speaker 2: year after he was married.
Speaker 3: So got one night in town baby.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but he didn't deny being the father of those children.
Speaker 2: He actual he's going to have a bunch of kids
Speaker 2: by a bunch of different, bunch of different women, and
Speaker 2: he's never going to be a shitty dad about it.
Speaker 3: He's always going to like try and keep up with them.
Speaker 2: Yeah, a lot of them take the name ledbetter even
Speaker 2: though their parents aren't married to him, just because they're
Speaker 2: like first of all, that name kind of goes hard. Yeah,
Speaker 2: and it goes extra hard once your dad's fucking led belly.
Speaker 3: That's pretty dope. Yeah.
Speaker 2: There's also a lot of evidence that overall, like the
Speaker 2: women he's with like care about him, and he cares
Speaker 2: about them.
Speaker 3: He's cheating on them, but like ya, we'll get to
Speaker 3: it more later, Okay.
Speaker 2: He and Alifa wanted the big city life, not the
Speaker 2: small town life. The couple moves to the Dallas area
Speaker 2: and they worked as hired cotton pickers. They're not sharecropping,
Speaker 2: and they're like daily they're like day labors, you know,
Speaker 2: hourly labor, day labor. Yeah, and he sings to her
Speaker 2: as they work, and this is also described as a
Speaker 2: reasonably happy time in his life. He plays out every
Speaker 2: chance he can. He tries to make it as a musician.
Speaker 2: And it's there in Dallas that he learns the Mexican instrument,
Speaker 2: the twelve string guitar. Whoa, that becomes his signature instrument.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 2: He often played with Blind Lemon Jefferson, the father of
Speaker 2: the Texas Blues, who played Hawaiian guitar aka and open
Speaker 2: tune guitar played with a slide Yeah, usually a bottleneck
Speaker 2: or actually usually a pocket knife. Yeah.
Speaker 3: And then Huddy plays mandolin or accordion alongside.
Speaker 2: Oh, they seem happy enough for a couple of them.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: From nineteen ten to nineteen fifteen, they make decent money.
Speaker 2: They starts building an audience. Later, the white people who
Speaker 2: discover him are going to be like, we pulled this
Speaker 2: man out of nowhere. No one had heard of this,
Speaker 2: like swamp creature we found.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this guy with a ten year music career. Yeah, Yeah,
Speaker 4: he is packing shows.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And there's always scales though, right, because there is
Speaker 2: a difference between like even Tory nationally and suddenly being
Speaker 2: like a fucking pop star, you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, or just having like a local buzz where you
Speaker 4: just play out of juke joints down here, versus like
Speaker 4: you're an artist now. So yeah, there is fair enough,
Speaker 4: but like, yeah, I'm only on your radar because.
Speaker 3: I was killing it where I was at No.
Speaker 2: And that's such a good point that it even just
Speaker 2: goes to like when people are like, oh, you got lucky,
Speaker 2: and you're like, yeah, by showing up to work every
Speaker 2: single day for ten years, yeah, eventually someone noticed me. Yeah,
Speaker 2: totally don't get noticed unless you show up and play shows.
Speaker 3: For the last ten years. Yeah.
Speaker 5: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So he's twenty six years old in nineteen fifteen and
Speaker 2: he has his first serious run in with the law,
Speaker 2: and it's going to tie into both white supremacy and
Speaker 2: self defense.
Speaker 3: This is going to be a continuing pattern. Great.
Speaker 2: He and Aalitha went home that year for the fiftieth Juneteenth.
Speaker 2: It had been fifty years since the text.
Speaker 3: And slaves were freed. What a thought.
Speaker 2: A few days before the celebrations, Huddy goes to go
Speaker 2: play a party somewhere along the way, like somewhere along
Speaker 2: the road at night. He gets into a fight and
Speaker 2: he shoots and injures another black man. And there's no
Speaker 2: particular evidence about how exactly this went down. The only
Speaker 2: people who even said, like, this is what happened are
Speaker 2: the people who are exploiting him or trying to build
Speaker 2: up the.
Speaker 3: Story about him.
Speaker 2: Yeah, the myth making is that it was a fight
Speaker 2: over a woman, because Huddy is a horrible flanderer.
