10/31/2025
She wrote "Freight Train" at 11, then didn't play guitar for 25 years.
At 62, she was rediscovered working as a maid.
At 90, she won a Grammy.
Elizabeth Cotten was born in 1893 in Chapel Hill, North Carolinaâthe youngest of five children in a Black family barely surviving the Jim Crow South. Her parents worked menial jobs. There was no money for luxuries like music lessons or instruments.
But Elizabeth wanted to make music. So at age seven, she started sneaking her older brother's banjo when he wasn't home. She'd cradle it awkwardly in her small hands, trying to figure out how sounds became songs.
There was one problem: Elizabeth was left-handed. Her brother's banjo was set up for right-handed players. But no one had told Elizabeth there was a "correct" way to hold an instrument.
So she just flipped it upside down and taught herself.
Her left handâthe one that should've been fretting notesâstrummed. Her right handâthe one that should've been strummingâpicked out melodies. It was backwards to everyone else. To Elizabeth, it was the only way that made sense.
By age 11, she'd saved enough money doing domestic work to order a guitar from the Sears catalog: a Stella parlor guitar, $3.75. She transferred her upside-down technique to six strings.
And she wrote "Freight Train."
"Freight Train" was about the trains that rumbled through Chapel Hillâthe sound that meant somewhere else, meant movement, meant escape from the poverty and limitation of her childhood. The melody mimicked the rhythm of wheels on tracks. The lyrics were simple, wistful, longing:
Freight train, freight train, run so fast
Freight train, freight train, run so fast
Please don't tell what train I'm on
They won't know what route I've gone
Elizabeth was 11 years old. She'd created something that would outlive her by generations.
But first, she had to survive.
At 15, Elizabeth married. Her husband's name was Frank. They had a daughter, Lily. Elizabeth put down the guitar. Not because she wanted toâbecause she had to.
Black women in early 20th-century North Carolina had limited options: domestic service, laundry, field work. Elizabeth worked as a maid and housekeeper to help support her family. There was no time for music. No market for a Black woman playing upside-down guitar in the Jim Crow South.
For 25 years, the guitar sat silent. Elizabeth cleaned houses, raised her daughter, survived. The girl who'd written "Freight Train" at 11 became a woman whose hands scrubbed floors instead of playing strings.
Music was a memory. A childhood dream put away because adulthood required survival.
Then, in 1948, at age 55, Elizabeth got a job working for the Seeger family in Washington, D.C.
The Seegers weren't just any family. Ruth Crawford Seeger was a composer. Her husband Charles was a musicologist. Their childrenâMike and Peggy Seeger, and their half-brother Pete Seegerâwere already becoming folk music legends.
Elizabeth worked as their housekeeper. She cleaned, cooked, kept the house running while the Seegers made music.
One day, Peggy Seeger (then a teenager) was in a department store with Elizabeth when Peggy paused to look at guitars. Elizabeth mentioned, almost casually, that she used to play.
"Show me," Peggy said.
Elizabeth picked up a guitar. Flipped it upside down. And began to play.
Peggy Seeger was stunned. The technique was unlike anything she'd seenâmelody in the bass, rhythm in the treble, everything backwards but somehow perfect. She ran home and told her family: their housekeeper was an extraordinary guitarist.
The Seegers invited Elizabeth to play for them. She played "Freight Train"âthe song she'd written four decades earlier. The family was mesmerized.
Pete Seeger, already famous, asked permission to perform it. Elizabeth said yes. Within months, "Freight Train" was being played at folk festivals and coffeehouses across America.
Elizabeth Cotten, at 62 years old, was rediscovered.
In 1958, Folkways Records began recording Elizabeth. Her first album, Folksongs and Instrumentals with Guitar, introduced the world to "Cotten picking"âthe name given to her unique left-handed, upside-down style.
She played with her thumb handling melodies on the bass strings while her fingers picked rhythm on the treble strings. It created a sound that was simultaneously complex and effortless, like two guitars playing at once.
Musicians were obsessed. Doc Watson learned from her. Joan Baez covered "Freight Train." Jerry Garcia cited her as an influence. Taj Mahal studied her technique. She became a legend in the folk revival movementânot as a novelty, but as a master.
Elizabeth toured. She played festivals. She appeared on television. At an age when most people retire, Elizabeth Cotten was finally getting the music career she'd deserved at 11.
She kept performing into her 80s. Her fingers, weathered from decades of housework, still remembered every note.
In 1984, Elizabeth Cotten won a Grammy Award for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording. She was 90 years old.
She accepted the award with quiet grace, the same way she'd lived her life. No bitterness about the decades lost to housework. No anger about being discovered in her 60s instead of her teens. Just gratitude that the music had finally found its way back to her.
Elizabeth died in 1987 at 94, in Syracuse, New York, surrounded by family.
"Freight Train" has been covered hundreds of timesâby folk singers, rock bands, bluegrass groups. Most people who play it don't know Elizabeth Cotten wrote it at 11. They don't know she stopped playing for 25 years. They don't know she won a Grammy at 90.
They just know it's a beautiful song about longing and trains and somewhere else.
Elizabeth Cotten didn't come from fame or fortune. She came from poverty, Jim Crow North Carolina, and a childhood where a $3.75 guitar from Sears was an impossible luxury she had to earn herself.
She taught herself to play upside down because no one told her that wasn't how it was done.
She wrote "Freight Train" at 11 and didn't play it again for decades because survival required putting away childish things.
She worked as a maid into her 60s, cleaning houses for families who made music while she made their beds.
And then one day, someone asked her to play. And everything she'd put away came flooding back.
She was 62 when she was rediscovered. She was 90 when she won a Grammy.
She had heart. She had rhythm. And a $3.75 guitar played upside down.
Elizabeth Cotten proved it's never too late. That decades lost don't mean dreams dead. That the music you put away to survive can come back when survival allows.
She wrote "Freight Train" at 11. She played it at 90 accepting a Grammy.
The train she sang aboutâthe one she wanted to ride away from poverty and limitationâfinally came.
It was just 79 years late.
