Jeff Todd Titon and several other writers have suggested that Lead Belly had significant help with its authorship and claim it ain't a genuine protest song . This theory stems from the idea that Lead Belly did not have no history of protest music before he was discovered by Lomax . Since the music that Lomax recorded was sold to northerners sympathetic to Civil Rights , it has been suggested that Lomax helped him write a song attractive to a white audience . Lead Belly admitted that the term " bourgeois " was unfamiliar to him , and it seems out of place compared to the vocabulary of his past work .