Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten was born on this day in 1893. Through her songwriting and unique left-handed, upside-down playing style on guitar and banjo, Cotten has influenced generations of musicians. Here she performs her classic “Freight Train” at the Seeger family home in 1957. Cotten wrote the song as a teenager, inspired by the train sounds near her home in Carrboro, North Carolina. It appeared on her 1958 debut album, Folksongs and Instrumentals with Guitar, released on Folkways Records and l

At age 85, Elizabeth Cotten demonstrates how she taught herself to play guitar as a child and performs the first tune she ever learned, "Wilson Rag." Special thanks to Mike Seeger for everything he did to bring Elizabeth Cotten's music to the world including this footage filmed at Black Hawk College in 1978. | Dust-to-Digital

322K views · 13K reactions | Congratulations to Elizabeth Cotten on her Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction today. Here she is speaking to a college audience in 1980 followed by a performance from 1965 of "Freight Train," a song she wrote at the age of eleven. | Dust-to-Digital | Facebook

Elizabeth "Libba" Cotten was a self-taught musical prodigy who created a unique legacy in American folk and blues. A left-hander playing a right-handed guitar upside down, she developed the "Cotten picking" style—using her thumb for melody and fingers for bass. At just 11 years old, she wrote the timeless classic "Freight Train," inspired by the trains near her North Carolina home. After decades away from music to raise a family, she was "rediscovered" in her 60s while working for the Seeger fam