Think you know where 'woke' comes from? Inside the word's musical history – and influence.

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 coming of age 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.

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

A battle over 'woke' in the Republican Party primary

This week 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.

DeSantis vs. Disney feud escalates: Disney nixes $1 billion Florida development, latest casualty in DeSantis' 'war on woke'

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.

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.”

'Woke' emerges with a song about race and suffering

In explaining to The Smithsonian Folkways Collection why he wrote the song "Scottsboro Boys," about the nine African American young men falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama in 1931, Lead Belly admonishes his listeners, “Best stay woke!”

It’s possibly 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. Lead Belly 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. 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.

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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.

'No Lead Belly, no Beatles'

Donegan became “the king” of the British “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.

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 Noble (Prize) Foundation. "That record changed my life right then and there. Transported me into a world I’d never known.

"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.”

The biggest names in many genres sing his songs

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, Led Zeppelin, Tom Petty, the Grateful Dead.

What does 'woke' really mean? Are we debating the meaning of 'woke'? What a waste of time.

A young musician in Seattle named Kurt Cobain said he was inspired after hearing Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs tell an interviewer that the new rock 'n' roll kids should just throw away their guitars and listen to Lead Belly.

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 "Lead Belly" 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, where this column was first published.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Where did the word ‘woke’ come from? Here's what it really means