Reddit reviews Lead Belly Sings for Children

He changed mine too. I'll never forget the process of how I found out about Leadbelly. I was about 10 or 12 years old in the mid 1980s. At the time I was pretty heavily into Led Zeppelin. One day, I noticed that the track "Gallows Pole" on III was credited to someone named "Leadbelly".

My best friend's parents had a very diverse and interesting music collection (also how I found out about Ravi Shankar, but that's another story) which included a few compilation albums with some Leadbelly tracks - Midnight Special and Goodnight Irene being the ones that stand out in my memory. After that I was hooked on him - there was no going back.

A quick look at my iTunes library today shows I have since amassed 25 albums totaling 434 tracks of his songs (probably a few dupes in there). I also have a copy of the Paramount Pictures presentation of the Gordon Parks film "Leadbelly" - you can't bury a black legend like Leadbelly! It's actually a pretty fun film with a great soundtrack by Fred Karlin and has a very early appearance of Ernie Hudson (billed as Earnest L. Hudson).

I just wish that that film was widely available to buy/rent/stream/whatever so I could talk about it with other Leadbelly fans. Seems like it was buried because of the blaxploitation aspect of the film.

So, now I play the album Leadbelly Sings For Children for my 1 year old son. A new generation will come to know and love Leadbelly if I have anything to say about it!