'Sheila Curran Bernard is the first to give us a biographical book on Huddie Ledbetter as he really was: a complicated man tactically negotiating a complex, racist, and overwhelmingly unforgiving world.' Gustavus Stadler, author of Woody Guthrie: An Intimate Life

'Sheila Curran Bernard rescues the legendary 'Lead Belly' from a swirl of fabrication and racist presumption, and simultaneously illuminates the systemized oppression that cruelly stalked Black artists and ensured, for a century after the ostensible end of slavery, that bitter chords of racial injustice would remain as central to the American chorus as any melodies of freedom.' Douglas A. Blackmon, author of Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II, Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

'A beautiful tribute to Lead Belly's legacy. This book will forever change the way we think about one of America's most iconic musical legends and one of its most misunderstood.' Talitha L. LeFlouria, author of Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South

'Bernard's valiant and impressively researched book is an attempt to reclaim Ledbetter from an implicitly racist narrative. Through close examination of arrest, trial and prison records, sharecropping reports, newspaper articles and oral histories contextualised by a deep understanding of American civil-rights history, she demonstrates how Ledbetter was far from a career criminal, but rather a victim of successive injustices and appalling conflicts of interest in a brutal system explicitly designed to provide enslaved work-forces and deny black rights in the post-reconstruction Southern states.... It isn't hard to draw a line from the public fear and fascination with Lead Belly to the gangsta rap controversies of more recent times. Bring Judgement Day is an overdue redress.' Neil McCormick, Sunday Telegraph

'A revelatory volume that rescues its subject from misconceptions that still circulate, enabling us to see more clearly a composer and performer who was the peer of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Bessie Smith.' Duncan Wu, The Spectator

'The portrait that emerges is of a man who defined himself as 'a musician, song composer and a dancer' and whose legacy deserves better than the demeaning characterization that's persisted for decades. Essential for musicologists and fans of folk music.' Kirkus Reviews

'[A] new and vitally important biographical study.... Lead Belly has, in many ways, remained hidden in the shadows behind myths, half-truths, and, in some cases, willful misrepresentations of him, his times, and his cultural and social significance as a Black musician in an America still rent by 'Jim Crow's lies.'.... Sheila Curran Bernard has exhumed this narrative and reexamined it, exposing (or, more accurately, insisting on acknowledging) the contradictions that have long compromised it.' David Whiteis, Living Blues