Anne Bredon

Who is Anne Bredon?

Anne Bredon is an American folk singer, best known for composing the song Babe I'm Gonna Leave You while she was a student at University of California, Berkeley in the late 1950s. Bredon is the daughter of physicist Leonard Loeb and granddaughter of physiologist Jacques Loeb. She majored in art at Humboldt State University and completed her master's degree in mathematics at Berkeley, California.

Some time around 1960, while attending Berkeley, Bredon appeared on a live folk-music radio show, The Midnight Special, on radio station KPFA singing Babe, I'm Gonna Leave You. Janet Smith, another folk singer, developed her own version of the song and performed it on the same radio show some time later, catching the attention of Joan Baez who used the song on Joan Baez in Concert, Part 1. The song was initially credited as "Traditional, arr. Baez" but properly attributed on Baez' 1964 sheet music, The Joan Baez Song Book.

The English rock band Led Zeppelin covered the song after hearing Baez's version, crediting the song as "Trad., arr. Page".