Elizabeth Cotten

Biography

Elizabeth Cotten was an American folk-blues guitarist and songwriter whose self-taught, left-handed, upside-down fingerpicking style is known as 'Cotten picking'. Rediscovered in the 1950s by the Seeger family after decades away from music, she became a cherished figure of the folk revival; her childhood song 'Freight Train' is a folk standard, and she won a Grammy Award in 1985, two years before her death.