Saturday, June 12, 2010

"Born With a Broken Heart" by Kenny Wayne Shepherd



This song is a favourite of mine, which explains so much; shown here recorded before a live audience in 1996, Born With a Broken Heart is the first song on Kenny Wayne Shepherd's first album Ledbetter Heights, and showed that straight out of the gate the boy was a man.

The actual Ledbetter Heights - also known as 'St. Paul's Bottoms' - is a traditionally black neighbourhood and former red-light district in Shreveport*, an area which spawned blues god Huddie 'Leadbelly' Ledbetter and was later named after him in an effort to rehabilitate the district's image...
All of which begs the question: what kind of a sorry state would a neighbourhood have to be in that naming it after a blues musician would improve it?

*Kenny Wayne Shepherd's hometown, yo.
*
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1 comment:

michael sean morris said...

How badly does a neighbourhood have to be doing for it to be an improvement to name it after a blues singer?