Elizabeth Cotten, was born in North Carolina during 1893, just 28 years after slavery ended. One can infer that her upbringing was filled by the sounds of Negro spirituals, work songs, and gospel that all reflected the hopes of her environment. The lyrics of our ancestors music typically invoked emotion of pain and toll. Their work songs utilized Call and Response to foster unity. As I listen to Cotten’s folk music and compare it to the music of enslaved people, I find that the lyrics are strong components in both, conveying the importance of oral tradition. When listening to the song, “I’m Going Away,” I find the lyrics to tell a story of transition. The melody creates a gentle and soothing effect. Additonally, Cotten utilizes a call-and-response that is hinted within her lyrics. All of these musical components showcase how folk blends the roots of African-American spirituals. 

At a young age, Cotten began learning to play the guitar and banjo. However, according to The Legacy of Elizabeth Cotten, Cotten was left-handed, leading to her “hack” of playing a right-handed musician’s guitar upside down, reversing the normal way of finger picking. The development of this style, is now known as “Cotten picking,” Cotten Picking. Once she picked up the guitar, she wrote “Freight Train,” which has a melody that I would characterize as gentle, it tells the story of a moving train through its rolling rhythm. Cotten’s young passion for her music exemplified the blend of tradition and acoustics. When looking at artists such as Pete Seeger (a white artist that Elizabeth worked for) and onto modern artists, we see that they all draw upon the elements of folk music that she pioneered.