Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten
Elizabeth "Libba" Cotten (1893–1987) was an influential American folk and blues singer-songwriter and self-taught fingerstyle guitarist from Carrboro, North Carolina. Playing a standard right-handed instrument flipped upside down to accommodate her left-handed orientation, she developed a signature alternating bass accompaniment technique known as "Cotten picking," characterized by striking bass lines with her fingers and melody lines with her thumb. Though she composed her defining classic track "Freight Train" at age eleven, she spent decades away from full-time performance until her musical talents were rediscovered by the prominent ethnomusicological Seeger family while she was working as their domestic housekeeper in the 1950s. Her debut LP, Folksongs and Instrumentals with Guitar (1958), catalyzed her emergence as a foundational figure in the American folk music revival, leading to prominent festival performances, a National Heritage Fellowship in 1984, a Grammy Award for Elizabeth Cotten Live! in 1985, and a posthumous induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2022.
In the newsletter
- No. 21 Fall 1999