Fannin Street and the World Huddie Ledbetter Learned In
Near Shreveport, Louisiana
Some time around nineteen oh three, a teenager from Mooringsport made his way into Shreveport and found himself on Fannin Street. His name was Huddie William Ledbetter, and he had been playing music since his uncle Terrell first put an accordion in his hands. What Fannin Street offered was an education no school in rural Louisiana provided.
The street ran through St. Paul's Bottoms, the city's red-light district, which operated legally from nineteen oh three to nineteen seventeen. Saloons, brothels, and dance halls lined the block.
Every style of music circulating through the American South passed through those rooms: blues, ragtime, the twelve-string guitar picking of east Texas, the field holler of the Delta. Ledbetter absorbed all of it. He was, by any measure, an extraordinary musician with a baritone so commanding that folklorist John Lomax would later describe it as stunning, and a twelve-string guitar technique that seemed mechanically improbable for one pair of hands.
His life was repeatedly interrupted by violence and imprisonment. He served time in Texas for homicide in nineteen eighteen. He was later convicted of attempted murder in Louisiana and sent to Angola State Penitentiary in nineteen thirty.
It was there, in nineteen thirty-three, that John Lomax and his teenage son Alan arrived with portable aluminum disc equipment to record folk songs for the Library of Congress. They found Ledbetter performing for the prison population and were immediately astonished. He was released on August first, nineteen thirty-four, having served the minimum of his sentence.
Lomax hired him as a driver and guide for continuing field recordings across the South. Ledbetter went to New York in nineteen thirty-five and befriended Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. He wrote or popularized songs that became American standards: Goodnight Irene, Midnight Special, Black Betty, Cotton Fields.
The Weavers' recording of Goodnight Irene reached number one on the charts in nineteen fifty, the year after Ledbetter died of ALS in New York City. The neighborhood where he first learned to play on Fannin Street is now called Ledbetter Heights.
