WNYC At 90: When Leadbelly Spoke With Woody Guthrie
WNYC was founded by the City of New York in 1924; Soundcheck celebrates the station's 90 years of broadcasting this week by listening back to some of its most important musical moments.
Back in 1940, folk and blues icon Lead Belly hosted his very own show on WNYC Radio, Folk Songs Of America — produced by a young woman named Henrietta Yurchenko. Yurchenko would go on to become a famous ethnomusicologist, and, at age 89, co-founded the Down Home Radio podcast along with co-host Eli Smith, the founder of the Brooklyn Folk Festival.
In a conversation with Soundcheck host John Schaefer, Eli Smith talks about Yurchenko's life — and about the time they both listened back to an episode of Folk Songs Of America in which Lead Belly was joined by folk singer Woody Guthrie.
The two musicians play songs that they had recently written at the time, and have since gone on to become familiar titles like Leadbelly's "Frankie and Johnny" and Guthrie's "Tom Joad," based on John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.
Smith says that Folk Songs of America is a glimpse of Lead Belly as a prodigious talent and intellectual.
"Leadbelly was an outstanding folk performer, a real virtuoso," Smith explains. "But he didn't fit in the literary circles... We can look back and realize now how rich Leadbelly's music was — he wasn't a country rube, he was really a phenomenal character."
