📍Mooringsport, LA 71060, USA
1888 – 1903“I was born Huddie William Ledbetter on the Jeter Plantation near Mooringsport, Louisiana, close to the Texas border, in the late 1880s, the son of Sally and Wes Ledbetter, who farmed the land. Mooringsport was a small town on the shore of Caddo Lake, with its cypress trees hung with Spanish moss, and my family moved across the border into Texas when I was about five, before coming back to the lake country. My uncle, Terrell Ledbetter, gave me my first instrument, an accordion, and he taught me to play it and the basics of the guitar. By my early teens I was playing at sukey jumps, the country dances in the area, and I could sing, dance and play all night long. People called me a musicianer. Then I started going into Shreveport, the nearest city, to Fannin Street, a row of saloons, dance halls and other places in St. Paul's Bottom, where I heard every kind of music, from blues to ragtime to the barrelhouse piano, though my mother begged me not to go. By 1903 I was playing parties in Mooringsport, and soon I left home, working in the cotton fields between Shreveport and Dallas during the week and playing at dances on the weekends. I took up the twelve-string guitar, and I became the King of the Twelve-String. I had hard times and spent years in prison, but my singing helped win my freedom. Then John and Alan Lomax recorded me, and I went to New York, where my songs, Goodnight, Irene, Midnight Special and Where Did You Sleep Last Night, inspired folk and rock musicians for generations. Mooringsport remembers me as its own, and Shreveport honours me with a statue on Texas Street.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today