Freight Train

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Above is a performance of Freight Train by Joan Baez. Below is the songwriter/composer, Elizabeth Cotton.

Freight Train
Written by Elizabeth Cotten, around 1906–1912

Some songs come from Nashville studios or Tin Pan Alley offices. This one came from a young girl in North Carolina who could hear the trains rolling past her home near Chapel Hill. Elizabeth Nevills, later Elizabeth Cotten and known to friends as “Libba,” taught herself to play her brother’s banjo and then the guitar. She was left-handed, so she simply turned a right-handed guitar upside down. That meant she picked the bass notes with her fingers and the melody with her thumb. The rolling style that came from it is still called “Cotten picking.” She wrote “Freight Train” in her early teens, around the same age she was already working as a live-in housekeeper.

After she married and raised her daughter, Libba put the guitar away for decades and gave her time to family and church. She might never have picked it up again if not for a small kindness. In the 1940s she was selling dolls at Lansburgh’s department store in Washington, D.C., during the Christmas season. A little girl wandered away from her mother, and Libba found her in tears and brought her back. The girl was Peggy Seeger, and her mother was the composer and folk-song collector Ruth Crawford Seeger. Mrs. Seeger offered her a job, and Libba went to work cooking and keeping house for one of the most musical families in America. She took care of Mike, Peggy, Penny and Barbara Seeger, and their older half-brother was Pete Seeger. Years later, Peggy came upon Libba playing one of the family guitars, and the Seegers were astonished by what they heard.

In 1957 and 1958, Mike Seeger recorded Libba at her home in Washington. The result was her first album, released on Folkways Records in 1958 when she was well past sixty. It was later reissued as Freight Train and Other North Carolina Folk Songs and Tunes, and in 2007 the Library of Congress added it to the National Recording Registry.

Before that album came out, the song had already had an adventure without her. Peggy Seeger took “Freight Train” to England, where it caught on in folk circles. The skiffle craze was booming there, and the Chas McDevitt Skiffle Group recorded the song with a young Scottish singer named Nancy Whiskey. Their version reached No. 5 on the British charts in 1957 and made the American Top 40. It even inspired McDevitt to open a coffee bar in London’s Soho named Freight Train. But the record credited the song to “Paul James and Fred Williams,” made-up names for McDevitt and his manager, Bill Varley. Libba found out when she heard the song performed on The Ed Sullivan Show. With the Seeger family’s help, her name was eventually added to the song’s credits, though she never received full credit for her own childhood tune.

“Freight Train” went on to become a staple of the folk revival. The Quarrymen, the teenage skiffle group that grew into the Beatles, played it in their earliest days. Peter, Paul and Mary recorded it in 1963 and moved the song’s setting to New York City. It has since been sung by Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Doc Watson, Jerry Garcia, Taj Mahal and many others.

As for Libba, she started a second life as a performer in her sixties and toured well into old age. She received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1984. She won a Grammy in her nineties for her album Elizabeth Cotten Live! In 2022, she was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an early influence. Mike Seeger, who accompanied her for years, was once asked to sum her up. His answer was simple: “In a word: grace.”