13/06/2026
Elizabeth Cotten was discovered because she found a lost child crying at a Washington department store. She was working at Lansburgh's selling dolls in the mid-1940s when the girl wandered up to her. The girl's mother was the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, who hired Sis to come work in the Seeger house. The folk revival's queen was their cook. She named herself. When the teacher called roll on her first day of school, the teacher looked at her and asked, "Little Sis Nevills, do you have a name?" The little girl answered yes, and told her the name was Elizabeth. That is how she remembered it, decades later, in her own quiet voice on tape. She named herself Elizabeth. She would carry that name through eighty more years of being called other things. At home she was Sis, and to the white folk-singing family who would hire her as a maid in middle age and pin a nickname on her she did not particularly like, she was Libba. And on the copyright of her own song for years, the names of two men who did not exist, who never lived, who collected money for music she had written when she was eleven years old. Paul James and Fred Williams. Behind those two names were a British skiffle singer named Chas McDevitt and his manager, Bill Varley, who had heard her song carried across the Atlantic in the mid-1950s and decided it was theirs now. They added a verse about a man on the run from the law and rode the song to number five on the UK charts in 1957. Across the ocean, the woman who had actually written it was kneeling in a Washington kitchen, scrubbing somebody else's floor for a paycheck. Her name was Elizabeth Nevills Cotten, born January 1893 in Carrboro, North Carolina, and the song was hers and only hers and had been since she was a child. She was eight years old the first morning she lifted her brother's banjo down off the wall after he left for work. The instrument was strung for a right-handed player and she was not. Nobody she knew owned an instrument. Nobody she knew had ever paid for a music lesson, because nobody she knew had that kind of money. She did the only thing that made sense to her hands. She turned the banjo upside down. Her thumb worked the high strings, her fingers worked the low ones, the whole arrangement reversed. When her brother caught her at it, he said, "You got it upside down, turn it around or change the strings." She tried it his way. She liked the sound of her way better. The town was Carrboro, just west of Chapel Hill, though Carrboro was not yet quite Carrboro in 1901. The Alberta Cotton Mill set the rhythm of the place, named for the family of a Confederate veteran named Julian Carr who had built his name on white supremacy and the labor of Black families like the Nevillses. Black folks worked the mill or worked the kitchens of the white folks who worked the mill. They earned less than five dollars a week for the privilege. The last lynching in Orange County had happened when Sis was five years old. She grew up on Lloyd Street with the railroad tracks just close enough that the freight cars rattled the windows at night. Most of America has been told, somewhere along the way, that "Freight Train" is a soft love song to a hometown. It is not. A folklore professor at UNC named Glenn Hinson would say it plainly. The song is about jumping the freight trains because there was no way to get out. A child wrote that song. An eleven-year-old, picking strings backwards, listening to the trains roll past her house and singing a small soft lullaby about disappearing on one of them. She bought her first guitar from a Chapel Hill shop for $3.75. NPR's reporting puts her wages at seventy-five cents a month cleaning houses, though some accounts say a dollar. Either way, the math runs the same direction. She cleaned other people's houses for the better part of a year to put down the price of one wooden guitar. She named the guitar Stella. By the time she was twelve she had written "Freight Train" on its strings. Then the church got hold of her. The elders told her, gently, the way Black church elders said most things, that the music she had taught herself was the devil's work. She was fifteen by then, recently married to a man named Frank Cotten, with a daughter named Lillie on the way. She put the guitar down. Forty years is a long time to set something down. It is long enough for a child to be born, grow up, marry, and have a child of her own. It is long enough for the United States to fight a world war, then another. It is long enough for a woman to lose track of who she was before she became the woman cooking somebody else's dinner. Sis never spoke of the music to her employers. She moved to Washington, D.C. in the 1940s after a divorce, took whatever work she could find, ended up at a department store called Lansburgh's selling dolls during the holiday rush. Her hands, the same hands that had once invented an entire style of guitar, washed dishes and folded sheets and counted coins for white women shopping for their daughters. She was not waiting to be found. It was at Lansburgh's, sometime in the mid-1940s, that a small girl wandered away from her mother in the holiday crowd and got lost in the aisles. She