Elizabeth Cotten

(North Carolina, the early 1950’s) Elizabeth Cotten was a fifty-year old divorced wife and mother making her living selling dolls in Landsburgh’s Department Store, where one day she discovered a lost child roaming the aisles. When she returned the little girl to her mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, the two women became fast friends and Elizabeth went to work for the Seegers , cleaning their house.

The Seegers were a family of musicologists. Ruth was the author of a well-known children’s songbook and the oldest son, Pete, was rapidly finding fame as a folk singer and activist. It was a serendipidous thing for Elizabeth to find herself in a home full of musicians on fire for folk music and only a matter of time before her own passion was discovered.

Although she hadn’t played music for more than thirty years, one day she picked up one of the guitars around the house and began playing. She turned the instrument upside-down to play it left-handed, plucking the treble strings with her thumb and the bass strings with her other fingers.

Elizabeth recalled how when she was seven, she would go into her brother’s room while he was at work and play his homemade banjo. She tried to learn with the banjo re-strung for a left-handed player but eventually returned to her upside down method and proceeded to learn on her own. Later, as a performer on stage, she delighted her audiences with her standard declaration, “Nobody did teach me. Everything I know, I learned all by myself. So, I give myself all of the credit.”

When Cotten’s brother grew up and left home, he took his banjo with him. Desperate to get her hands on an instrument, the ten year old “Libba” went door to door looking for work. She earned enough money to buy her first guitar and, “from that day on, nobody had no peace in that house.,” she’d say with a laugh. Cotten mastered the guitar and at about the age of twelve wrote Freight Train, inspired by the train running near her home.

Elizabeth remembered how she used to watch the freight train. “We knew the fireman and the breakman... and the conductor, my mother used to launder for him. They’d let us ride in the engine... put us in one of the coaches while they were backing up and changing... that was how I got my first train ride. We used to walk the trestle and put our ear to the track and listen for the train to come. My brother, he’d wait for the train to get real close and then he’d hang down from one of the ties and swing back up after the train had passed over him.”