He's just a name on a lot of lists: the fourth or fifth name on a list of influences, never first, and all too often not mentioned at all where appropriate. He's also an ex-convict, who was a sweet old man only while sober, which wasn't often enough. But by looking at the people he influenced, you can see that Huddie Ledbetter, Leadbelly, was redeemable no matter what he did aside from making music. The self-proclaimed "King of the Twelve-String Guitar" was more aptly the "Godfather of the Twelve-String Gui-tar," being inducted to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988 as an influence. He died poor and pitiful of a form of multiple sclerosis, and six months afterward his first hit song was a million-seller for another group. And every generation thereafter earned a new respect for a band that used one of

Encyclopedia of Black America. c1981, McGraw-Hill. Page 502

Among the hundreds of recordings Ledbetter laid down for the Lomax's cause, many were spirituals sang in prisons, a look at a life few would ever get to know. Admittedly, most of the songs were not writ-ten by Ledbetter, but had his own special guitar work behind it - enough to garner w writing credit for him-self and Lomax. Many of these songs go back to the days of slavery, and some are everyday prison worker songs, designed to pass time. Leadbelly had the voice and talent with a guitar to make these songs avail-able even to those that may never know what it's really like to be in a true state of trouble.

On December 6, 1949, Leadbelly died in Bellevue Hospital in New York. Although he was very popular - he had played in Europe earlier that year for the only time - Ledbetter died broke. One of his colleagues in the folk scene, Pete Seeger, had formed The Weavers the year before. The Weavers earned fame from Leadbelly's own "Goodnight Irene" six months after Leadbelly passed on, making more money than Leadbelly would ever have seen. Ledbetter and Seeger knew each other from their political connec-tions, and often played together at rallies for assorted causes. Seeger always had a lot of respect for Led-better, and was quoted as wishing Leadbelly could have lived only a little longer to see success at last. Seeger, having made a fortune in 1950, tried his hand at a television career, and was found by Senator Joe McCarthy to be a communist. As a result, he was blacklisted until 1966 from any public display, and he never gained much success hence.

 The study guides from this class offered a lot of direction as to which artists to look to, including Lonnie Donnagan and a little bit on "The House of the Rising Sun."

In the 1990s, two very different guitar legends covered Leadbelly in the same manner: on MTV's Un-plugged program. In 1992, Eric Clapton, arguably one of the greatest guitar players of all time, covered "Alberta" on his 1992 set. This song was done quite a bit in his concerts of the early eighties, but when laid down for the Unplugged session, he really nailed it perfectly, according to many critics. Two years later, in 1994, Nirvana played a session for Unplugged in New York, a city that Leadbelly rose to promi-nence in. The set-closer of this final recorded show was "Where Did You Sleep Last Night," a moving song about a man who's asking his wife where she was the night before. Kurt Cobain, the frontman for the band, made a joke prior to starting the song about how he was recently propositioned Leadbelly's guitar for $200,000 and how his label's president/owner, David Geffin, wouldn't buy it for him. The irony was that Leadbelly himself could never make that much money for one of his guitars. Cobain and a cellist per-formed most of the song, and it sounded much less hokey than Leadbelly's original. The large difference is in how Leadbelly managed to sound convincing in his hidden threat that if the woman were out with an-other man he would certainly kill him. Cobain didn't sound threatening, rather he sounded sad, almost dis-appointed.

One song Leadbelly laid down for the Library of Congress' Archive of Folk Song was "In New Or-leans," his own spin on "House of the Rising Sun," written in 1928, ten years prior by Texas Alexander. The Ledbetter spin was that he changed the perspective from the female perspective to the male point-of-view. While Bob Dylan (no stranger to seeing his songs made famous by others) and several others have recorded the song in Alexander's style, contemporarily credited to Dave Van Ronk, the song that the Ani-mals made their fortune on was lyric-for-lyric more of a match to Leadbelly's version. Th

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)