Shake Sugaree, The Story Of Elizabeth Cotten.

I’m not really interested in hearing new music by the likes of Ed Sheeran or Adele. What I like to do is discover great music from the past that I have missed out on. Today my kitchen has been filled with the sound of the guitar and singing of Elizabeth Cotten. I just thought I would tell you a little bit about her, because I think her story is quite fascinating. It was through listening to Rhiannon Giddens that I first heard of Elizabeth Cotten. On youtube I came across a live video of Rhiannon singing a song called Shake Sugaree which I enjoyed, and she spoke a little about the person who wrote it, who also came from her state of North Carolina. This aroused my curiosity, and I wanted to hear the original version. Thus began a train of events which led to an album called Shake Sugaree arriving at my house three days ago.

Elizabeth Cotten was born in 1895 in a town called Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She was the youngest of five children. She gave herself the name Elizabeth on her first day at school because at home she was just called Li’l Sis. She left school aged 9 to become a domestic servant earning a dollar a month from which she saved enough to buy her first guitar for $3.75. It was a right-handed guitar, so, being left-handed she turned it upside down to play, and she developed a self-taught unique guitar style which in later years became known among guitar players as Cotten-Picking. By her early teens Elizabeth was writing her own songs, one of which was Freight-Train which several decades later would make her famous. She married at 17 and had a daughter Lillie. The family moved around the east of the USA for several years and finally settled in Washington D.C. When Lillie got married, Elizabeth divorced her husband and moved in with her daughter’s family. She stopped playing the guitar for over 25 years.

With Mike Seeger.

She had a temporary job working in a department store when a chance fateful encounter changed her life. A child had got lost in the store and it was Elizabeth who found her and reunited her with her mother. That child was Peggy Seeger who was to become years later a famous folk singer and wife of Ewan McColl. Her mother was Ruth Crawford Seeger a well-known composer. Ruth gave Elizabeth her phone number and said to get in touch if she ever needed a job. That is how Elizabeth became a maid for the famous musical Seeger family. The most famous member of the family was Pete Seeger. There were musical instruments all over the house and the family soon became aware of Elizabeth’s talent when she began singing and playing again. Peggy Seeger learned Freight Train from Elizabeth off by heart.

At Newport 1964.

When Peggy moved to England in the 1950s, she included Freight Train in her repertoire around the burgeoning Folk Clubs of the time. Two unscrupulous Englishmen whose names I won’t mention heard the song and copyrighted it as their own work. It was recorded by Chas McDevitt & Nancy Whiskey and became a huge hit in Britain. It heralded the short-lived Skiffle craze in Britain. A band in Liverpool called The Quarrymen included it in their act in the late 50s. (There is no known recording of their version, which is a shame because they became The Beatles!) This shows the influence of Elizabeth Cotten. When the Seeger family heard about the copyright issue of Freight Train, they sorted it out in Elizabeth’s favour, but she must have lost a lot of money in royalties.

The recordings that arrived through my letterbox this week were made by Peggy’s brother Mike Seeger in 1965/66. I must say it is a wonderful CD. The singer on the title song Shake Sugaree is actually Elizabeth’s great-grand-daughter Brenda Evans with Elizabeth accompanying her on guitar. It is a very simple song, almost like a nursery rhyme, but very catchy. You almost can’t resist singing along. Over half of the tracks are instrumentals played on guitar or banjo. This is where you can appreciate what a virtuoso guitar player Elizabeth was. I can’t play the guitar and know nothing about the technical aspects of it, but my ears tell me when I am in the presence of a great guitar player. I am sure the likes of Richard Thompson or Bert Jansch would listen to Elizabeth’s fingerpicking style with admiration. She does sing on many of the songs, but I think you would agree that her genius was in the guitar playing. 

The album was originally released in 1967, but the re-release that I have contains ten previously unreleased tracks. There is also a very attractive booklet of sleeve notes from which I gleaned most of my information and photos. Elizabeth didn’t start performing professionally until 1960 when she had reached an age when most people retire. She received a Grammy award for her album Elizabeth Cotten Live at the age of 90. She continued playing live concerts until a few weeks before she died aged 92 in 1987. She was an American national treasure. I’m very pleased I discovered the music and learned about the amazing life of Elizabeth Cotten. I have shared a video below of Elizabeth singing her most famous song Freight Train. 

Freight Train by Elizabeth Cotten

Clicking, Clacking Of The High Heeled Shoes.

Sunday afternoon. It has rained most of the morning. I won’t be going anywhere today. I have been sitting in the kitchen, looking out of the window watching the starlings flying to and fro. The rain doesn’t seem to bother them, they are still chattering away to each other. I just put the clock back by an hour, I forgot last night, so that means it will be dark by 5.00 this evening. I haven’t written anything for a few days, so I thought I’d make the effort to write something to pass the time. I am listening to Astral Weeks by Van Morrison, which is probably my favourite album of all time, although I haven’t played it for a while. What prompted me to give it another listen today was a broadcast on BBC Radio 4 a few days ago which a fellow Van fan recommended. It was presented by the journalist Laura Barton and anyone who has read her articles in The Guardian will know that Laura is a big Van fan. 

The programme was about the relationship between music and language. One of the examples she cited was the phrase clicking, clacking of the high heeled shoes in the song Madame George. That line resonates with me as well. Van is popular for many, many reasons. I think one of the reasons is, that through his lyrics he is intuitively able to tap into what Jung or Freud might call the collective consciousness. In many of his songs he recalls his own childhood & teenage experiences. I am thinking of such songs as On Hyndford Street, Take Me Back, A Sense Of Wonder, Cleaning Windows, Cyprus Avenue and many more. Wherever in the world people listen to Van’s words they can relate to them because we all have similar childhood memories.

Our Street Now.

The street where I grew up in the 1950’s & early 60s was called George Street and wasn’t too dissimilar to Van’s Hyndford Street, except I think we had nicer gardens out at the back. I wish I had a photo of the street from the 1950s to show you, but all I could find is a modern picture from an estate agent’s website (See photo). Anyway, it was a working-class street of mainly terraced houses. There were only about two families in the street that had a car in those days. That meant that without any traffic all the kids could play in the street, which was ideal. Everyone in the street knew each other. These days people sometimes don’t even know who lives next door. There was a row of lime trees down our side of the street which was very pleasant. 

Hopscotch

In the long summer evenings, all the kids would be out on the street, playing football, or cricket (using a tennis ball rather than a cricket ball, because of the danger of smashing a window!) There were lots of traditional games as well. The pavement often had hopscotch marked on it with chalk. Boys played marbles; girls were more into skipping. There were games which involved singing as well, such as, The Big Ship Sails On The Illy Alley Oh. The girls did most of the organising of the games. Queenie O Coco, Who’s Got The Ball? was one, I’m The King Of The Castle, You’re The Dirty Rascal was another. There was another one called Fox & Hounds where all the kids would line up on one side of the street and then charge across to the other side before being grabbed. You could go on and on about memories of street life.

Factory 1929

To get back to the point of this story. In the radio programme Laura Barton said that the line ‘clicking clacking of the high heeled shoes’ reminded her of the sound of stiletto heels on rainy concrete paving slabs. Well, quite near our street, on Queens Walk was a factory called Symingtons. The workforce was about 95% female. It started in the Edwardian era making corsets. During the second World War it made parachutes. By the 1950s it made all sorts of underwear. Anyway, every morning hundreds of women and girls would come traipsing along Oundle Road at the top of our street to work at this factory. The pavement was tarmac and the high heel shoes left hundreds of tiny pock marks on the soft surface,, and that is what the image of clicking, clacking of the high heeled shoes means to me.