Unearthed

James "Iron Head" Baker Recordings

During his time as a folklore collector for the Library of Congress, John A. Lomax visited prisons throughout the South, where African-American convicts sang work songs to coordinate their labor. These were old songs, born in the fields of slave plantations, on the mighty railway lines, and among riverboat stevedores, that had been adapted to the heavy chopping and farm labor of prison farms and work gangs. Lomax brought back hundreds of such songs, sung by groups of convicts, and they now form part of the American Folklife Center archive. One of the extraordinary singers Lomax discovered in a Southern prison was James Baker, known to his friends as "Iron Head." In 1933, he was among a group of Texas convicts led by Earnest Williams who sang "Ain't No More Cane on the Brazos." That song became a folk-revival classic, recorded by everyone from Bob Gibson to the Band, after John and Alan Lomax printed it in American Ballads and Folk Songs in 1934. That recording -- and many others that feature Baker as song-leader -- were made at Central State Farm, a prison in Sugarland, Texas, in 1933 and 1934.

If you search the American Folklife Center's card catalog (now available online at www.loc.gov/folklife), you'll notice something unusual about Baker: For a prisoner, he moved around quite a bit. In April, 1936, he was in Dallas; then he was recorded in Raiford, Florida; Columbia, South Carolina; and Washington, D.C., all in May, 1936. Finally, he was recorded in 1939 by John and Ruby Lomax at Ramsey State Farm in Otey, Texas.

The explanation for Iron Head's travels can be pieced together from several clippings from newspapers and magazines that the American Folklife Center keeps in Baker's vertical file. Essentially, his freedom to travel in 1936 grew out of his own excellence as a singer and also the experience and ingenuity of John A. Lomax. In 1934, Lomax employed the newly freed convict Huddie Ledbetter as a field assistant; Ledbetter would drive Lomax from site to site and demonstrate for the convicts the type of songs Lomax wanted. When he arrived in New York in 1935, however, Ledbetter left Lomax's employ, transformed his prison nickname, "Lead Belly," into a stage name, and, after several years of trying, became a genuine star of the folk revival.