Freight Train by Elizabeth Cotten
This jam was posted by 17 people
but gxhxoxsxtxfxm was first
Dat fingerpicking though.
Great footage of Cotten towards the end of her life playing one of her most famous compositions and demonstrating her wonderful and unique guitar style.
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Binging on the massive amount of Folkways Records on Spotify and I happened upon Elizabeth Cotten. Wow. Things I learned today:
1) Elizabeth Cotten wrote this song when she was 12
2) She played guitar upside down (i.e., playing a right-handed guitar, strung right-handed, left-handed)
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The real deal.
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This is the fragile and beautiful voice of the original cotton picker. Found via Spencer Tweedy.
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Elizabeth Cotten (who was born in the next town over from where I live) taught herself to play guitar when a girl, then didn't play for decades and basically forgot how to. When she became a maid for the Seeger family, she taught herself to play again and recorded this amazing song. She wrote Freight Train when she was 11; she recorded it in her fifties. It has since then been covered by over a dozen artists.
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