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09/23/2026

The Roots Of Country Music & The Carter Family

The Carter Family watched a Black man pick guitar for hours. His name was Lesley Riddle, a picker from Kingsport, Tennessee. He said the Carters never sang for him, and he did all the picking and singing. Maybelle Carter, the guitar player in country music's first famous family, later credited him with a style of picking you can hear on their records.

So why did the man she learned from never play on a single one?

He had learned to play the hard way himself. Riddle was born in Burnsville, North Carolina, on June 13, 1905. When he was eight, his mother moved the family over the Tennessee line.

As a young man, he went to work at a cement plant. One account says he tripped on an auger there, and the injury cost him his right leg. While it healed, he took up the guitar.

Then he lost the middle and ring fingers of his right hand. He worked out his own way of picking around the gap, with his thumb, his first finger and his little finger.

That is a hard way to come by a sound of your own.

In Kingsport, Riddle played with a circle of Black musicians that included the bluesman Brownie McGhee. They gathered at a friend's house to play.

Most accounts have him meeting A.P. Carter, the head of the Carter Family, through that circle. They don't agree on the year, late 1927 or 1928. One story, which Maybelle told a young friend, puts the meeting at the Kingsport bus station instead.

Riddle's own memory of it was plain. "I played a couple of songs for him and he wanted me to go back home with him right then and there."

Home for Carter was Maces Spring, Virginia. Riddle went back with him, stayed about a week, and kept returning for the next three or four years.

He said he went out with Carter about fifteen times to hunt for songs. Carter wanted old ones, songs Riddle said "had never been sung in sixty years." "He was going to get it, put a tune to it, and record it," Riddle said.

They worked the hills of southwest Virginia and northeast Tennessee together, and Carter had a tremor that never let up. When someone sang them an old song all the way through, Carter took down the words and Riddle took the tune.

"If I could hear you sing, I could sing it too," Riddle said. "I was his tape recorder."

Back at Maces Spring, he taught each song to the two women in the group. "Then I'd get it and learn it to Sara and Maybelle," he said.

Sara Carter, A.P.'s wife, remembered him coming to stay for weeks at a time to "help us all he could." "He was a good guitarist, and he was a good singer," she said later.

If anybody in your family ever kept a song alive by singing it until the children had it, you know that kind of gift.

The Carters had made their first records in the summer of 1927, for a record man named Ralph Peer. He ran the sessions for the Victor company in Bristol, Tennessee, and took charge of the family's career.

Peer worked for Victor without a salary, taking control of his artists' song copyrights instead. At his urging, A.P. copyrighted the Carter Family's songs, and Peer's own company published them.

So a song could come into Maces Spring in Riddle's head and go out with A.P. Carter's name on the copyright.

A music encyclopedia credits Riddle with composing or passing on several of the songs the Carters recorded. "Hello Stranger" is one, and so is "I Know What It Means to Be Lonesome."

So what did the record business do with the Black man who brought those songs in? In those years it made no records of him at all, as far as anyone has found.

Peer sold music in separate lines by then. He took credit for coining the name of one of them, "race" records, made to be sold to Black buyers. The Carters sold under another, "hillbilly," the old name for country music.

Riddle never stood on a stage with the Carters either. North Carolina's own historical marker account puts that largely down to the Jim Crow customs of the day.

The business had a shelf for Black music and one for the Carters, and the man carrying songs between them fit on neither.

In 1930, by that same state account, Riddle wrote a song for the Carters called "Lonesome for You." He gave them the rights to it in exchange for an artificial leg, to replace the wooden one he walked on.

Nobody should have to pay for that with a song he wrote.

Another version, passed along in record-guide biographies, calls the story a legend and makes it a thank-you gift from Sara Carter. That version doesn't mention the song at all.

The song itself went onto a Carter Family record.

Riddle married Allie Rhea in 1937, and the two of them moved north to Rochester, New York, where she had family. He stopped playing outside of church, and in 1945 he sold his guitar.

For the next twenty years, the music world lost track of him. In Rochester he pressed clothes for a living.

