Whats the relationship to Lead Belly in rock and roll?
Well, Lead Belly was the favorite singer and the model for a young Irish guitar player, ballad singer, named Lonnie Donegan who grew up in Liverpool. Lonnie Donegan sang all of Lead Belly’s song and copyrighted some of them in his own name, but he popularized not only Lead Belly’s songs, but his style, his guitar playing style from Louisiana, under the title “skiffle music.” And skiffle music, in the 50s, was the rage among the young people all over Great Britain, and the songs were big in America too for a while, and it was directly from that skiffle music that the young singers of Liverpool like the Beatles and others got their idea about how to make American songs. Tell us about Woody Guthrie. I’ll never forget the first time I saw Woody. We were doing a benefit for this Spanish cause, the Spanish Loyalists who were fighting against Franco, and Woody was on the show. It was one of the first nights he was in New York. He stepped out on the stage, this little tiny guy, big bushy hair,
