ELIZABETH COTTEN -- THE WOMAN WHO PLAYED UPSIDE DOWN

   WASHINGTON, D.C. — 1940 — The Seeger’s house was full of music.  Peggy played guitar, while brother Mike drew earthy sounds from the banjo.  Sometimes half-brother Pete dropped in and got everybody singing.  Yet it was the Seeger's maid whose songs would someday be covered by Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead, Peter, Paul, and Mary, the Beatles...

   You may not know of Elizabeth Cotten but you know the song she wrote -- at age 11.  The words seem out of a grade school primer, yet they tapped a mature longing — to steal away, to find a place "they won't know where I have gone."  "Freight Train" was written with hope, hidden in sin, then released to become, like its composer, an American original.  Played upside down. Watch:

   Born in 1893, Elizabeth Nevill was the grandaughter of slaves.  Her household in Chapel Hill, North Carolina was also full of music and Elizabeth began playing her brother's banjo at age seven.  She taught herself guitar but being left-handed, she played with the strings upside down. “Turn it over,” her brother kept saying. “Well, I turned it over, and it was worse than before.” So she just kept playing — upside down.

With money made from cleaning, chopping wood, hauling water, she soon bought a $4 guitar.  "From that day on," she said, "nobody had no peace in that house."  Then she began to write songs. The first was about a train.

   "We used to walk the trestle and put our ear to the track and listen for the train. . . We'd take straight pins, lay them on the railroad track and make little alphabets out of them. We'd know just about the time when the train was either coming or going, and the train would run over the pins and mash them together . . . That was the beginning of me writing 'Freight Train,' right about then."

   Being black in North Carolina made any child dream of stealing away -- "please don't tell what train I'm on..."  Elizabeth left school at 13 to help her mother cook and clean.  At 17, she married Frank Cotten, then joined a fundamentalist church whose deacon convinced her to stop playing those "worldly songs."  For the next 25 years, she set the guitar aside.  "I declare,” she later said, “I don’t see where there’s so much sin in it."

   In the 1940s, when Elizabeth and Frank Cotten divorced, she moved to Washington D.C. to be near her daughter.  One day, while working in a department store, she met a little girl wandering, lost.  Elizabeth helped the girl find her mother.  Ruth Seeger told Elizabeth that if she ever needed a job. . .

   The Seegers did not know their maid played guitar until they caught her one day.  She apologized but soon they were sharing songs.  In the mid-50s, Peggy, starting a folk career in England, sang "Freight Train."  It became a hit, sung by every skiffle band including the Quarrymen, John Lennon on vocals.

    Meanwhile back in DC, Mike Seeger taped his maid picking in her bedroom.  The folks at Smithsonian Folkways recognized the talent , and "Elizabeth Cotten:  Negro Folk Songs and Tunes" came out in 1957.  Three years later, she was playing alongside young folkies and old bluesmen at the Newport Folk Festival. 

    For the next 25 years, Elizabeth Cotten toured America and Europe, charming audiences with her grace and stories.  "I've been about everywhere," she said, "so many places I've forgotten I was there."

    Only time could slow her, but it took its time.  In 1984, she won a Grammy. Two years later, she played at the Philadelphia Folk Festival, a 93-year-old woman picking a Martin.  The following year,  she died in her home in Syracuse.  She is buried there, near the Elizabeth Cotten Grove.  Her guitar is now in the Smithsonian.

            When I'm dead, Lord, bury me deep

            Down at the end of old Chelsea Street

            So I can hear old Number Nine

            As she goes rollin' by.

       CLICK TO LISTEN TO ELIZABETH COTTEN IN 'I HEAR AMERICA SINGING'