Before you fight over the word 'woke,' learn its surprising, musical history

Someday when the cultural moment that many have called “The Great Awokening” is finally, mercifully, over, Americans of all races should fight to give African Americans their word back.

Less than 10 years ago, “woke” was a word so deeply layered with history and meaning it could evoke years of pain suffered by descendants of slaves living in Jim Crow America.

You don’t have to be African American, however, to feel its history. The word woke is seminal to our larger culture in ways most of us have never understood.

It’s one of the great words in American English and it should be preserved in its purest form.

Trump, DeSantis battle over 'woke'

At the moment it is being hijacked by politics — first by white liberals, then by white conservatives.

The word “woke” is igniting a family spat within the 2024 Republican primary for president, pitting Donald Trump against his former apprentice, Ron DeSantis.

DeSantis, the Florida governor, uses the word frequently to describe an ideology steeped in identity politics that has taken over our universities, media, large corporations, medicine, arts, entertainment and sports.

Trump argues he doesn’t use the word.

“I don’t like the term ‘woke’ because I hear, ‘Woke, woke, woke.’ It’s just a term they use, half the people can’t even define it, they don’t know what it is.”

There’s a good chance none of us would know the word today had the Library of Congress not set out in the 1930s to preserve American folk music in the South.

The word emerges in a song about race

That project took library archivists to Louisiana where they discovered a little-known African American blues singer named Huddie William Ledbetter or “Lead Belly.”

The archivists recorded on aluminum discs Lead Belly and his 12-string guitar, preserving what would become some of the great Blues standards such as “Cotton Fields,” “Goodnight, Irene” and “Rock Island Line.”

While first recording his song “The Scottsboro Boys,” about nine African American young men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama, Lead Belly admonished listeners to, “Best stay woke!”

It’s believed to be the first recorded instance of the word.

As Huddie Ledbetter used “woke,” it meant that when you’re a Black person traveling through a deeply racist state such as Alabama, you need to know what you’re dealing with — a highly refined form of evil.

Ledbetter would know. He traveled the byways of Louisiana, Alabama and Texas singing his songs and confronting white bigotry and its violence against Black people.

In a way that history has of surprising us, Lead Belly would become essential to white culture in America and Great Britain.

Lead Belly, who inspired The Beatles, said it

All white people reading this and learning the name Huddie Ledbetter for the first time should know that they have likely felt his influence, far more than they could have imagined.

The driving rhythms of Lead Belly’s version of “Rock Island Line” would in the 1950s inspire an early British pop singer named Lonnie Donegan, who adopted the song’s musical style called skiffle, a mash of American folk, blues and jazz.

Donegan became “the king” of the U.K. “skiffle craze” and eventually inspired new skiffle groups across England, such as Liverpool’s The Quarrymen, then led by an aspiring singer-songwriter named John Lennon.

By 1960, the group would evolve into The Beatles, and its lead guitarist, George Harrison, would one day tell an interviewer, “If there was no Lead Belly, there would have been no Lonnie Donegan; no Lonnie Donegan, no Beatles. Therefore, no Lead Belly, no Beatles,” as recounted by Smithsonian Magazine.

A who's who of artists covered his songs

Lead Belly was inspiring many musical forms of that day.

Those same early recordings that preserved his music and the word “woke” found their way into the imagination of another young artist of some note.

“Somebody — somebody I’d never seen before ” handed me a Lead Belly record with the song ‘Cottonfields’ on it,” recalled Bob Dylan in his 2017 lecture to the Nobel (Prize) Foundation. “That record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known.

Another view: Will new law lead to a raft of 'woke' academies?

“It was like an explosion went off. Like I’d been walking in darkness and all of the sudden the darkness was illuminated. It was like somebody laid hands on me. I must have played that record a hundred times.”

By the end of the century, Lead Belly’s influence on American popular music was its own constellation of stars.

Artists covering his songs included Gene Autry, Frank Sinatra, Nat King Cole, Tom Jones, Harry Belafonte, Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, The Beach Boys, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Aerosmith, Lead Zeppelin, Tom Petty and The Grateful Dead.

One day, we'll stop misusing 'woke'

When Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs wrote, “These new rock ‘n’ roll kids should just throw away their guitars and listen to something with real soul, like Lead Belly,” a young musician in Seattle named Kurt Cobain took up his challenge.

Years later, Cobain recalled on an MTV stage: “I’d never heard about Lead Belly before so I bought a couple of records, and now he turns out to be my absolute favorite of all time in music. I absolutely love it more than any rock ’n’ roll I ever heard.”

After he said it, his band Nirvana began to play Huddie William Ledbetter’s “Where Did You Sleep Last Night.”

Our chattering classes, and I include myself among them, have been poor caretakers of the word “woke.”

When this battle over wokeness is finally over, it would do us well to give the word back.

And while we’re at it, maybe we could make the name Huddie Ledbetter, one of America’s most important songwriters, as easily recognizable as say, Ringo Starr.

Phil Boas is an editorial columnist with The Arizona Republic. Email him at phil.boas@arizonarepublic.com. 

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: What does woke mean? Inside the word's musical history