was crying when Sis found her. Sis did what Sis always did, which was kneel down and speak softly until the child stopped shaking. She held the girl's hand and walked her back through the displays until they found the mother. The mother was a composer named Ruth Crawford Seeger, married to the musicologist Charles Seeger, mother of Peggy and Mike. Ruth offered Sis a job after the holidays. Sis took it. She came to work in the Seeger house cooking and cleaning and looking after the children, surrounded every day by guitars and banjos hanging on the walls, and she said nothing about herself for years. It was the Seegers who started calling her Libba. The nickname stuck on every award and every album cover for the rest of her life, even though by some accounts she did not really care for it. Then one afternoon in the early 1950s, with the Seeger parents out and the house quiet, she lifted Peggy's guitar down off its hook in the kitchen. Her hands had not touched a string in nearly forty years. She flipped the instrument over the way she had as a girl, the bass strings on the bottom, and started picking out the song about the trains. Peggy Seeger, by then a teenager, walked into the kitchen and stopped in the doorway. "And I saw her playing the guitar," Peggy would later say in a public radio interview, "and she was playing 'Freight Train.'" Mike Seeger came running from another part of the house. Their housekeeper was pulling sounds out of one guitar that most professional players could not pull out of two. The bass walked, the melody rang, everything happened at the same time. There was no name for what she was doing because nobody else had ever done it. They started calling it Cotten picking, after her. Mike Seeger set up a reel-to-reel on the second floor of her house and recorded her over patient evenings, with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren wandering in and out of the room. That tape became the album Folksongs and Instrumentals with Guitar, released by Folkways Records in 1958. She was sixty-two years old. It was her debut. By the time the album came out, "Freight Train" had already left her without permission. Peggy Seeger had taken it to England in the mid-1950s and taught it to British folk circles, the way songs travel. Chas McDevitt and Bill Varley heard it. They registered the copyright under the made-up names of Paul James and Fred Williams, added the line about the man on the run from the law, and rode the song to number five on the UK charts in 1957. The actual author was on the second floor of her own house in D.C. by then, recording her own songs onto tape for the first time in her life. She did not yet know two pretend men had stolen the song of her childhood. The Seeger family eventually fought the credit back. It took years, and even now her name is missing from some recordings of her own song. She started performing in her late sixties. Her stage debut was at Swarthmore College in 1959, with Mike Seeger beside her, in front of an audience of college students who had never seen anyone play a guitar like that. She played the Newport Folk Festival. She played in the homes of senators and congressmen, including the Kennedys, and shared festival stages with Muddy Waters and Mississippi John Hurt and John Lee Ho**er. In 1965, when Peter, Paul and Mary's recording of "Freight Train" was on every folk radio show in America, The New York Times ran a profile of her. The headline read, Domestic, 71, Sings Songs of Own Composition in 'Village.' Domestic came first in the headline. Genius came second. The Grammy came in 1985. She was ninety years old when she walked to the podium for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording, for the album Elizabeth Cotten Live! The audience rose to their feet. She said, in that soft voice of hers, that she only wished she had her guitar with her so she could play them a song. She had said something like it once before, in 1966, sitting for a taped interview with Mike Seeger. "And that guitar, the lost child at Lansburgh's store, is what made me what I am today, a 'Freight Train' picker. That's the truth." By 1981, she had grown a little tired of the song that had nearly been taken from her. "I've heard 'Freight Train' so much, that's not my favorite any more," she told the San Diego Reader. "I've had to play it so much." Her last concert was in New York City in the spring of 1987, organized by the singer Odetta. She died a few weeks later, on June 29, ninety-four years old. She is in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame now, inducted in 2022. Most people who play "Freight Train" today still do not know who wrote it. They do not know that two men who did not exist almost kept her name off the song forever, or that the only name she ever chose for herself was the one she gave a teacher on her first day of school. The song still runs the way she wrote it, the bass walking and the melody ringing, the strings on a guitar she paid for one cleaning job at a time. It runs steady. It does not stop. I put a lot of effort into researching and sharing stories that matter. If you'd like to support the work, here's the link: Every coffee helps me keep creating
