Leadbelly at Angola Prison — Louisiana

Angola Prison — formally the Louisiana State Penitentiary — is where Huddie 'Leadbelly' Ledbetter was incarcerated in the early 1930s, serving a sentence for assault with intent to murder. It was at Angola in 1933 that the musicologist John Lomax and his son Alan, conducting field recordings for the Library of Congress, recorded Leadbelly performing his extraordinary repertoire of blues, ballads, folk songs, and work songs. The Lomaxes were so impressed that they began advocating for his release, and Leadbelly was paroled in 1934. He subsequently moved to New York with the Lomaxes and began performing for audiences who had never encountered the music of the African American rural South.

Angola Prison — built on former plantation land in the Louisiana River Parishes — is one of the most significant sites in American music history because of its role in the preservation of Leadbelly's recordings. The Lomax family's field recording project, which took them through the prisons and plantations of the South in the early 1930s, produced some of the most important documentation of American vernacular music ever assembled. The prison conditions at Angola in this era were harsh, and the music Leadbelly and others performed there was shaped by those conditions in ways that made it both historically valuable and artistically essential.

Angola Prison continues to operate as a maximum security state prison and is not open to the general public, though it hosts an annual prison rodeo in October that is open to visitors. A museum on the grounds documents the prison's history, including its role in the collection of folk music recordings. The Angola recordings of Leadbelly are held in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress.