Nirvana's haunting MTV Unplugged closer Where Did You Sleep Last Night and the phrase stay woke both feel like products of the modern era, yet both trace back to a single man born on a Louisiana plantation in the late 1880s. This episode digs into census data, prison records, biographies and discographies to follow Huddie Ledbetter, known to the world as Lead Belly, from farm labor and a first instrument that was an accordion, not a guitar, to the saloons of Shreveport's Fannin Street, where a teenager learned to overpower a rowdy room by playing louder, faster and longer than anyone else.

We separate legend from paperwork across his convictions: a 1915 chain gang he escaped under the alias Walter Boyd, a 1918 murder conviction and 30-year sentence, and the 1925 release by Texas Governor Pat Neff that prison records attribute to good behavi ...