Larry Ellis loved to watch his great-grandmother play guitar. She had a few gigs in Syracuse before she died, and wherever she was, he was in the front row.
“Anything she did local, I was there, front and center,” he said.
Larry was just a kid at the time, so he didn’t realize who she was to the rest of the audience. To him, she was “Mama Sis.”
To everyone else, she was a giant — a founding figure in the folk music genre and an internationally touring musician. Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten died in 1987, but this year she’ll be inducted posthumously into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and will receive the Early Influence Award.
“It’s a long overdue recognition of an incredibly significant and tragically underknown figure in American music history,” said Bob Searing, curator of history at the Onondaga Historical Association in Syracuse.
Cotten invented a new style of strumming and wrote several of what would become foundational folk songs when she was only a kid. She wanted to play her brother’s banjo with her left hand without re-stringing it, so she just flipped it over. Everything she did was from her own brilliance.
Much later, by the time she moved to her white shingle house in Syracuse, her playing was informing the music of folk musicians like Pete Seeger and Peter, Paul, and Mary. Sometimes they’d stop by her house.
“The people she had over, I just thought they were her friends,” Ellis said, “and then when I got older, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is Jerry Garcia.’ ”
Larry was little when Cotten moved to Syracuse, but he and his siblings spent a lot of time at her two-story home on West Ostrander Avenue. So did the Grateful Dead, when they were in town.
“They came to my grandmother’s house in the neighborhood,” he laughed. “They would be in her kitchen.”
“I never knew. It was like, who are these scruffy-looking white guys?” Little Larry thought Garcia, with his long hair and loose clothes, looked like an “old Jesus.” He used to sit on Garcia’s lap, sometimes. It was just a normal thing at his great-grandmother’s house.
Cotten’s marks are all over the city. On Castle Street, there’s Libba Cotten Grove and a bronze bust of the musician with her signature upside-down guitar. A towering painting of her hangs in City Hall at the entrance to the Common Council chamber. Her old Martin guitar is housed in the Onondaga Historical Association, donated by her family in 1994.
Her 1984 Grammy Award for Best Ethnic or Traditional Folk Recording is there, too, next to the guitar. She’s the only musician from Syracuse to win that award who didn’t pass through the city for school.
Her great-granddaughter, Venus Ellis, watched on TV from Syracuse that year.
“The biggest, biggest, biggest thing that blew my mind is I watched her on TV with Michael Jackson, Diana Ross, Stevie Wonder, walk and get a Grammy Award. That was just so, so big for me,” said Venus. Larry remembered that moment too.
Cotten first moved to Syracuse from Washington, D.C., to escape apartment living and to be closer to her family. She was in her 80s then, and her influence was only accelerating. By that point she was regularly jetting around the world for concerts, with no intention of slowing down.
Cotten lived on the South Side with her daughter, Lillie Ellis, in a two-story house with a big front porch – just like the one on her childhood home in segregated Chapel Hill, North Carolina, that her mom would sweep off with a broom in the mornings.
That house was next to the train tracks, and Cotten and her brother used to wave at the freight train when it went by, hoping for a wave back, she said in a June 5, 1983 interview with the Syracuse Herald-American.
The ubiquitous sound of the one-track train was the inspiration for her first and lasting hit, “Freight Train,” which she wrote when she was 11, although others would later try to claim the copyright. The song wouldn’t be recorded until she was in her 60s and working with Pete Seeger.
She picked up her brother’s banjo first – upside down. She was left-handed and needed her dominant hand to strum, so she flipped the guitar neck to her right side, but didn’t re-string, like Jimi Hendrix would do in the 1950s.
That’s how she played for the rest of her career – treble strings on top.
Libba saved up for a guitar so she could graduate from pilfering her brother’s instrument when he wasn’t around. She taught herself on a $3.75 “Stella” from Sears Roebuck.
“I was just bangin’ on the strings” at first, she said in 1983.
She liked blues – “going down the road feelin’ bad” songs – and then learned Baptist music to play at church. Those few early years shaped her style that would eventually become known as “Cotten-picking” or “finger-picking.”
