Critic's Review
Steve Leggett'±, All Music Guide
Whether Leadbelly actually wrote the songs he claimed he did or simply adapted and redefined traditional material with a keen sense of compositional placement is a matter for music historians and scholars to decide, but there is little doubt about Leadbelly's ability to craft lasting and even definitive arrangements of the songs he performed, which has led to Leadbelly material being covered by a diverse group of modern recording artists including Led Zeppelin, Nirvana Johnny Cash, the White Stripes, the Beach Boys, Little Richard, Creedence Clearwater Revival, the Meat Puppets and others. That's a pretty variable legacy. Leadbelly's greatest contribution to music, though, may well be the scores of folk songs, blues pieces, field hollers, children's rhymes and work songs he saved from musical extinction by recording them, and if he tweaked them to fit his needs and then claimed authorship, well, that's the folk process at work in the modern age. Borrow Love and Go collects several of Leadbelly's early recordings, including the sublime "Bourgeois Blues," the hard-charging "The Gallis Pole," and his take on "In the Pines," here called "Where Did You Sleep Last Night." Also included is a version of Leadbelly's most famous song, the beautiful "Goodnight Irene," which the Weavers took to the top of the charts in 1949 just months after Leadbelly died. There are countless Leadbelly collections on the market, some annotated and some not, and some, like this one, fall right in the middle, with a decent bio but little track by track information.
