Event commemorates Lead Belly’s 1948 Minneapolis house show

Mikkel Bee wears out washboards. 

The corrugated brass on the instrument is soft, and Bee (whose real name is Mikkel Beckman) scrubs out beats and rhythms that blend a persistent passion for the vintage songs and compassion for the attendant musicians and listeners. 

“The fun of it for me is organizing cultural events, even if they are in a bar,” Beckman told writer Jim Walsh in a fantastic MinnPost profile a couple of years ago. At the time he was sitting beside his dear friend and more famous fellow musician Charlie Parr, who bought him his first washboard for a couple bucks from the old Steeple People thrift store on Lyndale nearly 30 years ago.

Dozens of washboards later, Beckman is the guiding force behind thriving acoustic music scenes (folk, country, blues) at the 331 Club in Minneapolis, the Dubliner Pub in St. Paul, and other locales around the metro area. And he was the ideal person to organize an event this Friday night at the Cedar Cultural Center, commemorating a house concert that Lead Belly played in Minneapolis exactly 78 years earlier, on November 21, 1948. 

One of the many fables about how Huddie Ledbetter came to be known as Lead Belly is that he was shot in the stomach during a jailhouse dispute. Myths naturally attached to the man’s biography once he became an icon of folk-blues music, initially due to recordings made from the Louisiana State Penitentiary in 1933 by Alan and John Lomax on behalf of the Library of Congress. 

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Lead Belly was a prolific and versatile songwriter, adept at everything from children’s songs to murder ballads to incisive social commentary. He was a forceful, distinctive stylist on his trademark Stella 12-string guitar, pioneering the use of his thumb to play a “walking” bass line. And he was a strong, gregarious Black man who became a mentor to the likes of Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston and was heard on the radio and recorded for various labels during a time of racial segregation.

That Lead Belly found himself in Minneapolis in 1948 was not a coincidence. 

“The body of folk music at that time was more centered around concerts at universities and union halls, attaching itself to some of the more progressive political movements and streams throughout the country,” said Beckman, setting the scene. “And Lead Belly comes to Minneapolis in 1948 on the heels of Hubert Humphrey going to the Democratic National Convention (in July of that year) as the Mayor of Minneapolis, and giving that great speech about, ‘It is time for the Democratic Party to come out of the shadow of States Rights and into the sunshine of Civil Rights’ — saying Civil Rights will be the main theme of the 20^th Century and the Democratic Party needs to be a leader in pushing that forward.  

“And Lead Belly, under the management of some folks from Cambridge (Massachusetts), was on a tour singing for unions as well as students and progressives (in college towns) — I think he had gone up to the Iron Range and played a union hall — and obviously ends up at this house in Minneapolis during the midst of this tour. He plays this great show, and somebody was recording it.” 

For decades, the recording was greedily copied via reel-to-reel transfers among folk-blues enthusiasts before finally being properly released on the Document label at the turn of the century. Beckman, already inspired by Lead Belly’s music, a lover of live performance and living in Uptown, near where the house concert was purported to have occurred, was ecstatic.

Two years ago, he and guitarist Adam Kiesling made a relatively snap decision to showcase the Lead Belly house concert material when playing an early show at the 331 Club on its anniversary date. Last year, the lineup for a November 21 Lead Belly fete expanded to include Charlie Parr and Pop Wagner at the Dubliner. Both shows went so well that Beckman, realizing that the anniversary would be on a Friday night in 2025, contacted the Cedar last spring to see if they were interested in hosting the show. 

The Cedar agreed. Despite the fact that it is a larger venue, sales were brisk and the show sold out weeks ago. And the lineup was further expanded to include Corpse Reviver, a trio comprised of Beckman, Kiesling and Jillian Rae on fiddle and vocals, originally formed to pay tribute to the wealth of songs on Harry Smith’s epic Anthology of American Folk Music from 1952. 

