Elizabeth "Libba" Cotten (née
Nevill) (
January
5, 1893 – June 29, 1987) was a profoundly original American folk musician, vectoring
between the music of isolated early 20
th century North Carolina and
the multimodal hypersounds of the present – check her out playing in crystal
clear black and white on your youtube. A southpaw church and porch picker, Ms.
Cotten played a righty-tuned guitar upside down and sang the folk and blues of
a self-possessed and sassy little girl, who are known to come in all genders,
ages, and sizes, Scout Finch a few decades earlier and from the unscripted side
of town.
Ms. Cotten's musical family and environs might have foreordained her,
but that destiny nearly passed her by. She mostly stopped playing around 1910,
when she became a single teenaged mother in Chapel Hill. Then, "In the
mid-1940s, [she] chanced to meet composer Ruth Crawford
Seeger at a department store. They began to talk, and Seeger soon hired Cotten
to work in the Seeger household. It was here that Cotten became motivated to
pick up the guitar again" (
cite). Mike Seeger recorded her on reel-to-reel tape and projected her through
barriers of race, class, gender through the folk revival and into national
memory.
Her first record,
Folksongs And Instrumentals With Guitar,
appeared on Folkways (FG 3526) in 1958 (
youtube), and it
introduced the world, including eager young white (wannabe or legit) folkies
with turntables and a bit of disposable income, to a totally localized and yet
probably universally appealing "country ragtime" style and a set of
songs like a bracing draw from a cold spring. Cotten's repertoire tapped
timeless British Isles-meet-Africana –i.e., American—stock such as "Going
Down The Road Feeling Bad", a bunch of honeybabe songs and, of course,
"What A Friend We Have In Jesus" (
discogs),
but her biographic originals are what will slay you.
She was on in years by the time she was
"discovered", but this suited her frailing country voice just fine, a
spirited gem coming through loud and clear on Folkways vinyl, which rescued
many a prospective legend from the obscurity that befell those who never got wire-recorded
and waxed in. But it's not just that, it's also the great store of the written
word, promising extended-if-not-eternal life for those it picked up and, in the
absence of vinyl, utter obscurity for those it missed. "Cut off by the
cataclysms of the Great Depression and the Second World War and by a national
narrative that had never included their kind," Greil Marcus wrote of many
of the musicians appearing on the Harry Smith's Folkways Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), "they appeared now
like visitors from another world, like passengers on a ship that had drifted
into the sea of the unwritten" (Marcus 1997).
Cotten was double-lucky, because not only was she recorded,
but she also found pulp-and-glue permanence when Mike Seeger and John Cohen
included two of her originals in their
New
Lost City Ramblers Songbook (1964).
Garcia fell in love with both
"Freight
Train" and
"Oh Babe,
It Ain't No Lie". Both are
utterly haunting, based in Ms. Cotton's childhood and expressing a yearning place-boundedness
that has been the fate of most everyone who has ever lived, statistically
speaking, yet a world that nevertheless can remain alien and estranged. Ms. Cotten
explained
OBIANL:
That's the song I wrote about a lady who lived next door to
us. My mother had to go to work and this lady would teach children. She told my
mother something: made my mother punish me. They hurt me all the day. 'Cause I
know what she told my mum was not true. That song's 'bout me getting punished.
My feelings got hurt, 'cause I did not do what Miss Mary said I did. And I used
cry in a bed, and a little verse came to me, a pretty tune came to me, and I
made a little song, a little tune I love.
One old woman, Lord, in this town
Keep a-telling her lies on me
Wish to my soul that old woman would die
Keep a-telling her lies on me
Oh babe, it ain't no lie
Oh babe, it ain't no lie
Oh babe, it ain't no lie
You know this life I'm living is [mighty] high
If OBIANL is a wise child's lament at a world dark with
injustice, "Freight Train" provides the dream of escape. Ms. Cotten:
We used to watch the freight train. We knew the fireman and
the brakeman, and the conductor, my mother used to launder for him. They'd let
us ride in the engine, put us in one of the coaches while they were backing up
and changing ... That was how I got my first train ride. We used to walk the
trestle and put our ear to the track and listen for the train to come. My
brother, he'd wait for this train to get real close and then he'd hang down
from one of the ties and swing back up after the train had passed over him.
No wonder this one, too, brings ample morbidity – that kind
of shit can go really wrong in a hurry.
When I'm dead and in my grave
No more good times here I crave
Place the stones at my head and feet
And tell them all I've gone to sleep
When I die, oh bury me deep
Down at the end of old Chestnut Street
So I can hear old Number Nine
As she comes rolling by
Garcia tried on both tunes for an abortive Arista album project during November
1976 sessions at Elliot Mazer's His Master's Wheels (HMW) Studios (OBIANL features on
All Good Things, disc 3, track 11). (For more on the '76 studio work,
see.) They would
have fit perfectly. OBIANL found the more fulsome later live expression, appearing
in every Garcia acoustic configuration of the 1980s, from the Dead's September-October
1980 treatment (immortalized on
Reckoning,
Arista A2L-8604, April
1981), to Amsterdam with Bobby Weir (10/11/81), Garcia's only solo
engagement after 1965 (4/10/82), to the many Garcia-Kahn and Jerry Garcia
Acoustic Band (JGAB) gigs later in the decade. "Freight Train" had
preceded OBIANL at the solo acoustic show, but Garcia couldn't remember the
words and shelved it, as a known and public proposition, for over a decade. He
took it back up with Grisman, and it appeared on their
Not For Kids Only (
Acoustic Disc ACD 9,
1993) chock full of
New Lost City Ramblers Song Book chestnuts. By that time, and when it appeared
as an acoustic one-off during an electric JGB equipment failure at the
Knickberbocker Arena in Albany (11/3/93), but especially on its two 1994 public
voyages, the song's lullaby came across a sad Siren's song, a stone being laid
at Garcia's own pleading head and feet, buried deep under ol' Chestnut Street.
In response to a fan's concern that the Dead had ripped
Elizabeth Cotten off with its "Sugaree" (evoking, as it did, her
"Shake Sugaree"), manager Richard Loren said in May 1981 that
she was a "great hero" to Garcia (1). When she died, Garcia took to dedicating
OBIANL to her memory, the only artist he ever consistently recognized in this way,
as far as I know. At many of these shows, these were the only words he spoke to
the audience, a testament to the high esteem in which he held her.
! ref: (1) Grateful Dead Archive, MS332, Business Papers, Second Accrual (preliminary), Box 1008.
