#elizabeth cotten

[mimi-0007]

#black history #black tumblr #black literature #black excellence #black community #civil rights #black girl magic #blackexcellence365 #folk music #blues music #elizabeth cotten

[caveguy22]

Elizabeth Cotten playing banjo for a segment in a TV series. (1985)

Song is called Georgie Buck, which is an old traditional folk tune. She was around 92 years old when this was recorded.

Source: Aly Bain's Down Home

#Music #Music history #Elizabeth Cotten #Elisabeth cotten #Blues #Old blues #Blues history #banjo player #Banjo #History #Blues players #Folk songs #Traditional folk songs

[thechanelmuse]

Black American Music Month

• ELIZABETH “LIBBA” COTTEN - She was a maid at 9, wrote a hit song at 11 — and won a Grammy at 93. Not to mention she was a self-taught left-handed guitarist who played a guitar strung for a right-handed player, but played it upside down. This position meant that she would play the bass lines with her fingers and the melody with her thumb.

• SISTER ROSETTA THARPE- The “Godmother of Rock & Roll.” She helped shape modern popular music, was one of the few Black female guitarists to ever find commercial success and the first artist to blend gospel with the secular.

• ODETTA HOLMES - Known as “The Voice of the Civil Rights Movement.” In 1963, she sang for the masses on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial at the March on Washington. Her musical repertoire consisted largely of American folk music, blues, jazz, and spirituals.

• PEGGY JONES - Nicknamed “Lady Bo” played rhythm guitar in Bo Diddley's band in the late 1950s and early 1960s, becoming one of the first (perhaps the first) female rock guitarists in a highly visible rock band. Sometimes called the “Queen Mother of Guitar.”

• LIZZIE “MEMPHIS MINNIE” DOUGLAS - Known as the “Queen of the Blues,” was a singer, guitarist, and songwriter. Her title stems from her legacy of successfully recording music across four decades as well as being the lone female voice in a male dominated blues scene.

• NORMA JEAN WOFFORD - Nicknamed “The Duchess” by Bo Diddley, she was the second female guitarist in Diddley's backing band.

• ALGIA MAE HINTON - She was widely recognized as a master picker and buckdancer in the Piedmont styles. She would often play her guitar behind her head while buck dancing.

• ETTA BAKER - She was a Piedmont blues/folk guitarist and singer who began playing the guitar at age 3. Taught by her father, long-time Piedmont player Boone Reid, Etta played 6-string and 12-string acoustic guitar, and 5-string banjo. She was a master of the blues guitar style that became popular in the southern piedmont after the turn of the century.

• JESSIE MAE HEMPHILL - A legend of hill country blues guitar. She grew up in a lineage of familial fife-and-drums bands from northern Mississippi, rose to popularity in the mid-1980s and had a fruitful career during which she performed around the globe, traveling mostly on her own. She played in open tunings and, having started as a drummer, had a percussive guitar style that included slapping and banging the instrument. She would also tie a tambourine around her calf, which, together with her strumming-and-drumming guitar work, gave her performance the sound of a one-woman-band.

• BEVERLY “GUITAR” WATKINS - One part soul singer, one part rockin' roadhouse mama, and one part gifted songwriter. She's been chronically under-recorded for a woman with her résumé, performing with the likes of James Brown, Ray Charles and Otis Redding. She didn’t record her first album until she was 60. Her blistering licks on a 1962 red Fender Mustang earned her the well-deserved nickname “Guitar.” She gon’ put on a show:

One more for good measure:

• WILLIE MAE “BIG MAMA” THORNTON - Also referred to as “The Godmother of Rock & Roll.” She was a blues singer, songwriter, self-taught drummer, and harmonica player. She was the first to record "Hound Dog", in 1952, which became her biggest hit, staying seven weeks at number one on the Billboard R&B chart in 1953 and selling almost two million copies. She also helped to shape the sound and style of “Texas-blues,” an evolving blues sub-genre known to incorporate swing and big band elements.

#black american music month #elizabeth cotten #elizabeth libba cotten #sister rosetta tharpe #odetta holmes #peggy jones #memphis minnie #norma jean wofford #algia mae hinton #etta baker #jessie mae hemphill #beverly guitar watkins #big mama thornton #black american musicians

[passengerpigeons]

Libba Cotten's freight train. Technically I have some spots I use brush skips to make it more sparse and pensive, but I'm going to reincorporate those slowly as I work on singing along and consistency

#banjo #clawhammer banjo #libba cotten #elizabeth cotten #folk

[lisamarie-vee]

#elizabeth cotten #folk music #hatshop

[musicbabes]

Elizabeth Cotten Live !

#elizabeth cotten #guitare

[leguin]

work all the week, hon, and i give it all to you honey baby, what more can i do?

#elizabeth cotten #music

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Elizabeth Cotten - Euphoria Tavern, Portland, Oregon, February 19, 1975

American genius Elizabeth Cotten was born at the tail-end of the 19th century, but she thankfully lived a long life. And in 1975, at the age of 82, she was in Portland, playing her guitar and banjo and singing her classic songs for a small-but-very-appreciative crowd. Originally broadcast on KBOO-FM, this show features plenty of Cotten's hugely influential fingerpicking, charmingly rambling monologues and singalongs that will bring a smile to your face and a tear to your eye.

