Portal:Shreveport/Music, Arts & Culture archive/2007
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Ledbetter Heights is the debut album by the blues solo artist Kenny Wayne Shepherd. He released it in October 1995 when he was 18 years old. Its name refers to a neighborhood in Shepherd's home town of Shreveport, Louisiana. The Ledbetter Heights neighborhood, traditionally known as "The Bottoms", is one of the earliest parts of Shreveport to be settled outside the original downtown district, dating back to the 19th century. For almost all of its history, it has been predominantly African-American. In the early 20th century, there was a red-light district with legal prostitution within this neighborhood, and musician Huddie "Leadbelly" Ledbetter, after whom the neighborhood is now named, lived and performed there. The renaming of the neighborhood to Ledbetter Heights in the 1990s was part of an effort to rehabilitate the area's image, as it had become known as an economically depressed and crime-ridden area. Shepherd named his debut album after this neighborhood as an homage to the blues tradition of his home town.
