Thread by @YourWullie

Elizabeth Cotten was left handed yet played a guitar strung for a right-handed player, she played the guitar upside down, this required her to play the bass lines with her fingers and the melody with her thumb.
Clip from TV show 'Guitar Guitar' in 1969.
#InternationalWomensDay

Elizabeth was born in 1893 and started playing at age 7, she was self taught. While working briefly in a department store, Cotten helped a child wandering through the aisles find her mother. The child was Peggy Seeger, and the mother was the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger.  #IWD

Cotten began working as a maid for Ruth and Charles Seeger. In the 1950s, Mike Seeger began making recordings of Cotten's songs.These recordings became the album Folksongs and Instrumentals with Guitar, her very first recording - she was in her 60s.

Elizabeth wrote 'Freight Train,' in the early 1900s. Her song was wrongly credited for years to two British songwriters, who claimed it as their own in the mid-fifties. However, not only did Cotten write the song, but she did so when she was only 11.

In 1985, Cotten won a Grammy for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording for her album Elizabeth Cotten — Live!, she was 92 - “I was so excited when they gave me this, I was sitting in my seat just watching and listening and when the man said my name I got so weak and scared”

"I was just glad to get the Grammy. I didn't know what the thing was. It's the honor what I loved"

Elizabeth died in New York on 29th June, 1987, she was 94 years of age. ❤
#InternationalWomensDay #IWD