Lesley Riddle was born on June 13, 1905, in Burnsville, North Carolina, and grew up in Kingsport, where his mother brought the family to live with his grandparents. As a teenager he lost his right leg below the knee in an accident at the Clinchfield cement plant. While he recovered he took up guitar and mandolin. He later lost two fingers of his picking hand, and accounts differ on how. He rebuilt his style around the thumb, index and little finger.
Lyons's house in Kingsport
In Kingsport, Riddle played with Black musicians who gathered at John Henry Lyons's home, among them Brownie McGhee and Steve Tarter. A. P. Carter, a Virginia song hunter, met him there in the late 1920s. Accounts put the year anywhere from 1926 to 1928, and a highway marker in Burnsville dates their work together 1928 to 1937.
Carter needed someone who could hold a tune the first time he heard it. Riddle called himself a "human tape recorder," memorizing melodies while A. P. wrote down words. By Riddle's own count they made about fifteen trips over three or four years, through southwest Virginia, east Tennessee and western North Carolina, traveling together through the segregated South and stopping in Black churches and communities. Back home, Riddle stayed for weeks at the Carter home in Maces Spring, Virginia, and taught the songs to Sara and Maybelle.
What he handed over
"The Cannon Ball," "I Know What It Means to Be Lonesome," "Coal Miner Blues" and "Let the Church Roll On" reached the Carters through him. In one account he wrote "Lonesome for You" in 1930 and gave up its rights in exchange for an artificial leg. Maybelle Carter credited him with the thumb-and-index picking behind what became known as the Carter Scratch. Riddle said she needed no lessons and learned by watching, and the two claims have never been fully reconciled.
He never recorded with the Carters or appeared with them on stage, an outcome usually put down to Jim Crow custom. Accounts of when the partnership ended run from the early 1930s to 1937. He married in 1937 and moved to Rochester, New York, in 1942. He lost touch with the family, sold his guitar and worked as a shoeshine boy, a presser and a school crossing guard.
The tape that stayed
In the 1960s Maybelle Carter named him as the source of "The Cannon Ball," and the folk musician Mike Seeger went looking for the man she meant. He found Riddle in Rochester and recorded him from 1965 to 1978. Riddle played the Newport, Mariposa and Smithsonian folk festivals, and after his wife died in 1976 he performed more. He died in 1979 and is buried in Burnsville. Rounder Records issued the Seeger sessions in 1993 as "Step by Step: Lesley Riddle Meets the Carter Family." North Carolina put up its marker in 2014, and he appears in the first episode of the 2019 documentary series Country Music.
Start at Long Island of the Holston, in the Kingsport where Riddle grew up. Then drive to Bristol State Street, where the Carters first recorded in 1927.