A million years later, but I can't resist piping up and saying I think Eric Levine (RIP) was right.

"Black girl, black girl, don't lie to me
Tell me where did you sleep last night
In the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t ever shine
I would shiver the whole night through
...
My husband was a railroad man
Killed about a mile from here
His head was found in a driving wheel
But his body never was found"

So... a black woman spent the night in the woods (hiding?) and (or more likely because?) her husband was killed. His head was found in a visible place, but his body was never even found. That doesn't sound like an accident to me.

Might Leadbelly have started singing "Black girl" because he wanted people to actually understand it was violence directed against black bodies?

If you listen to a lot of the "hillbilly"/bluegrass/country versions it's clearly about something else, but I do believe Leadbelly's version at least (and maybe versions from earlier black folks?) is very much about someone who survived a lynching.

My understanding is that black folks arrived in Appalachia mostly as railroad workers – leading to a lot of musical exchanges and songs that would later be recorded and marketed as both “hillbilly” and “race” records, just like this one has versions coming out of both white and black communities. So my speculative stretch is that this husband might have been a black man going into areas – likely as a fairly well-paid worker – that had been just about all-white before.