It’s really not hard to find amazing women to make art about. The Takoma Park Folk Festival is coming up and they were kind enough to count digital design and typography as a craft, so that the Female Power Project can have a booth at their juried craft show this Sunday. My work slips through categories, since I don’t do limited edition prints for the Female Power Project, and they aren’t strictly handmade. The message is my medium. Anyway, I thought I might do a folk musician for the event, and I immediately thought of Cotten, even though I’m not much of a folky. I even think I saw her at a folk festival in Oregon in the 1980’s, though she didn’t make much of an impression on me (probably because of the drunk jerks carrying on at the edge of the crowd where I was standing). But she really was immensely impressive, as I discovered in my research. I urge you to check out some of the YouTube videos I’ve linked to at the bottom of this post. As usual, I have relied a lot on Wikipedia for the highlights. Here are some details.

Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten (née Nevills) (January 5, 1893 – June 29, 1987) was an American blues and folk musician, singer, and songwriter. A self-taught left-handed guitarist, Cotten developed her own original style. She played a guitar strung for a right-handed player, but played it upside down. This position required her to play the bass lines with her fingers and the melody with her thumb. Her signature alternating bass style has become known as “Cotten picking”.

Cotten was born near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to a musical family. At age seven, she began to play her older brother’s banjo. “From that day on,” she said, “nobody had no peace in that house.” By the age of eight, she was playing songs. At the age of 11, after scraping together some money as a domestic helper, she bought her own guitar. By her early teens she was writing her own songs, one of which, “Freight Train”, became her most recognized.

In 1910, at the age of 17, she married and soon after she complied when her church told her to stop playing her music. Cotten did not begin performing publicly and recording until she was in her 60s. The story of her return to playing is remarkable.

While doing seasonal work in a department store, Cotten helped a child wandering through the aisles find her mother. The child was Peggy Seeger, and the mother was the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger. Soon after this, Cotten began working as a maid for Ruth Crawford Seeger and Charles Seeger and caring for their children, Mike, Peggy, Barbara, and Penny. While working with the Seegers (a voraciously musical family that included Pete Seeger, a son of Charles from a previous marriage)—surrounded by music and instruments—she picked up the guitar again. Peggy heard her playing and asked Elizabeth to teach her the song. It was “Freight Train.”

In a documentary, Mike Seeger described how astonished they were by this “folklorist’s dream. She was a true musician.” The quote on the upper left of this print is from Mike Seeger: “She was certainly a confident person. Before every show she would say to the audience [that] nobody taught her anything. She did it all herself. And she gave herself all the credit.” This is from the first YouTube link below.

In the later half of the 1950s, Mike Seeger began making reel-to-reel recordings of Cotten’s songs in her house. These recordings later became the album Folksongs and Instrumentals with Guitar, which was released by Folkways Records. Since the release of that album, her songs, especially her signature song, “Freight Train”—which she wrote when she was 11—have been covered by Peter, Paul, and Mary, Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan, Joe Dassin, Joan Baez, Devendra Banhart, Laura Gibson, Laura Veirs, His Name Is Alive, Doc Watson, Taj Mahal, Geoff Farina, and Country Teasers. Shortly after that first album, she began playing concerts with Mike Seeger.

In the early 1960s, Cotten went on to play concerts with some of the big names in the burgeoning folk revival. Some of these included Mississippi John Hurt, John Lee Hooker, and Muddy Waters at venues such as the Newport Folk Festival and the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife.

The newfound interest in her work inspired her to write more songs to perform, and in 1967 she released a record created with her grandchildren, which took its name from one of her songs, “Shake Sugaree”.

Using profits from her touring, record releases and awards given to her for her contributions to the folk arts, Cotten was able to move with her daughter and grandchildren from Washington, D.C., and buy a house in Syracuse, New York. She was also able to continue touring and releasing records well into her 80s. In 1984, she won the Grammy Award for Best Ethnic or Traditional Recording, for the album Elizabeth Cotten Live, released by Arhoolie Records. When accepting the award in Los Angeles, her comment was, “Thank you. I only wish I had my guitar so I could play a song for you all.”

Cotten died in June 1987 in Syracuse, New York, at the age of 94.

from
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Cotten
and
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k439N7Ns0wg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NvXNT9Cu_X4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=voPJENW6i4c