Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker, writer, and educator, exploring the power of narrative to advance public understanding of and engagement with complex subjects and ideas.
Pub date July 11, 2024!
Canada, US, and Europe
Known worldwide as Lead Belly, Huddie Ledbetter (1889–1949) is an American icon whose influence on modern music was tremendous – as was, according to legend, the temper that landed him in two of the South's most brutal prisons, while his immense talent twice won him pardons. But as this deeply researched book shows, these stories were shaped by the white folklorists who 'discovered' Lead Belly and, along with reporters, recording executives, and radio and film producers, introduced him to audiences beyond the South. Through a revelatory examination of arrest, trial, and prison records; sharecropping reports; oral histories; newspaper articles; and more, author Sheila Curran Bernard replaces myth with fact, offering a stunning indictment of systemic racism in the Jim Crow era of the United States and the power of narrative to erase and distort the past.
About
Sheila Curran Bernard is an Emmy and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker with credits on nearly 50 hours of prime-time broadcast, theatrical, and giant screen programming, including the acclaimed theatrical documentary Slavery by Another Name. She is also the author of two books on filmmaking: Documentary Storytelling: Creative Nonfiction on Screen, now in its fifth edition and widely translated, and with Kenn Rabin, Archival Storytelling: Finding, Using, and Licensing Third-Party Visuals and Music, a book for media makers working in fiction as well as nonfiction. Over a period of ten years, she worked on five series for the acclaimed production company Blackside, in Boston, including Eyes on the Prize, I’ll Make Me a World, America’s War on Poverty, Hopes on the Horizon, and This Far by Faith.
In 2005, Bernard served as the Anschutz Distinguished Fellow in American Studies at Princeton University. In 2008 she joined the faculty at the University at Albany, SUNY, where she is an associate professor in the Department of History and director of the Graduate Program in Public History. She received the SUNY Chancellor’s Awards and the UAlbany President’s Awards for Excellence in Academic Service and for Excellence in Scholarship & Creative Activities.
Bernard has been awarded residencies at MacDowell and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and received the Geri Ashur fellowship in playwriting/screenwriting from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). In 2021, she received a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar Award, support for Bring Judgment Day: Reclaiming Lead Belly's Truths from Jim Crow's Lies, to be published in July 2024 by Cambridge University Press.
