The Lead Belly Songbook - Lead Belly, no stranger to the blues

  Gonna be the Death of You, the CD     -     The Lead Belly Songbook     -     The Lead Belly Page    -   Harry Lewman Music     -   Current Pricing and Orders   -  Home  

Bourgeois Blues

Click here to listen to Real Audio format 28.8 modem.

Pete Seeger, Taj Mahal, Ry Cooder are just some of the musicians who have performed and recorded this masterpiece. The song was inspired by the treatment that Lead Belly received in Washington, D.C. while in the company of Alan and Bess Lomax and others. Theirs was a mixed race group, and they found they were rejected by commercial establishments of both black and white ownership.

Martha Ledbetter commented to her neice, Tiny Robinson, that Lead Belly was truly angry at this treatment. The song is played in the D position and has lots of interesting moves. It is not an easy song to play, both for its lyrical content and musical difficulty. As Pete Seeger wrote, "The bourgeois never had it so good.".