Speaker 3: He's a little bit of a flanderer.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but also it might have been self defense, even
Speaker 2: in that particular case. I do know that he carried
Speaker 2: a pistol for eleven years before he ever fired it
Speaker 2: in a way that brought police attention. So I don't
Speaker 2: think he was reckless. Yeah, he drank and he gambled,
Speaker 2: it probably wasn't reckless. He's brought up on charges. His
Speaker 2: parents hire two white lawyers to defend him. No, which
Speaker 2: is not easy. They sign over they have sixty eight
Speaker 2: and a half acres, They sign over thirty fucking acres dail,
Speaker 2: which is like just loving parents, you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because it's like it's not like they have cash,
Speaker 4: you know what I'm saying. Yeah, but like exactly, you
Speaker 4: got land and then right, yeah, when these two white
Speaker 4: lawyers are and even if, even if you give them
Speaker 4: the most kindest read of them, even if I were
Speaker 4: to do this for free, yeah, I am ending my
Speaker 4: law career by showing up up defending this black man.
Speaker 4: So yeah, I mean I might not be able to
Speaker 4: spore myself for the rest of my life. So like,
Speaker 4: is there something y'all could do?
Speaker 3: Well?
Speaker 2: Maybe, I think in this case, because it's it's it's
Speaker 2: black on black crimes, I'll get to air quots. I
Speaker 2: believe that these people are part of a white spres
Speaker 2: and take land away from black people. But later he
Speaker 2: actually is going to get defended I think pro bono
Speaker 2: by just like straight up well meaning white people who
Speaker 2: I think maybe like his music. Okay, but that's decades late.
Speaker 2: Now what's happening right now?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Okay?
Speaker 2: Yeah, Actually later a man like drops out of grad
Speaker 2: school to raise money for his defense.
Speaker 3: Later like he fucking rips man way later.
Speaker 4: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and his parents might have thought they were just
Speaker 2: staking half their farm, not signing it over completely. Oh no,
Speaker 2: but now that they have Okay, So now they have
Speaker 2: white lawyers, and the charges mysteriously got dropped. They didn't
Speaker 2: even have to the whitelayers didn't have to show up
Speaker 2: in court. They just fucking magic network that bullshit, right,
Speaker 2: But instead he gets charged with carrying a pistol and
Speaker 2: it is either from this, I believe it's two charges
Speaker 2: in like three weeks. It's both the self defense carrying
Speaker 2: a pistol and later a walking while black. Yeah, and
Speaker 2: because it was illegal at the time in Texas to
Speaker 2: walk around carrying a pistol, and all white men did
Speaker 2: it all of the time and no one stopped them.
Speaker 3: Of course.
Speaker 2: One of the most fun things fun gets quotes here.
Speaker 2: One of the most fun things about America is it's
Speaker 2: so racist that both gun control and pro gun lobbies
Speaker 2: they just both come from racism.
Speaker 3: It's so bizarre. Yeah, it's like, man, nothing will make
Speaker 3: y'all happy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, oh totally.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: They're like the state wants certain people to be armed
Speaker 2: and able to commit extra judicial violence, and it wants
Speaker 2: other people disarmed, and so you make laws and then
Speaker 2: you selectively enforce them, and that's how you can do that.
Speaker 2: And that still happens today. Recently, the ATF announced that
Speaker 2: it's pistol brace rule. There's this thing where like, if
Speaker 2: you have an AR fifteen, this is going to be
Speaker 2: totally in the weeds. Let's go, gi have an AAR
Speaker 2: fifteen and you put a regular it can be technically
Speaker 2: a pistol, or it could be technically a rifle, but
Speaker 2: it's illegal if it's short and a rifle that's a
Speaker 2: short barreled rifle. Yeah, and so a stock versus a
Speaker 2: brace is what sets this apart.
Speaker 3: Huh.
Speaker 2: And the ATF said the a fucking couple of weeks ago, like, well,
Speaker 2: we're just going to if you get arrested for something else,
Speaker 2: take a closer look at your guns and then decide
Speaker 2: whether or not it's a fucking short barreled rifle to
Speaker 2: charge you. So they're just blatantly saying opinion, if you
Speaker 2: if you ain't got nothing to hide, it's.
Speaker 3: Not a problem. Yeah, we'll decide if you committed a crime.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Day and again you wonder why we don't trust the system,
Speaker 4: It's like you're making it up as you go along.
Speaker 3: That's why. That's why I don't trust Yeah, yeah, why I'm.
Speaker 2: Really fucking careful about gun laws, like I don't. There's
Speaker 2: no gray area that I feel is safe for me
Speaker 2: to be in, you know, like, and so it's completely possible.
