Artist Profile: Elizabeth Cotten

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Published in Vol. 2 No. 3

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Elizabeth Cotten’s music career began in her sixties following a forty-year hiatus from playing the guitar. Her talents were discovered by the influential Seeger family for whom she was working as a housekeeper. Cotten had an unorthodox playing style–holding the guitar upside down–and despite her delayed recognition she shared the stage with heavyweights Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Mississippi John Hurt and was covered by The Beatles (The Quarrymen), Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia and Joan Baez, among others.

Cotten was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina on January 5, 1893 to George Nevill and Louisa Price Nevill. George was a dynamite settler in an iron mine and Louisa was a midwife and domestic worker. The two could not agree on a name for Cotten who was the youngest of five. The family called her Li’l sis until she named herself Elizabeth upon being asked her name by a teacher on her first day of school.

When Cotten’s brother left for work, she would sneak into his room and play his banjo. She played the instrument upside down, strings and all, and learned to keep rhythm on the bass notes with her fingers rather than her thumb, which worked the melody. She later applied her technique to the guitar, and the style eventually became known as “Cotten picking.” She taught herself, and before long she was playing full songs and even writing some her own. She wrote “Freight Train”–which would become a hit decades later–at eleven or twelve years old. The song is about a train that passed close by the family’s Chapel Hill home.

Cotten wasn’t in school for long; she dropped out in fourth grade and began knocking on doors looking for work as a housekeeper. Most who answered their door were skeptical of the child’s abilities, but one lady gave her a chance and started her off at 75 cents per month. This was soon raised to $1 per month and Cotten saved $3.75 (about $140 today) to buy a Stella guitar which then filled all of her spare time.

Cotten’s folky, bluesy, singing and guitar picking was off-putting to the church who urged her to stop playing that “worldly music” because it was “for the devil” adding that “you’ve got to serve God or the devil, one of the two.” It was this influence and the birth of her daughter that caused Cotten to put down the guitar for decades.

“It wasn’t long before I married, started housekeeping, had a baby,” said Cotten. “And then I did forget my guitar, sure enough. ‘Cause I was so proud to housekeep and have a baby to take care of. And I just stopped playing, ‘til I got to Washington, DC.”

She married Frank Cotten when she was seventeen on November 7, 1910 and the couple had a daughter named Lillie shortly thereafter. Cotten worked in housekeeping and other jobs while raising her daughter. At some point, Frank began leaning into the bottle more and more. Cotten called him a good and honest man but said that she struggled to put up with his drinking. She later divorced Frank when her daughter married and moved in with Lillie and her husband in Washington, D.C. to help raise her grandchild.

One day, in Washington, while she was working in a department store, selling dolls, Cotten came across a lost child who was crying and looking for her mother. Being very receptive to children, Cotten was slightly emotional when she returned Peggy Seeger to her mother Ruth Crawford Seeger. Ruth asked Cotten there and then if she would like to work for the Seeger family as a housekeeper, which she accepted.

The Seeger family was very musical. Ruth herself was a composer and a music teacher. Her husband Charles was a musicologist, composer and folklorist, and his brother Alan Seeger was a war poet known for his poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.” Charles had three children in his first marriage including Pete Seeger who became a very famous folk musician. Cotton began to take care of the Seeger household and of the children; Peggy, Michael, Barbara and Penny. The kids were young and struggled to say Elizabeth so they called her Libba.

After some time working for the family, Cotten began secretly playing Peggy’s guitar in the kitchen while Ruth gave piano lessons. She relearned to play the songs of her childhood, and this became routine until one day when Peggy and Michael walked in while she was playing “Freight Train.” Cotton was embarrassed but the kids were amazed. She then began to play openly at the Seeger home.

Of this time Cotten said, “At dinner time, I’d cook dinner and put my dinner on the table and that’s about all the work I’d have to do. The kids would clear the table, wash the dishes and tell me to play ‘Freight Train.’ So I didn’t have much to do after dinner.”

In the late 1950s Michael began to record Cotten on a reel-to-reel tape machine in his bedroom. The recordings went on to become her first album: Negro Folk Songs and Tunes which was later reissued as Folksongs and Instrumentals with Guitar (Folkways Records). Following these recordings, Cotten began playing in the homes of congressmen and senators, including John F. Kennedy.

“Freight Train” was covered by many including the Seeger children who began performing the tune abroad. In the 50s, the song was popularized by Chas McDevitt and Nancy Whisky during the British skiffle movement following a performance by Peggy Seeger in England. Chas McDevitt and his manager Bill Varley took credit for the song under the pseudonyms “Paul James” and “Fred Williams.”

McDevitt and Whisky’s version of “Freight Train” became a radio hit and they even sang it on the Ed Sullivan show, catching Cotten and the others who knew of her childhood song by surprise. With the help of the influential Seeger family, credit was eventually restored to Cotten.

In 1960, Cotten agreed to begin playing concerts despite never having attended one herself. She started touring and held a major role in the American folk music revival, eventually sharing the stage with the biggest names in folk and blues music. She began writing again and wrote her well-known song “Shake Sugaree” in 1967. With her earnings from touring and recording, Cotton was able to buy a home in Syracuse, NY.

Cotten continued touring well into her eighties and died on June 29, 1987 at the age of ninety-four. She received a Grammy in 1984 for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording and in 2022 she was posthumously inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Cotten’s achievements and abilities went unknown for decades but due to a chance meeting in a department store, her songwriting and guitar playing became embedded and intertwined with American folk and blues. She influenced many songwriters and guitarist, including John Fahey, Jerry Garcia and The Quarrymen (soon to be The Beatles). Elizabeth Cotten could just as easliy have flown under the radar and remained unknown, no doubt like many extraordinary people have.

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