If I had my banjo with me, I’d play you a tune
I didn’t stop all at once ’cause I couldn’t. I loved my guitar too good.
She repeated herself three times – “thank you”— at a clear loss for additional words. “If I had my banjo with me,” she said, finally, “I’d play you a tune.”
She later told an interviewer, “I didn't know what the thing was. It's the honor what I loved.”
In 1985, Elizabeth Cotten won her first and only Grammy for her self-titled live album. She was 92 years old. Her adopted home of Syracuse named her a “national treasure,” and the Smithsonian Institution repeated the sentiment with the additional title, "Master of American folk music."
At age eight, the North Carolina-native began borrowing her brother’s banjo in secret, developing an innovative picking style out of necessity, a left-handed player on a right-handed instrument. The following year, Cotten was forced to quit school to begin work as a maid, knocking on the doors of well-off white families offering to perform tasks around the house. She eventually managed to save enough to buy a Sears, Roebuck guitar to replace the banjo that left home with her older brother.
By 11, Cotten was writing her own songs – penning her signature and most enduring number within a year or two, inspired by the sound of a locomotive that rushed past her childhood home three times a day. An early incarnation of The Beatles began playing “Freight Train” live in 1957, the same year Chas McDevitt and Nancy Whiskey scored a number five hit on the U.K. Singles Chart a skiffle version of the song.
By then, however, the song’s writer had long since vanished from the music scene. Cotten had chosen family and religion over the guitar, seldom picking up the instrument for a full quarter-century, save for the occasional church performance.
“I didn’t stop all at once ’cause I couldn’t,” Cotton would say in a 1967 interview. “I loved my guitar too good. I just gradually stopped playing. And then it weren’t too long ’til I got married. And when I got married that helped me to stop because then I started housekeeping, and then it weren’t too long before I had a baby.”
In 1947, Cotten moved to Washington D.C., to live near her daughter’s young family. Securing a job at a Lansburgh's department store, she found a young girl crying in the aisles and promptly returned her to her mother. “If you ever decide to stop working here,” the woman told Cotten, “here’s my telephone number — give me a ring sometime.”
The woman, Ruth Crawford Seeger, gave Cotton a new job, working at her house, caring for her children Mike, Peggy, Barbara, Penny and stepson, Pete. A musical family, the walls of the Seegar home were lined with instruments. Believing herself to be alone, Cotten pulled a guitar off the shelf and began to play.
Cotton describes what happened next,
Peggy said, “That certainly was a pretty song, would you play it for me? Would you learn me how to play that?” So then I started learning Peggy how I know to play it, and she wasn’t very long picking up “Freight Train.” And then I showed Mike; he played “Freight Train.” And when I knowed anything the two of them could play the same songs as I could just like I played them.
Mike Seeger began recording Cotten on a reel-to-reel, but it was Peggy who brought the song on tour to England. There, perhaps unsurprisingly, a pair of British songwriters claimed the composition for themselves. It was with their names in the linear notes that the song became a hit on the U.K. charts. Winning a lawsuit with help from the Seegars was enough to encourage Cotten — now well into her 60s — to once again take up performing.
“[T]hat guitar, the lost child at Lansburgh’s store, is what made me what I am today — a ‘Freight Train’ picker,” Cotten would latter describe the chain of events. “That’s the truth.”
Cotten’s musical resurrection coincided almost perfectly with the folk music revival, parlaying gigs with the Seegars into spots at massive gigs including the Newport Folk Festival and Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife, sharing stages with blues legends like Mississippi John Hurt, John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters.
More than 60 years after penning “Freight Train,” Cotton composed what may well be her second most enduring song. “Shake Sugaree” was written with her grandchildren taking turns penning verses. Her 12-year-old great-granddaughter (and future singer for Motown psychedelic-soul legends The Undisputed Truth) Brenda Joyce Evans sang the sometimes surrealist lines like, “I'm going to heaven, in a brown pea shell.”
Cotten would continue to play for another two decades, up to a month before her death in 1987. Frequently performing for young audiences into her 90s, one precocious youth asked the singer why she was still alive.
She responded with equal frankness, “I guess the good lord’s just not ready for me, yet.”
Sources:
Interview with blues and folk singer Elizabeth Cotten https://openvault.wgbh.org/catalog/V_B3861BF9014245A59E38C2DB4BCD97F1
A “Freight Train” Picker: Elizabeth Cotten
https://folklife.si.edu/magazine/freedom-sounds-a-freight-train-picker-elizabeth-cotten
Libba Cotten’s Guitar https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/libba-cottens-guitar-32846747/
Elizabeth (Libba) Cotten, 95, A Blues and Folk Songwriter https://www.nytimes.com/1987/06/30/obituaries/elizabeth-libba-cotten-95-a-blues-and-folk-songwriter.html