Mudcat is a forum that, as a collective entity, reveres Leadbelly perhaps above any other musician. Yet nobody, in my experience, has argued here that we should not listen to Leadbelly because of the extremely violent incidents in his life, eben though they were a million times worse than anything we are talking about in this thread.. Damien has apologised for a very unfortunate drunken stupidity. He is a very silly boy. I would say leave it at that. Judge his music as music.