11/13/2022 0 Comments Sidney spacepig wikipedia![]() The first thing I’d do, I laid the guitar flat in my lap and worked my left hand till I could play the strings backwards and forwards. It was at this time, being left-handed, that Elizabeth developed her idiosyncratic, upside-down, two-finger playing style-Cotten Picking: She gave herself the name “Elizabeth” on the first day of school as up until then her parents George Nevilles (a miner and mill worker) and Louisa Price Nevilles (a midwife, cook, and launderer) had not given her a formal name and referred to her alternately as “Babe,” “Sis,” or sometimes “Short.” The teacher asked if “Babe” had a name and she quickly answered: “Yes, Elizabeth.” Later in life, Elizabeth Cotten was quoted as saying, “I don’t know if I’d ever heard the name, but I had to say something!” (Meggs, 2002).Īs a child, Elizabeth taught herself to play the banjo and guitar on her brother’s instruments, and as her and her siblings worked and played, she would continually make up songs (one of these being the signature folk song “ Freight Train,” which she composed at the age of 11). Ruth was taken with Elizabeth immediately and offered her domestic work as a housekeeper and cook for the Seeger family (Williamson, 2008).Įlizabeth Cotten was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina in early January of 1893, or possibly1895 (no one truly knows). The department store employee was none other than Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten. The mother was modernist composer and American folk music specialist, Ruth Crawford Seeger (mother to Mike, Peggy, Barbara, and Penny wife to ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger and stepmother to iconic figure of the mid-20th century American folk music revival and member of The Weavers, Pete Seeger). A seasonal employee in her mid-forties found the crying child and promptly returned her to her mother. The daughter wandered away from her mother and a brief search was launched. Around Christmas time in the early 1940s, a woman was shopping at a department store in Washington, D.C. ![]()
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