Biography (read more)
Elizabeth ‘Libba’ Cotten was a self-taught American folk and blues guitarist and songwriter from Chapel Hill, North Carolina, notable for playing a right-handed guitar upside-down as a left-hander, producing her distinctive ‘Cotten picking’ fingerstyle technique. After decades away from music while raising a family, she was rediscovered in the 1950s while working as a housekeeper for the Seeger family and resumed performing in her sixties.
Cotten’s composition ‘Freight Train,’ written in her youth, became a folk standard covered by Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan, and Jerry Garcia; she won a Grammy Award at age 90 and was posthumously inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2022, and her fingerpicking style has influenced generations of guitarists.
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