Anthony Zierhut

I’ve sort of rediscovered the guitar. I say sort of because I never really stopped playing. It’s just that sometime after 1979 it stopped being the center of my life and sometime after 1990 it stopped being a daily activity. But it’s coming back, and one of the reasons is my self education of the blues. I did this little sketch this evening of Leadbelly – real name Huddie Ledbetter – who lived an amazing, if not checkered, life and left behind a treasure of early 20th century blues and folk music. I’ve read somewhere that he supposedly had a repertoire of about 800 songs, many of which he composed himself. The sketch above is from a pretty good photo I found on-line. Wikipedia has a fairly good biography, and the Lomax family’s web site has a fascinating timeline of the careers of Leadbelly and John Lomax, the man who discovered him in a Louisiana penitentiary in the 1930s, and first started to record Leadbelly’s music.

This weekend I’ll be helping to make Halloween costumes for the kids. My preferred medium, for the last six years or so, has been cutting, glueing and painting upholstery foam. You can make just about anything with it. The kids love to design everything – from their costumes to the pumpkins we carve. Halloween’s a great opportunity for rampant free expression and culturally condoned eccentricity.