It's Elizabeth Cotten's birthday (January 5, 1893).

Elizabeth Cotten was a North Carolina folksinger and a self-taught left-handed guitarist. She developed her own original style. She played a guitar strung for a right-handed player, but played it upside down to accomodate her left-handedness. This position required her to play the bass lines with her fingers and the melody with her thumb. Her signature alternating bass style has become known as "Cotten picking."

Click the image of Ms. Cotten playing at a 60s folk festival to hear her playing and singing her signature song, "Freight Train," which she wrote when she was 11 years old.

Ms. Cotten retired from playing the guitar for 25 years, except for occasional church performances. She did not begin performing publicly and recording until she was in her 60s. She was discovered by the folk-singing Seeger family while she was working for them as a housekeeper.

While working briefly in a department store, Cotten helped a child wandering through the aisles find her mother. The child was Penny Seeger, and the mother was the composer Ruth Crawford Seeger. Soon after this, Cotten again began working as a maid for Ruth Crawford Seeger and Charles Seeger and caring for their children, Mike, Peggy, Barbara, and Penny. While working with the Seegers (a voraciously musical family that included Pete Seeger, a son of Charles from a previous marriage), she remembered her own guitar playing from 40 years prior and picked up the instrument again and relearned to play it, almost from scratch.

Click Elizabeth Cotten's portrait to hear her play, "Vastopol."

Elizabeth Cotten wrote and recorded a song called "Shake Sugaree" in 1966. The chorus of her song is "Oh lordie me/Didn't I shake sugaree?" The song influenced Greatful Dead lyricist, Robert Hunter, in the composition of "Sugaree" for Jerry Garcia's first solo album. The Dead's version became part of their regular repertoire. 

Click this "concert" photo to hear her playing Shake Sugaree.