Those songs were still on the Carters' records the whole time.

In the mid-1960s, Maybelle Carter was on the bill at a Johnny Cash show in Los Angeles. After her set, a folklorist on the same bill asked her where she had learned "The Cannonball."

She told him Esley Riddle of Kingsport had taught it to her.

Esley was the Carters' name for him, because one of their little ones couldn't say Lesley. The folklorist, Mike Seeger, went looking for him.

Brownie McGhee, his old friend from the Kingsport circle, told the folklorist to try Rochester. That is where he found Riddle, in 1965.

"He didn't even have a guitar when I met him," Seeger said. Twenty years on, one of the songs Riddle had carried to Maces Spring had come back looking for him.

The folklorist talked him into playing again, first at local clubs with his band, the New Lost City Ramblers. Over the next thirteen years he recorded Riddle on several occasions. Riddle played big folk festivals too.

Allie died in 1976, and soon after, Riddle learned he had lung cancer. He went home to North Carolina and died on July 13, 1979.

He was buried near Burnsville, where he was born. Two of A.P. Carter's children spoke at his funeral.

Every time somebody asks where country music came from, his name belongs in the answer.

Fourteen years after he died, a record label put out an album of his Rochester recordings, called "Step by Step." The title came from a street corner in Rochester, in the years before the folklorist found him.

Riddle worked that corner as a school crossing guard, and he wrote the song watching the children cross. The people who have traced his songs agree that one is his.

That's where I like to leave him, on that corner, holding the traffic back so the children could get across.

I put a lot of effort into researching and sharing stories that matter.
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08/24/2026

The Rock & Blues Connection

Let’s start with the origins of rock ’n’ roll.

Musically, rock ’n’ roll took the rhythm & blues of the 1940s and ’50s, the blues, country, gospel, boogie-woogie, and even swing, and wrapped it all into a ball of excitement that scared the crap out of your parents.

And that’s important.

Your parents weren’t supposed to understand this new sound.

Did the original architects of rock ’n’ roll borrow heavily from Black musicians and Black American musical traditions? One hundred percent. The rhythms, the dancing, the excitement, the danger, the soul, the improvisation—and maybe most importantly, the desire to break away from polite (boring, scripted) convention—were essential ingredients.

That was the genie that artists like Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Buddy Holly, and countless others helped let out of the bottle. Behind the scenes, people like Sam Phillips recognized that something new was happening and helped bring it to a much larger audience.

By the 1950s, teenagers were ready for something different. Mainstream pop could give them How Much Is That Doggie in the Window? Rock ’n’ roll gave them Chuck Berry’s guitar, Little Richard pounding a piano, and Elvis shaking his hips on this exciting new medium called television.

Teenagers were sick of the rules.
It’s also important to understand that first-generation rock ’n’ roll was a grafted music—a glorious mutt of musical styles. There wasn’t one single ingredient that made it rock ’n’ roll. It was the mixture—the rhythm, attitude, danger, excitement, and energy—borrowing freely from blues, country, rhythm & blues, gospel, jump blues, swing, and even bluegrass.

This new-yet-old sound also began reaching a new demographic: young people across racial, ethnic, and economic lines.

Rock ’n’ roll became a meeting place.

The British Invasion: Borrow, Absorb, Grow

Then came The Beatles and The Rolling Stones.

Listen to the early Beatles albums. They’re mixtures of rock ’n’ roll, R&B, Motown, girl-group pop, country, blues, show tunes, and all kinds of other influences. Their early records combined covers with original songs that, remarkably, people are still singing more than 60 years later.
The early Rolling Stones leaned even more heavily into American blues and R&B. They initially thought of themselves largely as an R&B and blues band. They even took their name from Muddy Waters’ Rollin’ Stone.

The blues helped shape their sound.

But something else happened during this period that is every bit as important to understanding rock ’n’ roll. I call it the Growth Prototype.

The Growth Prototype is simple:

Learn from your influences.
Absorb them.
Then keep moving.
Don’t make the same record over and over again.
Expand your musical vocabulary.
Experiment.
Take chances.
Reinvent yourself.
Let your music grow as you grow.

