Born and raised in Cleburne County, Arkansas, she learned music from her father, a fiddler and a teacher of shape note singing.

Introduced to a wider public by folklorist John Quincy Wolf and musicologist Alan Lomax, Riddle recorded extensively, and claimed to be able to perform over 500 songs.

[3] In October 1959, on Wolf's recommendation, Lomax and Shirley Collins recorded Riddle at her home in Heber Springs in The Ozarks.

These records made Almeda Riddle widely known to participants in the American folk music revival.

In the film titled Almeda Riddle: Now Let's Talk About Singing (released in 1985),[8] she sang and spoke about her life and songs.