74%User score 74 percent
Richard Jewell
2019 · Drama · History
User Score
8 votes
You can't bury a black legend like Leadbelly!
The life of Blues and folk singer Huddie Leadbetter, nicknamed Leadbelly is recounted. Covering the good times and bad from his 20s to 40s. Much of that time was spent on chain gangs in the south. Even in prison he became well known for the songs he had composed and sung during and before the time he spent there.
Recommendations based on this film
JPRetana
June 16, 2026
Leadbelly (1976) opens with Huddie ‘Lead Belly’ Ledbetter (Roger E. Mosley) as an old man in prison. By “old” I mean they dyed Mosley’s hair and eyebrows gray, and even “dyed” might be an overstatement. Ledbetter is shirtless when we first meet him, so we can see he’s actually a strapping middle-age man. Perhaps that stuff on his hair is just dust from breaking rocks all day. Ethnomusicologists John and Alan Lomax co…
Read the full review on TMDBReviews are written by the TMDB community, not by Leadbelly's publisher.
