Most music historians date the writing of " The Bourgeois Blues " to Lead Belly 's June 1937 trip to Washington , DC , when he was invited by the folklorist Alan Lomax to record for the Library of Congress 's folk music collection . On the first night Lead Belly and his wife Martha spent in the city , they encountered racially discriminatory Jim Crow laws similar to those found in their native Louisiana : most hotels refused to rent rooms to African Americans and the few that would were either full or refused to serve him because he was with a white man ( Lomax ) . Lomax , in some versions of the story described as an unnamed " white friend " , offered to let the couple stay for the night in his apartment near the Supreme Court Building . The next morning , Lead Belly awoke to Lomax arguing with his landlord about the presence of a black man , with the landlord threatening to call the police .