The Importance of Being Leadbelly
“Women and Liquor, that was his problem. My father got him to marry his girl, Martha, and that settled him for a while, a week or two. He called himself ‘the twelve-string champion guitar player of the world,’ and I guess he was. I never heard anybody who could play it better. He loved being the best. He wanted to stay the best as long as he was alive.”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
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 2535
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page double spaced)
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