Elizabeth "Libba" Cotten (January 5, 1893 – June 29, 1987) was an American folk and blues musician. She was a self-taught left-handed guitarist who played a guitar strung for a right-handed player, but played it upside down. NPR stated "her influence has reverberated through the generations, permeating every genre of music."
Born Elizabeth Nevills in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Libba Cotten taught herself how to play the banjo and guitar at an early age. Although forbidden to do so, she often borrowed her brother's instruments when he was away, reversing the banjo and guitar to make them easier to play left-handed. Eventually she saved up the $3.75 required to purchase a Stella guitar from a local dry-goods store. Cotten immediately began to develop a unique guitar style characterized by simple figures played on the bass strings in counterpoint to a melody played on the treble strings, a method that later became widely known as "Cotten style." She fretted the strings with her right hand and picked with her left, the reverse of the usual method. Moreover, she picked the bass strings with her fingers and the treble (melody strings) with her thumb, creating an almost inimitable sound.
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| Ruth Crawford Seeger |
Libba married Frank Cotten when she was 15 (not a particularly early age in that era) and had one child, Lily. As Libba became immersed in family life, she spent more time at church, where she was counseled to give up her "worldly" guitar music. It wasn't until many years later that Cotten, due largely to a fortunate chance encounter, was able to build her immense talent into a professional music career. While working at a department store in Washington, D.C., Libba found and returned a very young and lost Peggy Seeger to her mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger. A month later, Cotten began work in the household of the famous folk-singing Seeger family.
Here’s “Freight Train” from above LP
The Seeger home was an amazing place for Libba to have landed entirely by accident. Ruth Crawford Seeger was a noted composer and music teacher while her husband, Charles, pioneered the field of ethnomusicology. A few years passed before Peggy discovered Cotten playing the family's gut-stringed guitar. Libba apologized for playing the instrument without asking, but Peggy was astonished by what she heard. Eventually the Seegers came to know Libba's instrumental virtuosity and the wealth of her repertoire.
As
her music became a staple of the folk revival of the 1960s, Elizabeth Cotten
began to tour throughout North America. Among her performances were the Newport
Folk Festival, the Philadelphia Folk Festival, the University of Chicago Folk
Festival, and the Smithsonian Festival. Her career generated much media
attention and many awards, including the National Folk 1972 Burl Ives Award for
her contribution to American folk music. The city of Syracuse, New York, where
she spent the last years of her life, honored her in 1983 by naming a small
park in her honor: the Elizabeth Cotten Grove. An equally important honor was
her inclusion in the book I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed
America, by Brian Lanker, which put her in the company of Rosa Parks, Marian
Anderson, and Oprah Winfrey.
Cotten's later CDs, Shake Sugaree (Folkways, 1967), When I'm Gone (Folkways, 1979), and Elizabeth Cotten Live (Arhoolie 1089), continued to win critical acclaim. Elizabeth Cotten Live was awarded a Grammy for the Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording in 1985. She continued to tour and perform right up to the end of her life. Her last concert was one that folk legend Odetta put together for her in New York City, shortly before her death on June 29, 1987at the Crouse Irving Memorial Hospital in Syracuse.
Cotten's legacy lives on not only in her own recordings but also in the many artists who continue to play her work.
(Edited
from Folkways & Wikipedia)