Elizabeth Cotten

Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten (née Nevills) (January 5, 1893 – June 29, 1987) was an American blues and folk musician, singer, and songwriter. A self-taught left-handed guitarist, Cotten developed her own original style. She played a guitar strung for a right-handed player, but played it upside down, as she was left-handed. This position required her to play the bass lines with her fingers and the melody with her thumb. Her signature alternating bass style has become known as “Cotten picking”. Cotten was born in 1893 to a musical family near Chapel Hill, North Carolina, in an area that would later be incorporated as Carrboro. Her parents were George Nevill (also spelled Nevills) and Louisa (or Louise) Price Nevill. Elizabeth was the youngest of five children.

She named herself on her first day of school, when the teacher asked her name, because at home she was only called “Li’l Sis”. By the age of eight, she was playing songs. At age nine, she was forced to quit school and began work as a domestic worker. At the age of twelve, she had a live-in job at Chapel Hill. She earned a dollar a month, that her mother saved up to buy her first guitar. The guitar, a Sears and Roebuck brand instrument, cost $3.75 (equivalent to $134 in 2025). Although self-taught, she became proficient at playing the instrument, and her repertoire included a large number of rags and dance tunes.
More information

In the Sweet By and By

Oh Babe It Ain’t No Lie

Look and Live, My Brother

Wilson Rag

Washington Blues

When I’m Gone

Freight Train

Shake Sugaree

Going Down the Road Feeling Bad

Gaslight Blues

Back to the homepage

This page contains text from Wikipedia. The content is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0).
See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/