William "Cat Iron" Carradine
Cat-Iron' was not his actual nickname, but a mishearing of his surname.
William Carradine was quite an old man when he encountered Frederic Ramsey (music researcher), who encouraged him to play blues music. William was not interested in blues music, because he was religious and considered blues the devil's music. Fred was in Natchez MS in 1957 when he met a sax-player, Thermond Monroe, who told him about an old guy who could be interesting to him. Thermond borrowed a guitar from a neighbor and asked William to sing his Gospel tunes and ‘spirituals’. Eventually William was persuaded to sing some Blues songs, and six of these appeared on a Folkways album, alongside some of his religious numbers.

Aaron Thibeaux "T-Bone" Walker a.k.a. Oak Cliff T-Bone
A phonetic spelling of his second name, t-bone also refers to a t-bone steak.
Walker was a gifted dancer who taught himself guitar. Around 1925 he joined Dr. Breeding's Big B Tonic medicine show (see medicine shows), then toured the South with blues artist Ida Cox. In 1929 in Dallas he cut his first record, "Wichita Falls Blues," under the name Oak Cliff T-Bone, using the name of his Dallas neighborhood.
In 1935 Walker moved to Los Angeles, where he quickly made a name for himself singing and playing banjo, and then guitar (see info T-Bone's guitar), for Black audiences in two popular nightclubs, Little Harlem and Club Alabam. Crowds of fans were attracted to his acrobatic performances, which combined playing and tap dancing, and in 1935 he became the first blues guitarist to play the electric guitar.
In the early 1960s T-Bone joined Count Basie's orchestra, appeared in Europe with a package called Rhythm and Blues, U.S.A., and played at the American Folk Blues Festival and Jazz at the Philharmonic.
Among those he influenced were B. B. King, Pee Wee Crayton, Eric Clapton, Albert Collins, and Johnny Winter. Many titles from Walker's more than four decades of recording have been reissued.
T-Bone will always be remembered for one of his best songs "Stormy Monday".

Booker "Bukka" T. Washington White
Bukka (Booker) was named after the African-American educator and civil rights activist Booker T. (Taliaferro) Washington.
Bukka was one of the most expressive vocalists and powerful slide guitarists in the blues (see Bukka's guitar). He recorded such classics as “Shake ‘Em On Down” and “Fixin’ to Die Blues” between 1930 and 1940 under the names Washington White or Bukka White. An important influence on his cousin B. B. King, White enjoyed a second career as a performer and recording artist beginning in 1963.

Booker T. (Taliaferro) Jones
Booker T was named after the African-American educator and civil rights activist Booker T. (Taliaferro) Washington.
He is an American multi-instrumentalist, songwriter, record producer, and arranger. Best known as the front man of the band Booker T. & the MGs. One of his first recording “Green Onions” was an international sensation, selling more than one million copies and winning a place among Rolling Stone’s top five hundred songs of all time.

The first piece is a 1935 March of Time newsreel, produce by March of Time newsreel company. It is a reenactment of when Leadbelly was discovered by John Lomax in Angola State Penitentiary, though state officials denied the legend of Leadbelly's singing getting him out of present, and showing that prison records showed he was due after serving the minimum sentence and for good behavior. Lomax and Leadbelly play themselves in this.

The second piece is a 1945 film created by Chinese-American designer and sculptor Wah Ming Chang. Chang began a join venture with Branding Sloan and the East-West Film Company and filmed Ledbetter for a film called "Pick a Bale of Cotton" in 1944. Though Ledbetter filmed 6 songs, only 3 have survived, and is now known as "Three Songs by Leadbelly" after edited by Pete Seeger. 

Burl C. "Jaybird" Coleman
In the army he developed a reputation for being stubbornly independent, often disobeying the Army's strict code of conduct. As a result, his superior officers would call him Jaybird, a nickname associated with him for the rest of his life. J-bird is short for jailbird.
Jaybird joined the Birmingham Jug Band, in which he played harmonica. He worked with minstrel shows and as a solo artist before his death in June, 1950 in Tuskegee, Alabama. His singing and playing are a compromise between field hollers and blues. His falsetto voice range and harp playing connect together like a call or a response as is done in work song. Like so many bluesmen, Jaybird's recorded repertoire easily moves between the secular and the sacred.

James "Bo Weavil" Jackson (also known as Sam Butler)
The man called “Bo Weavil” is said to have truly been named James Jackson (or perhaps James Butler or Sam Butler) and is believed to have hailed from Alabama, probably born sometime in the 1890s. He was playing for spare change on a Birmingham street corner when he was “discovered” by record salesman and talent scout Harry Charles in 1926, who referred him to Chicago to make some records for Paramount (he was one of the first country bluesmen to be recorded for Paramount Records and Vocalion Records).
Bo Weavil is phonetic spelling of Boll Weevil, a small snout beetle, the boll weevil does its damage by laying eggs on cotton flower buds or on the young developing cotton boll. Farm boys were sent to pluck these insects from plants (see the page about Boll Weevil) .

Frederic Ramsey
After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1953, Ramsey undertook a tour of the South in order to explore and document the African-American music environment. His goal was to record the speech and music of persons at least sixty years of age or older in an attempt to trace the evolution of the musical genre that would become jazz.

Ramsey produced a number of recordings for the Folkways label in the 1950s-1960s, including his collection of field recordings "Music from the South".