Elizabeth Cotten born - January 5, 1893

On this day in 1893, blues and folk musician Elizabeth Cotten was born near Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radio. Hi everyone, I'm Eves and welcome to This
Day in History Class, a podcast where we dust off
a little piece of history and placed it, ever so
gently on your brainshelf. Every day today is January. The

(00:25):
day was January. Blues and folk musician Elizabeth Cotton was
born near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Sources differ on her
year of birth, with some saying eight two and others
saying Cotton was born into a family steeped in a
musical tradition. As a child, she often borrowed her brother's instruments,

(00:49):
and she taught herself to play the banjo and the guitar.
She was left handed, so it was easier for her
to hold the banjo upside down to play it. When
her brother left and had to quit school and take
jobs as a domestic worker. By the time she was
eleven or twelve years old, she had saved up enough
money to buy a Stella demonstrator a guitar for three

(01:10):
dollars and seventy cents. She played the guitar upside down too,
and developed a unique picking style. She fretted the strings
with her right hand and picked with her left. By
the time she was a teenager, she was able to
play several different songs. Cotton often stayed up late at
night playing the guitar, and her mother would scold her

(01:31):
and tell her to stop playing. As a teen, Elizabeth
married Frank Cotton. They had one child together not long after,
named Lily. As Elizabeth became busy with family life, she
became more involved in her church. Leaders at her church
urged her to stop playing worldly music. Committed to the
church and busy at home, she put down her guitar

(01:54):
for years. The Cottons lived in New York City for
a while, but when Lily got married and had a child,
Elizabeth left Frank and moved to Washington, d c. To
be close to her daughter. She cleaned and sold dolls
at a department store for a living, but one day
in the department store, she found a lost girl named
Peggy Seeger and returned her to her mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger.

(02:18):
Elizabeth soon began to work in the household of the Seegers,
who were also a musical family. Ruth was a composer
and music teacher, and her husband, Charles, was an ethno musicologist.
Cotton would play the guitar at the Seeger home, but
the family didn't find out about her musical talent until
a few years after she began working for them. Then,

(02:39):
in her sixties, Elizabeth began recording her songs. Those recorded
songs became the nineteen fifty eight album Folk Songs and
Instrumentals with Guitar, released on Folk Ways Records. The album
featured Freight Train, a song that Elizabeth composed when she
was a child. She had her performing debut at Worthmore

(03:00):
College with Mike Seeger, Ruth and Charles Son, and she
continued to perform solo and concert and at folk festivals.
She was on the same ticket as performers like Skip
James and Muddy Waters, and her music became a staple
of the folk revival of the nineteen sixties. Cotton continued
playing and touring throughout the US and Europe into the

(03:21):
nineteen eighties. She played her last show in New York
City in nineteen seven months before her death. I'm Eve
step Coote and hopefully you know a little more about
history today than you did yesterday. You can keep up
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(03:44):
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