Speaker 2: One history and I read conjectures that this whole thing
Speaker 2: was orchestrated to get this land into the hands of
Speaker 2: white oil prospectors, because that's what fucking happened. Yeah. In
Speaker 2: one of the other episodes I've done a while ago,
Speaker 2: I talk about the like numbers. The black ownership of
Speaker 2: land in the South at the end of the nineteenth
Speaker 2: century versus thirty years later is dramatic because the hardest
Speaker 2: people to disenfranchise during Jim Crow were the landowners. Congratulations,
Speaker 2: Leoy Supremase succeeded at that. Finally, you know, they figured
Speaker 2: it out. Yeah, and so oil prospectors get the thirty acres. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: Hotey gets himself thirty days on a chain gang, plus
Speaker 2: extra at least five months to pay off his fines
Speaker 2: of fifty cents a day. We actually don't know how
Speaker 2: long he was supposed to be in jail, because this man.
Speaker 3: Did not stay in jail. Let's go, I'm out cuz.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just to reverence my granddad, the hobo again, my
Speaker 2: granddad also was on a chain gang for a while
Speaker 2: because he was stealing a car and he refused to
Speaker 2: snitch out the people he stole the car with.
Speaker 3: I love it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, let's go Grandpops. Yeah, hey, pop Pop, what'd you
Speaker 4: do when I was a.
Speaker 3: Stole a car, didn't snitch?
Speaker 2: Yeah? And then he fought in World War two and
Speaker 2: worked for the government. But like before that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, before then, I was pretty badass. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: The rest of my family is confused that the part
Speaker 2: that I'm really interested in is the hobo stories. Yeah yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: like no, I wrote trains, I want to fucking Yeah.
Speaker 2: And so he gets sent out. They give him some
Speaker 2: unknown length of time. Officials are getting paid out in
Speaker 2: a cash for convicts kind of program. Chain gangs provide
Speaker 2: cheap labor for various private interests. Yea, four months into
Speaker 2: his one month sentence, he decides he's been in jail
Speaker 2: long enough. He and his fellow convicts they're in these
Speaker 2: like prison wagons, these wooden wagons that take them around
Speaker 2: to do work on the chain gang. And so like
Speaker 2: even like Sundays they're like day off, they're just like
Speaker 2: in cages by the side of the fucking road, you know. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And so he and his fellow convicts start a fire
Speaker 2: and burn a hole in the floor of the jail wagon.
Speaker 2: Cut yeah, and they all get off and movie. Unlike
Speaker 2: almost every other story about jail breaks that I've ever read,
Speaker 2: including some of his later jail breaks, this is not
Speaker 2: the only time he's going to break out of jail.
Speaker 2: He succeeds so crazy, he never does the rest of
Speaker 2: that sentence. So crazy he goes. And he also doesn't
Speaker 2: have to hide like a lot of times now, if
Speaker 2: you break out of jail, they catch you because you
Speaker 2: go home to your family, right, Yeah, but it's old
Speaker 2: timey times.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: So he and Alitha, his wife, fuck off up north
Speaker 2: and they change their name to mister and Ms Walter
Speaker 2: boyd Yes, and they moved to another black community up
Speaker 2: near the Oklahoma border. The pair of them sharecropped, and
Speaker 2: he broke wild horses. He played his twelve string guitar
Speaker 2: for everybody all the time. Some of his young nieces
Speaker 2: and nephews came to live with him because his family's
Speaker 2: having a rough time because they just lost a lot
Speaker 2: of their land and everything's going badly.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: And then a year into his new life, he killed
Speaker 2: a man.
Speaker 3: Oh so there's that.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, I was about to make a joke about Okay, nephew,
Speaker 4: now when you come up here, my name is BOYD now.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah yeah yeah, boy yeah yeah No, it's that's
Speaker 2: not what got him in trouble. It was definitely shooting
Speaker 2: a guy that got him in trouble. He killed a guy,
Speaker 2: He shot and killed his distant cousin's husband. The most
Speaker 2: likely story is that the two men were arguing. The
Speaker 2: story that's completely possible, but is the story that's played
Speaker 2: up is that the guy was like, you slept with
Speaker 2: my wife and then attacked him, and then he shot
Speaker 2: him in self defense, possibly with that guy's own gun,
Speaker 2: or they were gambling and arguing about money. There are
Speaker 2: witnesses that say it was self defense because the guy
Speaker 2: pulled a gun on him, But self defense doesn't get
Speaker 2: black men, even black men accused of killing black men
Speaker 2: out of jail, because there's no profit in not convicting
Speaker 2: a black man where there's lots of profit, and convicting
Speaker 2: a black man too was con.
Speaker 3: And sends to twenty years bail.
