Good Morning Blues: Gordon Parks Imagines Leadbelly

Abstract

Gordon Parks’ 1976 film Leadbelly opens with a scene that embodies what Michel de Certeau terms “transverse tactics,” a notion that people gain and demonstrate agency when they “manipulate the spaces in which they are constrained.”¹ The film’s opening sequence, outlined above, frames the film as a narrative about frustrated heroism, akin to the story of John Henry and his hammer. Almost certainly, the sequence refers to a 1945 documentary footage of Leadbelly edited by Pete Seeger, in which Leadbelly plays guitar in front of a red velvet curtain. A few bars into the song, Leadbelly adds a chopping gesture that Parks then reinscribes into the film as the rise and fall of Leadbelly’s pickax. In its entirety, this film captures the raw energy of rebellion, the refusal to submit to authority within the oppressive boundaries of Jim Crow, and the importance of human creativity in sustaining a sense of dignity and agency through that struggle.

Here, at least, I could try to think things out in peace, or, if not in peace, in quiet. I would take up residence underground. The end was in the beginning.

Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man

Leadbelly

The screen fills with the orange red hue of twilight. In soft focus, silhouetted against the red, a muscular black man, naked to his waist, lifts his pick ax to strike a pile of rocks. The saturated color gives way to the unaltered image of the quarry, where other figures walk with prison stripes and leg irons. The year is 1933; the place, the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola, named after the African homeland of the former slaves of this one-time plantation.