17. He fathered two children by the age of 16, and local outrage forced him to go and seek his fortune
As his socially-ascendant parents no doubt feared, the influence of Shreveport rubbed off on young Leadbelly. Aged 15, with hardly any income, he fathered his first child, but instead of learning from the experience he was a father again within the year. Both were, of course, out of wedlock, and locals were outraged at Leadbelly’s gung-ho approach to the fairer sex and fatherhood. Coupled with his parents’ relatively good social standing, the pressure on the family was intense from all sides. But, luckily, Leadbelly knew just what he had to do…
‘Soon as my mamma put long pants on me, I flew out the do[or]’, Leadbelly later remembered. In the face of the scandal, Leadbelly simply gathered up his instruments and headed into the sunset to become a travelling minstrel. In the most romantic of all music stories, he fed himself for the next few years by playing shows in every town he arrived at. When times were tough, he fell back on his other area of expertise, agricultural labour. Of his early travels, Leadbelly once boasted that he would ‘make it’ with 10 women a night.
