Elizabeth Cotten

 

Elizabeth Cotten was born around 1893 outside of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. At a young age, she would borrow her brother's banjo, teaching herself how to play. Forced by financial circumstances to drop out of school in the third grade, she cleaned houses for 75 cents a month, eventually getting a 25-cent raise, to save up for a $3.75 Sears Roebuck Harmony Stella guitar. Elizabeth, being left-handed, played the right-handed guitar, upside down and backwards. Her signature alternating bass style, now known as "Cotten Picking," involved playing bass notes with her index finger and melody notes with her thumb.

Around age 12, she wrote her most famous song, "Freight Train." The song became popular during the revival of American folk music and British skiffle in the late 50s and early 60s.  It was written about her hometown in North Carolina and dealt with many adult themes, including death and depression.

Elizabeth married Frank Cotten when she was 15 (not a particularly early age in that era) and had one child, Lily.  As Elizabeth became immersed in family life, she spent more time at church, where she was counseled to give up her "worldly" guitar music.

It wasn't until many years later that Elizabeth, due largely to a fortunate chance encounter, was able to build her immense talent into a professional music career.  While working at a department store in Washington, D.C., Elizabeth found and returned a very young and lost Peggy Seeger to her mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger.  A month later, Elizabeth began work in the household of the famous folk-singing Seeger family, who gave her the nickname, "Libba".

The Seeger home was an amazing place for Elizabeth to have landed.  Ruth Crawford Seeger was a noted composer and music teacher, while her husband, Charles, pioneered the field of ethnomusicology.  A few years passed before Peggy discovered Elizabeth playing the family's gut-stringed guitar.  Elizabeth apologized for playing the instrument without asking, but Peggy was astonished by what she heard.  Eventually, the Seegers came to know Elizabeth's instrumental virtuosity and the wealth of her repertoire.

Elizabeth would sing "Freight Train" to young Peggy Seeger (left), Pete's half sister.  When Peggy Seeger moved to London, she played the tune in local coffee houses, where other artists picked up on its catchy lyrics.  The song spread around and eventually was falsely copyrighted by British songwriters Paul James and Fred Williams.  One Sunday night, Elizabeth and Seegers watched "The Ed Sullivan and they saw folk singer Nancy Whiskey perform "Freight Train" with British Chas McDevitt's skiffle group, and said, "That's my song!"

With help from the Seeger family, Elizabeth sued for copyright infringement and eventually settled out of court in 1957, but, according to her great-grandson, she only received a fraction of the royalties made off the song.

1958, at the age of sixty-two, Elizabeth had recorded her first album, 'Elizabeth Cotten: Negro Folk Songs and Tunes', and in 1989 was reissued as 'Freight Train and Other North Carolina Folk Songs'. The album was meticulously recorded by Mike Seeger, this was one of the few authentic folk-music albums available by the early 1960s, and certainly one of the most influential.  In addition to the now well-recorded tune "Freight Train" penned by Elizabeth when she was only eleven or twelve, the album provided accessible examples of some open tunings used in American folk guitar.  She played two distinct styles on the banjo and four on the guitar, including her single-string melody picking "Freight Train" style, an adaptation of Southeastern country ragtime picking.

Elizabeth's later recordings, 'Shake Sugaree' from 1967 and 'When I'm and Gone' from 1979,  continued to win critical acclaim.  In 1984, her live album 'Elizabeth Cotten Live!', won her a Grammy Award for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording, at the age of 90.

Elizabeth Cotten continued to tour and perform right up to the end of her life. Her last concert was one that folk legend Odetta put together for her, here in New York City.

Elizabeth Cotten passed away in 1987, at the age of 94, leaving a permanent mark on the world of folk and blues music.

Elizabeth's mural in in Chapel Hill, North Carolina

Elizabeth legacy lives on not only in her own recordings, but also in the many artists who continue to play her work.  The Grateful Dead produced several renditions of "Oh, Babe, It Ain't No Lie" and "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad".  Bob Dylan covered the ever-popular "Shake Sugaree," and "Freight Train.

In 2022, she was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

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