Compare The Beatles of 1964 with The Beatles of 1966 or 1967. It almost sounds like a different band.

That was no accident.

You can trace that same trajectory through The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Kinks, Jimi Hendrix, Grand Funk Railroad, Fleetwood Mac, Led Zeppelin, and countless others.

Fleetwood Mac began as a British blues band deeply indebted to the American blues tradition. Yet with time, personnel changes, experimentation, and new influences, the band became something almost unimaginable from those first recordings.

Led Zeppelin’s first album was saturated with the blues.

But Zeppelin didn’t stop there.

Folk music, acoustic music, Eastern influences, funk, psychedelia, hard rock, unusual rhythms, and experimentation all became part of their vocabulary.

That’s the point: The blues was the foundation—not the fence.

What the Blues Gave Rock Guitar
The blues also brought rock musicians one of their most important skills:

Improvisation.

Behind that tradition lies an even deeper musical lineage—African American work songs, field hollers, spirituals, gospel, and other oral musical traditions where music was learned by listening, imitating, participating, responding, and eventually finding your own voice.

And that is exactly what the blues gave rock guitar players:

A voice.

The blues taught musicians to explore the melodies between the melodies.

The bends.
The slides.
The vibrato.
The shake.
The shimmy.
The blue notes.
The spaces between the notes.
The tiny rhythmic variations that allow two guitarists to play the same five notes and sound completely different.

The blues taught musicians that playing the correct notes is only the beginning.

You have to say something with them.
And eventually, that tradition provided the nitro that helped create one of rock culture’s most recognizable characters:

The Guitar God.

By the mid-1960s, people were literally writing “Clapton Is God” on walls in London. Eric Clapton was barely into his twenties, yet his reputation was already enormous.

Where did his musical vocabulary come from?
The blues.

Clapton immersed himself in players like B.B. King, Freddie King, Albert King, Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, and other American blues musicians.

That same language became central to the playing of Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck, Carlos Santana, and an entire generation of guitar heroes.

Behind those players stood giants such as Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, B.B. King, Elmore James, Albert King, Freddie King, Buddy Guy, Otis Rush and countless others.

The blues vocabulary was being borrowed, amplified, distorted, stretched, and reinvented.
That helped give us Cream, The Yardbirds, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, and eventually Led Zeppelin.

Once again:
Borrow. Absorb. Grow. Reinvent.

The Blues Goes to the Arena
Then came the 1970s.Black Sabbath. Aerosmith. Deep Purple. Humble Pie. KISS. ZZ Top. Queen. Pat Travers. Van Halen. Rush. Grand Funk Railroad.

The music got louder.
The stages got bigger.
The amplifiers got more powerful.
The clothes got crazier.
But underneath much of it, the blues was still there.

You can’t completely separate the blues—and especially the Chuck Berry lineage—from Ace Frehley’s guitar playing.

Joe Perry and Brad Whitford were students of the rock guitarists of the 1960s, who themselves had been students of the blues.

And then there was Edward Van Halen.

Here was arguably the most innovative rock guitarist to emerge during the 1970s—a player who radically expanded what people thought an electric guitar could do.

Tapping.
Harmonics.
Whammy-bar effects.
Rhythmic inventions.
Unorthodox techniques.

A completely different approach to what a rock guitar player—and even a rock band—could sound like.

Yet underneath all those innovations was the blues.

Eddie loved Eric Clapton. He loved Billy Gibbons. He had swing. He had swagger. He had improvisational fearlessness.

And he had something else that goes all the way back through blues culture: that competitive cutting-contest mentality—the idea that when it’s your turn to play, you had better bring something.
Eddie Van Halen didn’t simply copy the blues.
He absorbed it, personalized it, and transformed it.

That is the Growth Prototype in action.
The Blues Underneath Hair Metal
That rock ’n’ roll lineage takes us directly into the 1980s and the hair-metal revolution.
Was the blues still important?
You bet it was.

