Problem: Huddie William Ledbetter (January 20, 1888 - December 6, 1949) was an American folk and blues musician notable for his strong vocals, virtuosity on the twelve-string guitar, and the folk standards he introduced. He is best known as Lead Belly. Though many releases credit him as "Leadbelly", he himself wrote it as "Lead Belly", which is also the spelling on his tombstone and the spelling used by the Lead Belly Foundation.

Lead Belly styled himself "King of the Twelve-String Guitar," and despite his use of other instruments like the accordion, the most enduring image of Lead Belly as a performer is wielding his unusually large Stella twelve-string. This guitar had a slightly longer scale length than a standard guitar, slotted tuners, ladder bracing, and a trapeze-style tailpiece to resist bridge lifting. Lead Belly played with finger picks much of the time, using a thumb pick to provide a walking bass line and occasionally to strum. This technique, combined with low tunings and heavy strings, gives many of his recordings a piano-like sound. Lead Belly's tuning is debated, but it seems to be a down-tuned variant of standard tuning; it is likely that he tuned his guitar strings relative to one another, so that the actual notes shifted as the strings wore. Lead Belly's playing style was popularized by Pete Seeger, who adopted the twelve-string guitar in the 1950s and released an instructional LP and book using Lead Belly as an exemplar of technique. In some of the recordings in which Lead Belly accompanied himself, he would make an unusual type of grunt between his verses, best described as "Haah!"; "Looky Looky Yonder," "Take This Hammer," "Linin' Track" and "Julie Ann Johnson" feature this unusual vocalization. In "Take This Hammer," Lead Belly explained, "Every time the men say, 'Haah,' the hammer falls. The hammer rings, and we swing, and we sing." The "haah" sound can be heard in work chants sung by Southern railroad section workers, "gandy dancers," in which it was used to coordinate work crews as they laid and maintained tracks.

How old was he when he came up with this technique?

Answer with quotes:

Background: Peter Gregg Arnett, ONZM (born 13 November 1934) is a New Zealand-born journalist holding both New Zealand and US citizenship. Arnett worked for National Geographic magazine, and later for various television networks, most notably CNN. He is known for his coverage of the Vietnam War and the Gulf War. He was awarded the 1966 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting for his work in Vietnam from 1962 to 1975, mostly reporting for the Associated Press.
Context: In 1998, Arnett narrated a report on the joint venture (between CNN and Time magazine) program called NewsStand, covering "Operation Tailwind". The report, titled The Valley of Death, claimed that the United States Army had used sarin against a group of deserting U.S. soldiers in Laos in 1970. The men allegedly involved were an elite Green Beret A-Team. The report was expressly approved by both CNN Chairman Tom Johnson and CNN President Rick Kaplan. In response, the Pentagon commissioned another report contradicting CNN's. CNN subsequently conducted its own investigation, which concluded that the "journalism [in the Valley of Death] was flawed" and retracted the story. While all 12 men of the Green Beret A-Team were wounded in action during Operation Tailwind, no sarin was involved. Due to the US Government's insistence that the CNN report was flawed, three or more of the individuals responsible were fired or forced to resign. Arnett was reprimanded, and eventually left the network. The co-producers of the report, April Oliver and Jack Smith, were dismissed. They sued Time Warner, the parent company of CNN, claiming they had been wrongfully fired, and Time Warner ultimately paid millions of dollars to settle their lawsuits, along with other suits brought by military personnel who claimed to have been libeled in the Oliver/Smith report. Senior producer Pam Hill and others resigned. Oliver was later quoted by the World Socialist Web Site (International Committee of the Fourth International) as saying that: [Arnett's] firing was a direct result of Pentagon pressure. Perry Smith [a retired USAF major general and former CNN consultant who resigned in protest over the Tailwind report] told The Wall Street Journal last July that CNN would not get cooperation from the Pentagon unless Peter Arnett was fired. [...] They will do anything to stem the flow of information.
Question: Did anyone dispute that?
Answer: Due to the US Government's insistence that the CNN report was flawed, three or more of the individuals responsible were fired or forced to resign.

Question:
Sylvia Jane Hutton (nee Kirby, born December 9, 1956), known simply by her first name Sylvia during the 1980s, is an American country music and country pop singer and songwriter. Some original source books have her birth name as Sylvia Kirby Allen; however, Allen was her first husband's last name. She consequently used only her first name. There was also a point in time that she used Sylvia Rutledge.
The release of her fourth album, Surprise, spurred her second foray into the Adult Contemporary charts, but neither its sound, nor her newly shorn locks courtesy Francesco Scavullo, were well received in country music. Surprise was the last of Sylvia's first four albums to be produced by Tom Collins, who also produced Mandrell, Charley Pride, and Ronnie Milsap. They have been described by critics as too slick for country music. Her following album, One Step Closer, produced by The Judds' producer Brent Maher, had a more guitar-driven feel to it as opposed to her previously more orchestrated affairs. It was followed up by Sylvia's last top 40 country hit, "Nothin' Ventured, Nothin' Gained", from the unreleased album Knockin Around. The shelving of this album marked the end of Sylvia's tenure with RCA Records. The label did release a Greatest Hits compilation and a single from it titled "Straight from my Heart" (written with Jimmy Fortune of The Statler Brothers). The record received little promotion from RCA and the single charted in the low 60s. In the late 1980s, RCA began streamlining its roster of country-pop artists and the casualties included Sylvia, Dolly Parton, Louise Mandrell, Deborah Allen, Juice Newton, John Denver and Kenny Rogers. Over an eight-year period, Sylvia crisscrossed America many times with her popular concert performances (over 200 per year), and she was a frequent guest on network television talk shows and specials -- from The Today Show and Good Morning, America to Dick Clark's American Bandstand and the Country Music Awards. Her decision to stop touring and recording at the end of the 1980s was not fueled by the grueling schedule, as some might guess, but by her desire to bring more of herself to the music, she turned her energies to songwriting.
Answer this question using a quote from the text above:

What were surprises for her?

Answer:
The release of her fourth album, Surprise,