Elizabeth Says: I just loved to play. That used to be all I’d do. I’d sit up late at night and play. My mama would say to me, “Sis, put that thing down and go to bed.” “Alright, Mama, just as soon as I finish—let me finish this.” Well, by me keep playing, you see, she’d go back to sleep and I’d sit up thirty minutes or longer than that after she’d tell me to stop playing. Sometimes I’d near play all night if she didn’t wake up and tell me to go to bed. That’s when I learned to play, ’cause then when I learned one little tune, I’d be so proud of that, that I’d want to learn another. Then I’d just keep sitting up trying. I tried hard to play, I’m telling you. I worked for what I’ve got. I really did work for it.

PS - A snippet of this performance was released a while back on a 7-inch with the great Marisa Anderson on the flipside. Go grab the digital version to support KBOO!

#elizabeth cotten

[cicadaboybat]

ok i know im an mcr blog but im a huge folk music enjoyer and im rediscovering elizabeth cotten and holy shit she was so fucking talented,she was born in 1893, fully self taught, learnt all by herself as a young black girl, had her music stolen by white dipshits, helped popularize the alternating bass and fingerpicking styles style, she died at 97 after playing music her whole fucking life, she has a statue in syracuse i need to see

look at this fucking sweetheart, she has a song with one of her granddaughters and it's so pretty

#boy bat bullshit #elizabeth cotten

[geeshiewiley]

elizabeth cotten - sweet by and by

#Youtube #elizabeth cotten

[krispyweiss]

Toward the FUN(ds): A Concert Benefitting Camp Winnarainbow at Herbst Theatre, San Francisco, Sept. 28, 2023

- Steve Earle, Rickie Lee Jones, Peter Rowan, John Craigie and John Popper perform pre-Hardly Strictly Bluegrass benefit with Wavy Gravy in attendance

Seeing how they all were in town for separate appearances at Hardly Strictly Bluegrass, Steve Earle, Rickie Lee Jones, Peter Rowan and John Craigie got together and donated some time to a guitar (and mandolin) pull to benefit Wavy Gravy’s Camp Winnarainbow.

The round-robin performance is “an efficient way for a concert to raise funds … you get a lot of us for your buck,” host Earle told the crowd - which included Gravy, 87 and wearing his trademark clown nose, in the front row - assembled Sept. 28 for Toward the FUN(ds) at San Francisco’s Herbst Theatre.

This informal setting was an opportunity to hear Jones fumble through an untitled work-in-progress - “it’s like a lesson - a bad one,” she deadpanned mid-song - while earning the loudest applause of the evening for “Weasel and the White Boys Cool.”

“That usually happens to me when I host these things,” Earle said.

Jones would later wow the crowd by turning a false start of “Bury Me Under the Weeping Willow” into a singalong “Hand Me Down My Walking Cane.”

For his part, the host dedicated “Jerusalem” to Gravy, played mandolin on “Copperhead Road” and duetted with Rowan on “Train a Comin’.”

The incongruous grouping also found the 43-year-old California native Craigie - who was hysterical when talking about needing, and eventually quitting, oxygen when playing gigs at altitude - swapping licks with the 81-year-old Rowan, who played mandolin and guitar, sang high notes like a man half his age and slipped Elizabeth Cotten’s “Freight Train” inside his own “Panama Red.”

“Now my roots are really showing,” Rowan said upon playing the first notes of “Freight Train.”

Cragie’s songs, like his banter, can also be funny (as on “I Wrote Mr. Tambourine Man” and “Laurie Rolled Me a J”) before he slips into wistful homesickness on “I am California.” He punctuates both sides of his songwriting with mournful bleats on harmonica.

Unannounced guest John Popper, whose daughter attends the camp, appeared to perform a take of John Lennon’s “Imagine” with Craigie on guitar and participate in the all-hands-on-deck closer “Rivers of Babylon.” The Sour Widows Duo played an opening two-song set. But it was the four-way pull that pulled the crowd in and delivered huge payoffs during their 90-minutes on stage.

Grade card: Toward The FUN(ds): A Concert Benefitting Camp Winnarainbow at Herbst Theatre, San Francisco - 9/28/23 - A-

9/29/23

#toward the fun(ds) #2023 concerts #wavy gravy #camp winnarainbow #rickie lee jones #steve earle #peter rowan #old & in the way #john craigie #new riders of the purple sage #elizabeth cotten #sour widows #john popper #blues traveler #hardly strictly bluegrass #john lennon

[draculizing]

Elizabeth Cotten performing at the hudson river revival in 1983, on her 90th birthday.

#elizabeth cotten #folk music #folk #this is my first time recording something like this so if you have any tips or critiscisms pls share :]

[fungi-maestro]

#instrumental #vastopol #Elizabeth cotten #playlist #Spotify

[pleiades974]

Sunday is fading, I'm in the mood for going back to the roots...

#freight train #elizabeth cotten #Youtube

[odk-2]

Elizabeth Cotten - New Year's Eve (1978) Elizabeth Cotten from: "Elizabeth Cotten, Volume 3: When I'm Gone" (Compilation LP)

Instrumental | Acoustic | Folk | Cotten Picking * *https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Cotten#Guitar_style

JukeHostUK (left click = play) (320kbps)

Personnel: Elizabeth Cotten: Guitar

Recorded by Mike Seeger

Recorded: @ Elizabeth Cotten's Home in Syracuse, New York USA on December 9, 1978

Album Released: 1979

Smithsonian Folkways Records

#Smithsonian Folkways Records #Elizabeth Cotten #Folk #Acoustic #1970's #New Year's Eve #When I'm Gone #Instrumental #Cotten Picking #Mike Seeger