Lead Belly amassed more than 500 songs over his career, many of them originals, including classics like “Goodnight Irene,” “Midnight Special,” “House of the Rising Sun,” “Rock Island Line,” and “Black Betty.” The Minneapolis house concert contains over 20 distinct songs (there are some spoken intros and a couple are done twice) comprising nearly an hour. 

There is scathing social commentary addressing race and class discrimination, such as “Jim Crow,” “The Gallis Pole” and “Bourgeois Blues,” topical fare such as a song lamenting the death of “Jean Harlow,” even the ode to “Governor Pat Neff,” that earned Lead Belly a pardon from prison. And there is a touching, closing rendition of “Goodnight Irene,” sung with a child. 

The Minneapolis performance was one of Lead Belly’s final recordings. A year later, in 1949, he was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease while on tour in Europe and passed away soon after, narrowly missing out on the song royalties for “Goodnight, Irene,” which was a spectacular number-one hit for the Weavers in 1950. 

Beckman generally prefers spontaneity — he rarely rehearses and, despite his love of vintage music, has cautioned that “you can’t let anything you are doing become a prison or a church.” But with so many songs up for grabs, he asked for a list of preferred Lead Belly songs from each of the acts and happily reports that there was very little overlap (although he remained tight-lipped about the specific set list).

As often happens at shows he curates, Beckman will stay on stage providing washboard percussion for each of the 30-35-minute sets from Pop Wagner, then Corpse Reviver, and then Charlie Parr, before everyone comes together for a rousing finale.

Reached by phone, Pop Wagner was effusive and excited to again be participating in the anniversary gig. A stalwart of the local folk scene since he arrived in the Twin Cities in 1970, he remembers his parents having an old Lead Belly 78 and his father singing him Lead Belly’s “Down in the Valley” as a bedtime lullaby. 

Given his trademark cowboy hat, it is no surprise that Wagner has volunteered to play, “When I Was A Cowboy,” which is not on the house concert recording, and at least two songs from the Minneapolis show. One is “Grey Goose,” and the other is a song that Lead Belly composed on the spot that night, entitled “Lake Superior.” Wagner said he will add a few of his own verses to the impromptu composition.

“Grey Goose” is significant because of the way Lead Belly marked the “Lord, Lord, Lord,” chorus with low bass notes from his Stella 12-string, renowned for its wide neck and thick strings. It turns out that a luthier and close friend of Wagner’s gifted him an exact copy of that Stella several years ago before he died. 

And that won’t be the only 12-string replica prominent in the proceedings.

Lead Belly’s yeoman work on the Stella is one of Beckman’s favorite things about the house concert recording. “It sounds like a southern bar-room piano the way he is playing it, the booming low notes and the way his thumb is driving the bassline,” he said. He is pleased that Wagner will be toting his gift from the luthier, and that Charlie Parr also is in possession of a prized instrument. 

“Spider John Koerner had three (12-string) guitars,” said Beckman, referencing the late, legendary member of arguably the most accomplished folk group in Twin Cities history, Koerner, Ray and Glover. “When John was no longer able to play, one of those ended up in Cambridge or Boston, one was at (the now defunct) Palmer’s Bar and is now on the wall at the Hook & Ladder, and Charlie (Parr) has the other one.” 

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As someone who presides over an acoustic music scene teeming with quality performances most nights of the week, Beckman isn’t surprised that the Cedar show is sold out. 

“The singers and performers all have their fans. It will be a different night for people who follow these musicians because obviously this is all Lead Belly’s songs and not the songs they might usually perform. I hope they appreciate this is something pretty unique.

“The acoustic music scene here is a lot bigger than most cities in the U.S, and there is just a tremendous amount of talent,” Beckman continued. “To have this happen, where we can put it together with the Cedar, which is an absolute gem for the international music scene — the world is at our doorway with the Cedar and now people are going to enter this too, a door to something else that is really exceptional.” 

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