African-American musician Lesley Riddle influenced country music through his association with A.P. Carter of the Carter Family, introducing Carter to songs of African American origin that Carter reconfigured for the family’s repertoire and helping him transcribe and adapt songs and hymns collected across southern Appalachia. Nicknamed “Esley,” Riddle was born in Burnsville, North Carolina, on June 13, 1905, and grew up with his paternal grandparents near Kingsport, Tennessee. After an injury at the Penn-Dixie cement plant led to the amputation of his right leg at the knee, he began playing guitar during his recovery and associated with other African American musicians, including Brownie McGhee. In 1928, he met A.P. Carter, who was seeking songs for the Carter Family’s recording sessions, and the two formed a friendship and working relationship, traveling through southwest Virginia, eastern Tennessee, and western North Carolina on songcatching trips that sometimes lasted for weeks. When they found a song that appealed to Carter, Carter wrote down the lyrics while Riddle remembered the melody, and Riddle then taught the songs to Sara and Maybelle Carter; Sara later recalled that “The Cannonball” came directly into the Carter Family repertoire from Riddle himself. Because segregated accommodations posed difficulties, Riddle would stay at Carter’s house in Maces Spring, Virginia, when they were gathering songs nearby. After the Great Depression began in 1929 and record sales fell sharply, Carter could no longer afford to pay Riddle by the early 1930s. Riddle married in 1937 and moved near his wife’s family in Rochester, New York, in 1942, where he worked as a clothes presser, shoe-shine parlor operator, and school crossing guard. By the early 1960s, the Carter Family’s repertoire was recognized as foundational American music, and after Maybelle Carter told Mike Seeger about Riddle, Seeger located him through Brownie McGhee in 1965, interviewed and recorded him extensively, and brought him to several folk festivals. After becoming ill, Riddle returned to the South to live with his brother in Asheville, North Carolina, where he died on July 13, 1979.