NC native Libba Cotten to be posthumously inducted into Rock & Roll Hall of Fame
Elizabeth Cotten, who was born and raised in the area of Chapel Hill now known as Carrboro, is being posthumously inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame as part of the 2022 class, the organization announced Wednesday.
Cotten, who was born in 1893 and is also known as “Libba,” will receive the Hall of Fame’s Early Influence Award, which honors artists “whose music and performance style have directly influenced, inspired and evolved rock & roll and music impacting youth culture.”
Cotten was a folk and blues musician perhaps best known for her timeless folk song “Freight Train,” which she composed and wrote as a 12-year-old, inspired by the trains that would pass by her childhood home in Carrboro. Her songs have been performed by music greats including Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, the Grateful Dead and Peter, Paul and Mary, among others.
As a whole, Cotten’s music brings together “strains of oral traditions, church singing, ragtime, popular songs and music played by traveling and local musicians,” the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame said in their biography of Cotten.
Cotten taught herself to play banjo and guitar at an early age, first borrowing her brother’s instruments when he was away from home before saving up $3.75 to buy her own guitar from a local store, her biography from the Smithsonian Institution reads.
Being left-handed, Cotten learned to play the instruments upside down, picking the bass strings with her fingers and treble strings with her thumb. The distinctive style and sound became known as “Cotten style” or “Cotten picking” and has been described as “almost inimitable” and “nearly impossible to replicate.”
Originally performing music just for her family, Cotten first recorded her music for a wider audience when she was in her early 60s.
After what the Smithsonian Institution calls a “fortunate chance encounter,” Cotten began working as a nanny and maid for the “famous folk-singing” Seeger family — musicologist Charles Seeger, composer Ruth Crawford Seeger and children Pete, Mike and Peggy. She met them while working in a department store in Washington, D.C. Mike Seeger eventually helped Cotten record her first LP, which became a “highly influential album of the folk revival.”
Cotten was honored in 1984 as a National Heritage Fellow by the National Endowment for the Arts. She received a Grammy Award in 1985, at the age of 90, for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Song Recording, and was nominated in the same category the following year. She has also been honored by the Smithsonian Institution as a “living treasure.”
Cotten performed at festivals and concerts, including the Newport Folk Festival, until her death in 1987 at the age of 92.
Cotten has been honored in her hometown of Carrboro with the Libba Cotten Bikeway, a short trail off of Merritt Mill Road. Cotten is also featured in a mural on Merritt Mill Road, installed in 2021.
Freight Train Blues, an annual music series in Carrboro, also honors Cotten’s legacy by featuring roots musicians who are “steeped in the diverse traditions” of music in the Piedmont. The 2022 series begins Friday, May 13.
Other inductees to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year include Dolly Parton, Carly Simon, Lionel Richie, Eminem, Duran Duran and more. Along with Cotten, singer, actor, producer and activist Harry Belafonte will also receive the Early Influence Award from the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame this year.
You can find a full list of this year’s Hall of Fame inductees at rockhall.com/2022inductees.
The 2022 Rock & Roll Hall of Fame induction ceremony will take place on Saturday, Nov. 5, in Los Angeles.
This story was originally published May 5, 2022 at 4:18 PM.
