WASHINGTON - In the early 1900s, a black girl living in Carrboro composed a mournful song about a freight train, picking out her tune on a three-dollar guitar.

Elizabeth "Libba" Cotten would grow up to leave that guitar behind, to marry at age 15, have a baby and become a housekeeper and nanny for well-to-do white families. For decades, her work subdued the passion she once held for making music.

Her gift for music was rediscovered in midcentury. By then, she was a grandmother secretly plucking notes on an instrument that hung inside the suburban family home where she worked.

This spring, Cotten's folk song was named one of the most significant works in recorded history, joining the U.S. Library of Congress' national recording registry.

The album "Freight Train And Other North Carolina Folk Songs and Tunes," first released in 1958, joins 249 other recorded songs, spoken-word albums and political speeches honored for their cultural, historical or aesthetic significance.

Jose Antonio Bowen, a member of the National Recording Preservation Board that chose Cotten's album this year, says that if someone could listen to every recording on the registry, "You'd get a range of the incredible variety of what goes into making America great."

The registry was set up by Congress in 2000 to offer the public a way of understanding the breadth of recorded music and spoken word. The Library of Congress currently has about 3 million works in its archives.

"Ultimately, the real purpose of this is to preserve our nation's history with sound," Bowen says.

Historians say Cotten's recording is among the few remaining examples of women's parlor music popular in the early 20th century.

Who knows what might've been lost had chance not sent Cotten to work outside Washington for one of the most renowned family names in folk music, the Seegers.

Mike Seeger was a teenager when his sister, Peggy, heard their mother's housekeeper picking out tunes on a guitar she hadn't asked permission to handle.

Discovered by Seegers

"When she first played, it was one of those experiences that you never forget the feeling of," Mike Seeger recalled last week in an interview, "because it was very down-to-earth music but very refined at the same time."

The teenagers were enchanted. Can you teach us to play? Mike Seeger asked.

No, Cotten answered. But I can show you what I do.

Cotten showed how she played, left-handed, holding the guitar upside down and strumming upward. She told of how she learned to play her brother's guitar on her lap, how she saved up quarters from a baby-sitting job to buy her own guitar at the age of about 12.

She showed her delicate style of picking strings and taught Seeger how to sing "Freight Train."

In 1958, Seeger recorded Cotten with a microphone as she sat in the bedroom of her home in Washington, a cluster of grandchildren listening silently at her feet.

He helped Cotten sell the recording to a New York label for $50, plus royalties of 25 cents an album.

He took her on tour to folk festivals with his band, The New Lost City Ramblers.

At festivals, she would gently pick her guitar and, in a delicate voice, tell stories of her youth in rural North Carolina. Eventually, millions of listeners would hear her signature song, which begins:

"Freight train, freight train, run so fast

Freight train, freight train, run so fast

Please don't tell what train I'm on

They won't know what route I'm going ... "

In 1984, she won a Grammy for a live album. She was thought to be 90 years old.

"From my point of view, she just took it all in stride and loved it," Seeger said. "There's something about the way she looked, just even walking on stage with a guitar."

Parlor ragtime

Cotten was a talented musician in her own right, but what she represents to history means so much more, says Glenn Hinson, chairman of curriculum and folklore at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Cotten played parlor ragtime, the kind of delicate songs performed by women of the households around the turn of the 20th century.

Although Cotten remembered playing for close friends and relatives, Hinson says, she would never have performed in public as a young woman because it would have been considered unseemly for women.

And though a few women with similar styles became well-known, among them the late Etta Baker of Morganton, most music companies and historians knew more about the men, Hinson says.

Gene DeAnna, who heads the Library of Congress' recorded sound section, admits the registry is something of a publicity stunt.

"People love lists," he says.

Still, board members argue long and loudly every year about which works to add.

"It is not an honor that is handed out freely," Hinson says. "For an African-American woman who was raised in a working-class neighborhood of Carrboro, North Carolina, and spent much of her life doing domestic service and care-giving, to achieve this level of national recognition ... there are countless albums that could have been chosen for this kind of honor."

Cotten died in 1987.

Seeger, who first learned that freight train song half a century ago, says Cotten's story continues to mean something to American culture.

Nowadays, it makes him think about the domestic workers and lawn caretakers he sees doing work for which they're not always highly valued.

"Every time, if I'm in D.C. and passing a bus stop and seeing brown-skinned women there, I say, 'I wonder what they can do,' " Seeger says.

"The station you find yourself in in life doesn't always reflect your potential."

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