Speaker 2: And just because I love the name Margaret, the wife
Speaker 2: in question was named Peggy, which means her name was
Speaker 2: probably Margaret, but her she went by pig. Yeah, that's precious,
Speaker 2: which is a whole new nickname for Margaret I've never
Speaker 2: heard before.
Speaker 1: Cute.
Speaker 3: That's amazing, Yeah, yeah, cute.
Speaker 2: So he had lawyers, and this time he had white
Speaker 2: lawyers working pro bono and no one seems quite sure why.
Speaker 2: But he gets convicted and he goes to jail and
Speaker 2: his lawyers are trying to get him retried because it's
Speaker 2: pretty obviously self defense, but he doesn't like being in jail.
Speaker 2: So anywait, no, when the jailer comes into the cell
Speaker 2: one day, one of the inmates, there's like four of them.
Speaker 2: You break got her jail again?
Speaker 3: Huh yeah, no, totally yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: After a couple of weeks, How fast is this dude?
Speaker 2: This time one inmate jumps out of a pile of
Speaker 2: laundry and overpowers the guard and steals his gun and.
Speaker 3: Then they run for it. This is amazing.
Speaker 2: It didn't go as well this time, for actually one
Speaker 2: of them might have gotten away, but one of them
Speaker 2: was shot and killed in the escape attempt, and Huddy
Speaker 2: was caught a.
Speaker 3: Few miles away. He was unarmed.
Speaker 2: One escape he might have made it, so he was
Speaker 2: found guilty for the attempted murder of the prison guard,
Speaker 2: and he was going to be in prison. Both sentences
Speaker 2: were not running but at the same time. Yeah, they
Speaker 2: were running consecutively. Instead he had one then the other.
Speaker 2: It was going to be in prison for seven to
Speaker 2: thirty years. Who while he was in prison, another child
Speaker 2: he'd had with someone else who wasn't his wife, was born.
Speaker 2: Had a kid what whatever the right way the grammar
Speaker 2: of that sentence. He had a kid with somebody. He
Speaker 2: likely never got to know about this kid. He was
Speaker 2: in jail for a while. Alitha, for her part, I
Speaker 2: think she's done with him. I feel like at this
Speaker 2: point and she becomes a preacher. Of course she does. Yes, yes, no,
Speaker 2: she tied. Ah, he's you know, I'm gonna give my
Speaker 2: life to Jesus. I was outside, Yeah, cussing and fussing.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I don't know if they ever got divorced, maybe they
Speaker 2: just stopped being married. But that's where we're gonna leave it.
Speaker 2: Now he's in prison for a second time. He's he's
Speaker 2: not gonna stay there. He's gonna become incredibly famous. The
Speaker 2: people who are gonna help make him famous are gonna
Speaker 2: treat him like absolute fucking garbage, and then he's gonna
Speaker 2: fuck well, I don't want to spoil.
Speaker 3: All of you, don't ruin it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but he's gonna do some awesome fucking cool stuff,
Speaker 2: including apparently be faithful. I'm quite happy with his second
Speaker 2: wife to the end of his days.
Speaker 3: Ah, And so neither first recorded Wolkester.
Speaker 2: Stay Woke. No, you can hear the recording too, it's
Speaker 2: on YouTube. It's it's one of him many times he
Speaker 2: sings Scottsboro Boys. Yeah, anyway, what do you think about
Speaker 2: old Ladbelly so far?
Speaker 4: Man, He's not a cool person yet, He's just a
Speaker 4: regular dude who has lived some really dope adventures.
Speaker 2: Yeah, totally.
Speaker 4: But like, knowing where this goes is just like I
Speaker 4: didn't I've obviously I had no idea at his backstory.
Speaker 3: I just knew his contributions. But this is so fun,
Speaker 3: Like I've been smiling the whole time.
Speaker 2: Well, one of the things that I like about him,
Speaker 2: he's a regular dude, Yeah, who made amazing contributions, who
Speaker 2: had crazy adventures. Yeah, who like did some fucked up
Speaker 2: stuff and did some really fucking cool stuff, And like
Speaker 2: it makes them more real.
Speaker 3: I love it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it makes the music makes so much more sense too,
Speaker 4: where you're just like, yeah, yeah, bro, like he look
Speaker 4: came into town.
Speaker 3: Playing his twelve string.
Speaker 4: He out there up there being fine as hell, and yeah,
Speaker 4: bagged him with chick that night. He just happened to
Speaker 4: get it pregnant and he's like, yeah, well, I mean
Speaker 4: I made another kid today, So yeah, all right, I
Speaker 4: mean it is what it is, yeah, you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and as funny is, he's still like not rock
Speaker 3: star level.
