Elizabeth "Libba" Cotten

Yours truly, has stumbled upon another great, but lesser known folk blues and gospel artist.  Her name, is Elizabeth "Libba" Cotten.  She played guitar, in open, or Vastopol tuning.  There are some videos of her playing, on YouTube.  Here is one.  It is the full length record of songs she played called Elizabeth Cotten "Freight Train & Other North Carolina Folk Songs & Tunes".  The track listing is:

1. Wilson Rag
2. Freight Train
3. Going Down The Road Feeling Bad
4. I Don't Love Nobody
5. Ain't Got No Honey Baby Now
6. Graduation March
7. Honey Babe Your Papa Cares For You
8. Vastopol
9. Medley: Here Comes My Old Rattler Here/Sent For My Fiddle Sent For My Bow/George Buck
10. Medley: Run...Run/Mama Your Son Done Gone
11. Medley: Sweet By And By/What A Friend We Have In Jesus
12. Oh Babe It Ain't No Lie
13. Spanish Flangdang
14. When I Get Home

Now, the history of her music, and the record itself.

Elizabeth "Libba" Cotten was born in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, (around January, 1895 - June 29, 1987), one of four children. Her parents had been raised as farmers and before her birth had moved to the city, where her father worked as a laborer, mostly in the ore mines, and her mother was a cook and midwife. At about the age of eight, Elizabeth started playing her older brother's banjo and, a little later, her brother's guitar which he thought he had hidden from her. She would wait for him to leave, pull the guitar from under the bed and set it flat on her lap. At first she developed her picking pattern, with her left hand, then her chording, and finally some of the easier parts of Wilson Rag. Occasionally, a broken string would reveal her playing to her brother, and eventually she went to work and saved enough to buy her own instrument. To learn a new tune she needed only to hear it played or sung once by one of the many musicians around her town. Then she could play it on the guitar or banjo. When she was first learning, she played the guitar at every opportunity pausing only to eat. Both of her brothers and her sister could also play. Sometimes she would play music with her brothers, one playing bass (on the guitar), the other chording, and Elizabeth leading with the melody. They would also make and play cornstalk fiddles, paper on comb, and other such homemade instruments. They only played around their home, strictly for themselves and their friends. At about age 12, Elizabeth Cotten fol-lowed in her mother's footsteps by doing housework for people in Chapel Hill. She had done this kind of work most of her life. She married when she was fifteen and had one daughter, Lillie. Soon after, she joined the church and for about 25 years gave up her guitar playing except for brief occasions in church. She remained most of this time in Chapel Hill, except for a brief stay in New York City. Since the early 1940s she has lived with her daughter and five grandchildren in Washington, D.C. In the mid-forties she was working in a department store there and returned a lost Peggy Seeger to her mother. They quickly became friends and soon Elizabeth Cotten was working for the Seegers. After a few years, remembering that she used to play, she took the family guitar down off the wall and start-ed playing again, recalling one by one many of the songs and tunes of her child-hood and youth. Some of those songs are recorded here.