Windjammer Accordion and Leadbelly/How the Beckers Met

Now, I have found validation for my last 15 years of accordion mania....

It turns out the Leadbelly (Huddie Ledbetter) not only sang and played the 12 string guitar, but also played a single row diatonic accordion called a windjammer.   I've got a picture of him with it that I'll load below this when I figure out how.

Here's the story of how he got the accordion (he had talked to his parents to get him some kind of instrument he could play)..

"When Huddie was seven, this dream came true when his Uncle Terrell dropped by the house, returning by mule from Mooringsport. A "windjammer" (a small button accordion) hung from the saddle and he gave it to his excited nephew. Huddie worked on it all evening and into the night, trying to find the proper combination of rhythm and buttons to make a tune. His experience wore down Sallie and Wes's patience, but they understood his enthusiasm. By morning Huddie had mastered a rough version of "There's No Cornbread Here." A few days later his mother taught him an old jig called "Dinah's Got A Wooden Leg." Soon she was adding to his repertoire some of the lullabies and sprituals she sang in church, and Huddie was learning that the windjammer could be as much at home in church as it was at the local square dance."


From "The Life and Legend of Leadbelly," by Charles Wolf and Kip Lornell (1992)
In 1940 Woody Guthrie lived with Leadbelly in a NYC apartment.  He wrote to Henrietta Yurchenco, stating:  "Huddie plays a little old $4 accordion and you can actually hear the sad note[s] of his people singing in the swamps and jungles and echoing in the Louisiana moss.   And when you hear it you almost know that it's [the] sad and losensome music of a people [sic] can't even vote."

My parents also have a Leadbelly connection sort of.   Abe and Harriet met at an adult camp somewhere in Western New Jersey called Nature Friends.   This was apparently an international socialist/ecological movement of camps that started in Europe.   Well, one day Harriet's friend Dorothy Nadel talked mom into going up to this camp to check it out (probably around 1938, Harriet age 26.)    Apparently Dot pointed out this large family clan and said "there's the crazy Beckers."  The rest was love and history.  Well the Leadbelly connection was that my parents always remembered hearing Leadbelly sing at the Nature Friends camp.

(By the way, they did go back to camp)