Guitar Heroine: Elizabeth Cotten
Written by Farah Alkhalisi on Tuesday, 24 November 2009
Elizabeth Cotten (1895-1987) taught herself to play her brother's banjo as a small child, quickly moving on to the guitar and starting to write her own songs before she was even a teenager. She played left-handed but with the guitar strung conventionally and held upside-down, and her banjo-playing (with the lowest high-tuned string acting as a drone) informed the way she tackled the six-string guitar: bass strings plucked with her fingers, the higher strings by her thumbs to pick out a melody line. This ragtime-inflected style later became known, unsurprisingly, as 'Cotten picking'.
Born to a poor family near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Cotten had to start work at 12 as a domestic servant; by 15 she was married, and for decades on, she played only very occasionally in church. However, the story goes that, in the late 1940s, she was working in a department store in Washington DC, and comforted an upset lost child - Peggy Seeger. Cotten became a housekeeper and nanny for the Seeger family - musicologists, cultural historians - and Mike Seeger later heard her playing one of Peggy's guitars. In the late '50s, he made reel-to-reel recordings of Cotten's playing and encouraged her to perform again; in her 60s and 70s, she recorded albums for Folkways and played at key folk-revival events including the Newport Festival. Her song Freight Train, written when she was 12 years old, was recorded by Peggy Seeger and Peter Paul & Mary during the folk revival years, and has since been covered by Dylan, the Dead, Taj Mahal and many more. Happily, though she never saw a lot of money from that song, or others recorded by better-known names, she did get the recognition she deserved late in life, with a Grammy award and other accolades.
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