Listen underneath the distortion, Floyd Rose tremolos, huge drums, hairspray, leather, and spandex.

The blues vocabulary is everywhere.
Van Halen, Cinderella, Whitesnake, Mötley Crüe, and countless others were still connected to that lineage.

And the successful bands continued to grow.
Mötley Crüe’s Live Wire doesn’t sound like Home Sweet Home, and neither sounds exactly like Dr. Feelgood.

That’s important.

Players like Mick Mars didn’t learn to improvise rock guitar solos in a vacuum. They inherited a vocabulary that rock guitarists had been developing for generations.

Pentatonic scales.
Blues scales.
Bends.
Vibrato.
Call and response.
Improvisation.
Phrasing.
Tension and release.

The blues was still underneath the hood.
And so was the other great tradition of rock ’n’ roll:

Reinvention. Growth. Expansion.

Take what you did before and build upon it.
Don’t make the same album every time.

Then Everything Changed

Then came the early 1990s. And Nirvana’s Nevermind became one of the great symbols of that change.

The blues didn’t suddenly disappear from rock music, and neither did great guitar playing. But the culture surrounding the Guitar Hero changed dramatically.

The long guitar solo wasn’t automatically something to celebrate anymore.

Virtuosity could even be viewed with suspicion.
The song moved back to center stage.
Image changed.

Attitude changed.

The definition of a great guitarist changed. Did we even need a great guitar player in the band anymore?

And increasingly, listeners didn’t necessarily need to know the name of the person playing guitar.

There were plenty of exceptions.

Pearl Jam kept one foot firmly planted in the great rock-guitar tradition, and mad props to Mike McCready for carrying that blues-influenced torch into the 1990s. Players like Slash, who emerged just before the grunge explosion, also proved that blues-based guitar could still fill arenas.

But something had undeniably shifted.
Think about the previous generations.
Clapton. Hendrix. Page. Beck. Blackmore. Gibbons. Iommi. Frehley. Perry. Lifeson. Van Halen. Rhoads.

Rock fans knew the players.

The guitarist wasn’t simply somebody standing behind the singer. The guitarist was part of the identity of the band.

Beginning in the 1990s, that tradition became less central to mainstream rock culture. There were still incredible guitarists everywhere, but the age when the guitar hero stood near the center of popular culture was beginning to fade.

Know the Lineage
So when somebody tells you that “the blues has no business in rock ’n’ roll”—or that it doesn’t belong in hard rock or hair metal—know the history before you make that judgment.

Rock ’n’ roll has always been a hybrid.

It borrowed.
It absorbed.
It stole.
It mixed cultures.
It mixed musical languages.
It rebelled against what came before it.

And then the best musicians did something even more important:

They made those influences their own.
The blues isn’t the entirety of rock ’n’ roll.

Country mattered.
Gospel mattered.
R&B mattered.
Swing mattered.
Soul mattered.
Funk mattered.
Pop mattered.
Folk mattered.

And as rock evolved, countless other musical traditions entered its bloodstream.

But the blues runs through the history of rock ’n’ roll like a deep underground river.

Chuck Berry heard it.
The Rolling Stones heard it.
Clapton heard it.
Hendrix heard it.
Page heard it.
Iommi heard it.
Frehley heard it.
Gibbons heard it.
Van Halen heard it.

And generation after generation took that language and asked the same question every creative musician eventually has to ask:

“What can I do with this that hasn’t been done before?”

That is the real rock-and-blues connection.
The lesson isn’t simply to play the blues.
The lesson is to understand what generations of great rock musicians did with it:

Learn the roots.
Absorb the language.
Find your voice.

Then grow beyond the template.

08/22/2026

I nearly forgot about this! Andy and Barry were next door at Criteria in Miami while Eagles were working on Hotel California and they brought me over to check out Andy’s solo record. I dug the tunes and then everyone looked at me as if I should do something… so I did! Did the solo on “Love is Thicker than Water” (uncredited) and played lead on “I Just Want to Be Your Everything” and they both went to #1! What a beautiful soul and talent taken too young. Thanks for the memories.