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Lesley Riddle's music finally gaining recognition

LESLEY RIDDLE

 

KINGSPORT — Lesley Riddle is what some would call an “unsung hero” of country music.

That’s because until recently, Riddle, an African-American musician from Kingsport, had gained little recognition for the important contributions to the music he made as a contemporary of the Carter Family.

Riddle was born in Burnsville, N.C., in 1905 and moved to Kingsport a short time later. He had a rough life coming up — a gun accident took two fingers on his picking hand and he lost a leg during an industrial mishap in Kingsport — and he didn’t make his living with music, never finding fame or fortune playing guitar or singing songs. But what he did accomplish left a lasting mark on the Carters and the history of country music.

According to folk musician and folklorist Mike Seeger, A.P. Carter — the famous song collector and patriarch of the Carter Family — met Riddle at the house of Kingsport musician John Henry Lyons and the two formed what Seeger called a “special friendship.”

Fresh off the now famous “Bristol Sessions” of 1927, Carter was in need of more songs to record for the Victor label, Seeger said.

“A.P. and Lesley Riddle struck up a friendship, and A.P. invited him up to Poor Valley,” Seeger said. “Lesley came up there for maybe as much as a week, and while he was up there, Maybelle picked up several songs from him, including “The Cannonball,” and Lesley also picked up some songs from them, which is a familiar story in country music. It’s that exchange between black and white musicians that really made American music American.”

Riddle’s fingerstyle guitar playing, which he learned from African-American musicians like Gate City’s Steve Tarter, also influenced the technique of Maybelle Carter, Seeger said, who learned to play the “Piedmont” blues and “Bottleneck” slide styles of guitar from him.

Besides “The Cannonball,” several other songs in the Carter Family’s catalog were either taught to them by Riddle or bear some of his influence. Some of those included “Bear Creek Blues,” “Blow My Blues Away,” “I Know What it Means to Be Lonesome,” “Let the Church Roll On” and “Lonesome For You.”

It was because of Riddle, who is described as a human tape recorder, that Carter was able to collect as many songs as he did from African-Americans, especially those in and around Kingsport, said ETSU professor of Appalachian Studies Ted Olson, who wrote an essay on Riddle for Harvard’s “African-American National Biography.”

“A.P. was able to gain access to the African-American community and its musicians that he probably wouldn’t have been able to gain if he had not been spending time with Lesley Riddle,” Olson said. “Look at the number of songs the Carter family recorded that had blues in it, and that will give you a sense that they were getting access to African-American musical communities.”

While many of the songs the Carter family picked up from Riddle were blues numbers, he played more than just the one style, Seeger said.

“Some of the things he did I wouldn’t hardly call blues, just songs,” he said. “A lot of people say that black people just did the blues, but they sang songs and ballads too, and the music was unique because it was based on a different experience and heritage.”

The working relationship between the two men was a symbiotic one, Olson said. A.P was an avid song collector, known to leave Virginia for weeks at a time to find the right songs. While Carter had a love for music, he wasn’t much of a musician, which was Riddle’s strength, he said.

“It’s often said that A.P was the word man, he remembered the lyrics,” Olson said. “And Lesley Riddle was very strong in composition skills, he knew how to translate a melody to paper, so that’s how they complemented each other so well, they both had talents and they were in complementary areas. You might say that A.P. Carter needed Lesley in those early years for effective song catching.”

Many times those trips to find songs led the pair far from the hills of Southwest Virginia. Traveling around the Deep South during the Jim Crow era was not always easy, though. Riddle would drive on the trips, as was customary for that time. On the road, they would spend the night in different residences and go out of their way to look for eateries that would serve them both, Seeger said, although it didn’t always work out.

On a trip to Florida looking for songs, Carter’s respect for Riddle was shown when they stopped at a diner in Georgia to eat. When the restaurant refused to serve Riddle, the two men abruptly left and returned to Poor Valley.

“A.P. got hungry and he went in the front door and Lesley around the back, and they wouldn’t even serve him there,” Seeger said. “So he went back in the front door and said. ‘Mr. Carter, they won’t serve me out back.’ So they both walked out, got in the car without a word and Leslie turned the car around and they went back to Virginia.”

After nearly five years, Riddle parted ways with the Carters. He married in the late 1930s and moved to Rochester, N.Y., with his wife in 1942. Not long after that, he sold his guitar and gave up music for nearly 18 years before he was discovered by Seeger, who learned about Riddle from Maybelle Carter, in 1963.

Seeger would eventually talk Riddle into taking up music again and help him record his only record, “Step by Step,” which was released by Rounder Records 14 years after his death, in 1979.

After years of obscurity due to the fact he gave up music and the racial norms of the time, Riddle is starting to get some recognition for his contribution to country music. He’s also been featured on a PBS documentary about the Carter Family and was covered in detail in a chapter of the Carter Family biography “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone.”

His home town of Burnsville recognized him last year with the first “Riddle Fest,” now an annual event held in his honor during February, and even named a recording studio in his honor in the town’s Mountain Heritage Center.

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