NC EOG Practice Test 9

Libba Cotten's Upside-Down Guitar

¹Elizabeth Cotten was born around 1893 near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her family called her "Libba." As a little girl, she could not stop listening to music. Her older brother owned a banjo, and whenever he left the house, Libba took it down from the wall and tried to play it.

²There was one problem. Libba was left-handed, and the banjo was strung for a right-handed player. Instead of changing the strings around, she simply turned the instrument over and played it upside down. She picked the low bass notes with her fingers and the melody with her thumb, the opposite of the way most players do it.

³When she was about twelve, Libba wanted a guitar of her own. She worked doing housework for neighbors, and with her mother's help she saved her wages. At last she bought a guitar from a mail-order catalog for $3.75. It was not a fancy instrument, but to Libba it was a treasure.

⁴She practiced every chance she got, and soon she was making up songs of her own. As a young teenager, she wrote a song called "Freight Train," about the trains she heard rumbling past her home. She played the guitar the same upside-down way she had played her brother's banjo. Her style later came to be called "Cotten picking." Years afterward, other guitar players would work hard to copy it.

⁵Then Libba's music went quiet. She married when she was about seventeen and spent her days raising her daughter, working, and going to church. Between her family, her jobs, and her church, there seemed to be no time left for music. She put the guitar away. For about twenty-five years, she hardly played at all.

⁶Years later, Libba moved to Washington, D.C. When she was in her fifties, she went to work as a housekeeper for a family of musicians and song collectors. One day she picked up a guitar in their home and found that her fingers still remembered the songs. She began practicing again. The family was amazed by her playing, and one of the sons recorded her at home.

⁷Her first album came out in 1958. "Freight Train," the song she had written as a girl, became famous. Other singers recorded it, and folk musicians across the country learned to play it. Libba began performing at concerts and festivals, and she kept performing for the rest of her long life. Young musicians traveled to hear her and to learn her unusual picking style.

⁸In 1984, she received a National Heritage Fellowship, one of the nation's highest honors for traditional artists. In her nineties, she won a Grammy Award. When Elizabeth Cotten died in 1987, she left behind a style of guitar playing that is still taught today and a song she wrote as a girl that people around the world still sing.