Speaker 4: Oh, he's just like, you know, like there's there's such
Speaker 4: thing as like like black Hollywood, like you black famous
Speaker 4: like that. Yeah, everybody don't You're not a megastar like
Speaker 4: the world don't know, but like we mess with you, you know.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah yeah. Well if people want to hear your
Speaker 2: music or maybe your podcast, other ways that they can
Speaker 2: do it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, the politics prop I'm on the same network with
Speaker 4: these wonderful humans right here, proptpop dot Com. A lot
Speaker 4: of new music rolling out, man, I'm actually really excited
Speaker 4: about the new stuff.
Speaker 3: Check this out.
Speaker 4: Actually this is something to promote I am going to
Speaker 4: somehow I got involved in improv.
Speaker 3: I don't know how this happened.
Speaker 2: I'm so sorry. Huh and uh.
Speaker 4: But the show got invited to the Fringe Festival. If
Speaker 4: you're the Fringe.
Speaker 3: No, I never heard of it, but it's.
Speaker 2: I think I've heard the name, so it must be big.
Speaker 2: If I have heard, it's pretty big.
Speaker 4: It's in Scotland, in Edinburgh and it's like kind of
Speaker 4: a thing. So anyway, the people putting it together put
Speaker 4: together like a seed and spark to like support it
Speaker 4: because this ain't like paid gig, you know what I'm saying,
Speaker 4: which was weird to me because I was like, oh, yeah,
Speaker 4: it's cool go to the festival.
Speaker 3: But yeah, yeah, hit me up and they're like, oh no,
Speaker 3: you have to. You have to pay your way there, and.
Speaker 4: I was like, oh shit, I don't know really, So
Speaker 4: then I told some people and they were like, no,
Speaker 4: you got to figure out how to Apparently mister Bean
Speaker 4: the first sight all right, he's yep, his first showing
Speaker 4: was at Fringe. Yeah, and then got the show, so
Speaker 4: it's like, okay, so you gotta go, you gotta go
Speaker 4: do it.
Speaker 1: Jamie performed at the Fringe Festival.
Speaker 4: Oh yeah, see so shit, yeah it's a thing. So
Speaker 4: now I'm going, but like y'all want to support to boy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they should talk to Jamie about it.
Speaker 2: Okay, No, it makes sense that there's like there's certain
Speaker 2: things where you're like, you want me to do what
Speaker 2: you're gonna pay me if I'm going to do that,
Speaker 2: and then every now and then you're like, I will
Speaker 2: do that for exposure.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because it's a fucking lot of exposure.
Speaker 2: It's kind of dope, Like, yeah, this is kind of dope.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So yeah, sports A Boy, that's some of my websites.
Speaker 1: You're going to practicup perform every night.
Speaker 4: Fifteen seventeen days and fifteen shows. Yeah, every other night
Speaker 4: or every night everybody too, So it's like it's going down. Yeah,
Speaker 4: I basically freestyle a spoken word.
Speaker 1: Jimmy did boss whum his girl at that friend festival
Speaker 1: like several years ago.
Speaker 3: Dude, I'll ask her, Yeah, I talked to her. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Well, people should listen to Politics a Prop. It is
Speaker 2: one of the best shows about just actually breaking down
Speaker 2: what's fucking happening in the world, Like like, if you
Speaker 2: ever are like I'm confused about what all this fucking
Speaker 2: shit means. I just listened to Politics a Prop. That
Speaker 2: sounds like I'm doing an ad read. I just literally
Speaker 2: do that. That is a thing that I do.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: I listen to a lot of podcasts, and so I
Speaker 2: have visual memories of where Yeah, like ah, I learned
Speaker 2: that thing, well, hanging curtains, yeah, or like whatever the
Speaker 2: fucking thing is, Like, ah, walk in the dog, That's
Speaker 2: where I learned about this thing. So cool people should.
Speaker 3: Listen to that man and thank you.
Speaker 2: Yeah people should listen to this show on Wednesday when
Speaker 2: we come back for part two. Whoo, I just want
Speaker 2: to pop in real quick from the future and say,
Speaker 2: I can't believe I forgot to kind of more specifically
Speaker 2: and directly point out the person and the book that
Speaker 2: helped bring all of this information to light. It's right
Speaker 2: there in the title. It's called Bring Judgment Day. Reclaiming
Speaker 2: Leadbelly's Truths from Jim Crow's Lies by Sheila Kuran Bernard.
Speaker 5: Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff is a production of
Speaker 5: cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media,
Speaker 5: visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out
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Speaker 5: your podcasts.