In a 1965 issue of “Sing Out!” Folklore researcher Frederic Ramsey Jr. wrote of a man called Leadbelly: “The miracle is that he survived and endured so much for forty-nine years; that he lived to sing uninhibitedly for fifteen more years; and that he died peacefully in a bed.

The odds against this survival were nearly incalculable in the frame of the period and the place to which he was born.” In the course of a life alternately tragic and triumphant, Leadbelly became one of America’s greatest folk singers and composers as well as its leading exponent of the twelve-string guitar.