Unlike most modern 12-strings, which are designed to be tuned to E like a standard six-string guitar, old Stellas were set up to be tuned down to D or C. It appears that Leadbelly had started playing a 12-string guitar sometime in the 1920s and after his got his freedom he bought a new Stella very much like the one here. In 1933, the folklorist John Lomax heard Lead Belly perform on a song collecting trip and helped get him pardoned and released from prison. He had a nasty temper and wound up in prison numerous times for fighting, and in one instance, manslaughter. Lead Belly was born in Louisiana in the 1880s and learned to play guitar, piano, accordion, mandolin, violin and harmonica. (Check out Gregg Miner’s site for a good overview of the current thinking on the early history of the 12-string guitar.) They didn’t make much of an impact in the general guitar market but in the 1920s they were popular with Mexican musicians in the border sates and with blues players like Barbecue Bob, Blind Willie McTell, Lonnie Johnson and, perhaps the most famous 12-stringer of them all, Huddie Ledbetter, who is better known by his nickname, Lead Belly. The origins of the 12-string guitar are fairly mysterious but from what we know they first started appearing in builder’s catalogs sometime in the very late 1890s.
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