Rock fans of the late 70s might have claimed her as their own, but in fact Black Betty was older than she seemed. In December 1933, the noted American ethnomusicologists John and Alan Lomax set up at Central State Farm in Texas – actually a prison where convicts produced sugar cane and cotton – to record an a-capella take by career criminal James ‘Iron Head’ Baker, which is believed to be the song’s first rendering. The 63-year-old couldn’t claim authorship of Black Betty, which had likely been hollered under the burning sun as an African-American work song since the first slaves landed. But whether the ‘Betty’ of the title meant a bottle of whisky, a devious woman, a police car or the bullwhip that bit at the workers’ backs, Baker – self-described as “the roughest n ger what ever walked the streets of Dallas” – knew of what he sang, a
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