Country music may trace part of its foundation to Lesley Riddle, the one-legged African-American guitarist born June 13, 1905, in Burnsville, North Carolina. While employed at the local cement plant, he lost his right leg at the knee in an industrial accident; during recovery he took up the instrument and cultivated both an idiosyncratic picking approach and a sharp slide technique. In 1928 A.P. Carter encountered Riddle in Kingsport, Tennessee, and absorbed the song “Cannonball” from him. Thereafter Carter regularly drew on Riddle for traditional songs and settings, often bringing him along on collecting excursions. For several years Riddle stayed intermittently at the Carter home in Virginia, where he sometimes coached Maybelle Carter through difficult guitar passages; family lore holds that Sara Carter later gave him a new wooden leg in gratitude.
Riddle relocated to Rochester, New York, in 1942. There, in the mid-1960s, Mike Seeger located him and captured a series of field recordings between 1965 and 1978. From those tapes Rounder Records assembled the 1993 CD Step By Step, which presents Riddle’s work on guitar and piano. His vocal delivery was relaxed yet tinged with fatigue, and his guitar work remained firm and illuminating—qualities that clarify the impression he made on A.P. Carter decades earlier. An artist of notable skill and principle, Riddle left a clear imprint on the Carter Family’s repertoire and sonic character, thereby shaping country music at large. He died July 13, 1980.
