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Article: Blind Lemon meets Leadbelly.(Blind Lemon Jefferson, Huddie Ledbetter)
- Article from:
- Black Music Research Journal
- Article date:
- March 22, 2000
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2000 Center For Black Music Research. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly, was arguably the most famous African-American folk singer in U.S. history. (1) Born in 1889 in Caddo Parish, Louisiana (near Shreveport), Leadbelly grew up in an almost entirely black world at the beginning of the decade when the most virulent Jim Crow laws were passed across the United States. His life and music mediated between Reconstruction and post-industrial America; he grew up on a small farm owned by his sharecropping parents, rode horses, and carried a pistol but ended up living in Greenwich Village at the dawn of the modern Civil Rights movement. He died in 1949, just before Joseph McCarthy's Communist witch-hunts ...