“I was just glad to get the Grammy. I didn’t know what the thing was. It’s the honor what I loved.” — Elizabeth Cotten

Elizabeth Cotten, folk/blues music pioneer, was born on this day in 1895.

She taught herself to play the guitar and banjo as a child. She was left-handed but she played a guitar for a right-hander, meaning she played everything upside down.

One of her songs – “Shake Sugaree” – where she accompanies her 12-year-old granddaughter singing the vocals, is featured prominently in Dogfight (in the scene Lili Taylor takes River Phoenix into her bedroom, aka a shrine to folk music legends). I discussed the incorporation of that song in my conversation with Matt Zoller Seitz about the film.

Cotten wrote songs as a child, including the famous “Freight Train,” written when she was just 11 years old. To hammer this home: this means, she wrote “Freight Train” in 1906. This means that 60 years later, the song would be covered by Peter Paul and Mary, Joan Baez, Jerry Garcia, Joe Dassin … and etc. and etc. and so forth. Bob Dylan sang it in his live shows. He also performed “Shake Sugaree”. Elizabeth Cotten was a huge influence on Dylan. This song which spanned the 20th century was written by an 11-year-old girl, who could have had no idea how far that “freight train” would travel.

Cotten married in 1910, and stopped playing the guitar and writing songs. For decades. She was busy working and raising a family.

Then she got a job as a maid for a family whose last name happened to be … Seeger. Destiny?

More after the jump:

The Seegers were all musicians and composers. Pete Seeger was part of the extended family. Elizabeth would sing as she worked and Mike Seeger, struck by the sound of her voice, made recordings of her. This was in the 1950s.

By this point, Elizabeth had literally forgotten how to play the guitar, but music was starting to rise in her again, so she set out to teach herself – for the second time – how to play the guitar. She was now in her 60s. You’re never “done” with life. Or, life is never done with you.

Mike Seeger released an album of the stuff he had recorded of Elizabeth Cotten singing around the house. It reached many people, and this was how she was rediscovered, right at the time of the rediscovery of American folk music. And not just folk music but the blues. Cotten’s stuff was a mix of folk and blues, as was the case with so many of early 20th century artists, who lived long enough to see the revolution in technology/culture that would bring their music to new generations. The original songs – the hillbilly folk tunes, the old r & b tunes, came out of poverty and hardship, longing and deprivation. Different styles but same source, and the lines blurred in the music itself – even though radio stations would separate them out into different genres and different audiences, music made by/for white people, music made by/for black people. But – you cannot segregate the airwaves. On the ground, there was a lot of cross-pollination going on. You hear the blues in Ray Charles, of course, but you hear country music too. Everyone listened to the Grand Ole Opry radio show, because there was nothing else to damn DO. You hear gospel in all of it. All of this rich history was part of the appeal to those who came after, the people in the 50s and 60s hungry for something new and yet authentic, new and yet not “hip”, something that wasn’t pre-packaged like pop music, something that was closely connected to its source. Elizabeth Cotten was a huge part of this movement, this movement backwards and yet also forwards.

Elizabeth Cotten strolled back into the world just as folk music broke into mainstream popularity.

Cotten was in her 60s when she started performing at folk music festivals, like the legendary Newport Folk Festival.

She inspired a generation of singers and composers, the ones who changed the landscape of American culture … by going back into its past, opening up the present to the forgotten or ignored voices of the past. Sometimes these artists had been ignored deliberately, but sometimes it was not deliberate, just a casualty of the time/technology. Prior to radio, prior to a modern recording industry, and modern distribution services, prior to the technology of vinyl records themselves and phonographs on which to play those records, many voices remained local un-captured phenomenon.

Elizabeth Cotten was born in the 19th century. In 1984, she won a Grammy – her first – for her live album. She was 89 years old. She died 3 years later.

She was a phenom in so many ways. A wellspring.

Here she is performing “Freight Train,” written when she was 11 years old. Pay attention to the guitar-picking too. In it, you can hear Dylan, Baez, the whole lot of them. This is not simple strumming. It’s intricate and it provides the base-line of melancholy and yearning suffusing the whole song.

Here’s Joan Baez’s cover of “Freight Train.”

Listen to her masterful guitar-picking in this one.

 
 
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