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.

It's Victor Borge's birthday (January 3, 1909).

He was a comedian, conductor and pianist, affectionately known as The Clown Prince of Denmark, The Unmelancholy Dane, and The Great Dane. He artfully blended one-liners with concert piano music, often playing in eccentric ways while always seeming, for the most part, to create an slightly dignified presence. (But not really always.)

Click the Victor Borge image to open his classic performance of Phonetic Punctuation.

Click the Hirschfield Victor Borge to open a performance representative of his humor and talent. (Note: We distinguish between his humor and his talent!)

Victor Borge used physical and visual elements in his performances. He would play a strange-sounding piano tune from sheet music, looking increasingly confused. Turning the sheet upside down or sideways, he would then play the actual tune, flashing a joyful smile of accomplishment to the audience (he had, at first, been literally playing the tune upside down or sideways). 

When his energetic playing of another song would cause him to fall off the piano bench, he would open the seat lid, take out the two ends of an automotive seat belt, and buckle himself onto the bench, "for safety." Conducting an orchestra, he might stop and order a violinist who had played a sour note to get off the stage, then resume the performance and have the other members of the section move up to fill the empty seat while they were still playing. From off stage would come the sound of a gunshot.

He enjoyed interacting with the audience. Seeing an interested person in the front row, he would ask them, "Do you like good music?" or "Do you care for piano music?" After an affirmative answer, Borge would take a piece of sheet music from his piano and say, "Here is some," and hand it over. After the audience's laughter died down, he would say, "That'll be $1.95." 

It's Milt Jackson's birthday (January 1, 1923).

Click Milt Jackson in action to open to the Modern Jazz Quartet performing his composition, "Bag's Groove," which became a jazz standard. A fellow musician nicknamed him "Bags" because of the bags under his eyes. [MJQ: John Lewis, piano; Milt Jackson, vibes; Percy Heath, bass; Connie Kay, drums.]

He zings the pings off his vibraphone bars and it's like tasting that first sting of a soft drink's fresh carbonation. His musical vibes can tingle your spine. The notes he sends into the atmosphere are like singing chimes. His chords are as crisp and clear as a sunny winter's morning. Magic!

Click Mr. Jackson to run his rendition of Monk's "'Round Midnight."

Milt Jackson up front with his MJQ associates, playing what I consider one of the prettiest tunes in all jazz, "Softly, As in a Morning Sunrise" (by Sigmund Romberg and Oscar Hammerstein II from the 1928 operetta The New Moon).