Grunge is a fascinating subgenre because of its success and longevity. The commodification of its motifs is in direct opposition to the mission of the artists who would turn out to be the founders of genre. Those at the nucleus of the movement, like pioneers in any art, did not set out to create a new and marketable genre.
Instead, they endeavored to create music for the sake of expression, not sales. They desired to achieve artist authenticity and honest self-expression. In their determination to distance themselves from all this commercial music, they turned to a man they didn’t fully understand. Huddie William Ledbetter had been perfectly crafted by circumstance and by his handlers to represent total separation from mainstream influences.
Huddie William Ledbetter, better known as “Lead Belly” was an African American folk singer in the 1930s. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of plantation and prison songs. He crafted his own lyrics passed on his own wanderings through the South and his time in prison. He was a master of the 12-string guitar and accordion. His vocalizations were powerful, he did not sing as much as moan and mumble his lyrics, which he seemed to have to wrestle out of his mouth.
The Lomax family, a father-son duo obsessed with finding and documenting an authentic and uniquely American form of music, discovered Ledbetter. Musical historians of the 1930s argued that the United States had no authentic music form, and that everything was a derivative of European forms. The Lomax’s were on a mission to prove this supposition wrong. In their pursuit, they sought out musicians that existed on the outskirts of American society because no one could argue that they had been influenced by anything other than the American experience.
They embarked on a year-long odyssey through the deepest parts of 1930s American Southland, convinced that the music of the African Americans who lived as a matter of survival on the outskirts of society. They traveled through plantations and visited prisons recording any musician they could, looking for that special something. They eventually found it in William Ledbetter.The Lomax’s were truly moved by his emotional vocalizations and uncanny mental collection of folk and blues songs.
Huddie Ledbetter was exactly what the Lomax’s had been searching for. As an African American living in a southern prison having been convicted of murder it could not be argue that Huddie’s musicianship was influenced by anything other than his uniquely American experience.
The Lomax’s went to great pains to ensure that Huddie never broke from their presentation of him, as being other and separate from the mainstream culture. This is what made Ledbetter famous, but it also pigeonholed him. He was not allowed to dress well on stage or to invent new music. This meant that Ledbetter could never really achieve mainstream success and fame.
He gained notoriety for his talent and for the legend the Lomax’s built around him as being a half-wild man saved from a life in prison by his supernatural talent. But because he could not soften or adjust his style, he could not reach mass audiences.
It was not long after Ledbetter’s death before other folk musicians began to invoke his memory as a way to authenticate their own music. By covering his songs and claiming to have been friends with Ledbetter, later musicians could ground their work in the sense of authenticity that audiences crave, while at the same time employing pop music elements and softening Ledbetter’s lyrics so as to make them more PG-13. This allowed them to use the folk music fan base to support their drive to reach the widest audience possible.
Grunge musicians of the ’90s were honestly trying to find a way to break from the popular music scene and make something authentic. Because Ledbetter’s story having been obscured by decades and whitewashing historians, they arguably discovered the Ledbetter that the Lomax’s presented — a totally separate phenomenon capable of producing music that poked the soul. They could not have known of the tyrannical control the Lomax’s had over his career or his desire to become a truly famous and wealthy musician.
Musicians like Eddie Vedder actively attempt to copy Ledbetter’s style to ground themselves in authenticity and use that authenticity to break into the mainstream by incorporating popular music styles into their folk based work. That is how you get from Alice in Chains to Godsmack and from Godsmack to Nickleback.