There’s something about Libba’s playing, said her friend Ralph Rinzler, former Smithsonian folklore director, in a Jan. 2, 1983 interview with the Syracuse Herald-American.
“It’s the sureness of her sense of time, and her touch is a combination of gentleness and power,” he said.
Cotten married at 15, and life took over. She had a daughter and moved to New York with her family.
Years after her husband died, she ended up tending house for composer Ruth Crawford Seeger and folk scholar Charles Seeger – parents to Mike, Peggy, Barbara, Penelope and Pete – after meeting Ruth in a department store where Cotten worked as a clerk in the doll department.
When the Seegers were busy elsewhere in the house, Cotten would pick up a guitar in a side room, flip it upside down and play. Inevitably the kids heard her, then the whole family.
Cotten told the story years later on a 1965 Rainbow Quest TV program with Pete Seeger. She gently plucked the strings of her guitar while she spoke, and Seeger listened at her side, arms folded across the body of his guitar.
“They had two pianos, guitars, banjos, mandolins, all kinds of string music,” she said.
“‘Course that made me think about what I used to do, playing guitar a little bit.”
She’d take down Peggy’s guitar from the wall in the kitchen and play in the dining room, where she thought no one could hear. Inevitably, Peggy and Michael heard her, and immediately wanted to know how to play the song Cotten was strumming. It was “Freight Train.”
Sometimes Libba would teach the kids after dinner, while they cleaned up the dishes. Peggy learned Cotten’s songs and eventually started performing them in her own sets, where they were recorded by audience members and picked up by other musicians.
When Cotten saw a woman she didn’t know perform “Freight Train” on Ted Mack ‘s “Original Amateur Hour” on TV, Cotten started thinking about performing.
With the Seegers’ resources behind her, she started playing shows. She always wanted to be close to her audience, somehow, and had the venues turn up the house lights so she could see their faces.
When she would perform, Cotten would sit very still, only her fingers moving quickly over the wonky strings. She would often tell stories or speak to the audience in her calm voice between songs. She was captivating.
“Oh, Libba,” Seeger sighed, when Cotten plucked the last notes up a song on the Rainbow Quest TV program.
Cotten eventually inspired the same kind of reverence from the highest caste of the folk music world: Taj Mahal; Joan Baez; Bob Dylan; Chet Atkins; Peter, Paul and Mary; and Pete and Mike Seeger. Jerry Garcia listed her as one of his primary influences. The band recorded her “Oh, Babe, Ain’t No Lie” and visited her when they toured through Syracuse.
Cotten was “an icon to musicians,” said Searing, the OHA curator.
“People like Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia, who brought music to the masses and really kept American music alive, look to her as a significant figure both as a writer and as a player,” he said.
She started touring when she was 60, and didn’t stop for 30 years.
She played concerts in Russia, Great Britain, Alaska, Hawaii, Boston and New York, and jetted off to Washington a few days after her 90th birthday to play a concert in her honor at the Smithsonian Institute in Washington.
A few months later, after a swing through the West Coast where the mayor of Los Angeles pronounced her arrival “Elizabeth Cotten Day,” the musician headed home to be dubbed Syracuse’s first “living treasure.” She performed that day at the John D. Archbold Theater with her granddaughter and great-granddaughter. Her family sat up front.
Her great-granddaughter, Venus Ellis, was there, next to Larry. Her grandmother just mesmerized the crowd, said Venus.
“They loved this lady to death,” she said.
“When she would go and perform, they would just sit on the ground. They’d fold, wherever she was, and just listen to her talk and listen to her play.”
Sometimes, Cotten would sit on the porch and just pluck the guitar strings a little, or sing a little, said Venus. She loved to sit on the bed in her great-grandmother’s neat bedroom and brush her long hair into Cotten’s signature braids.
Cotten’s legacy will be immortalized in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Cleveland, Ohio at November’s induction ceremony.
“It’s fantastic news,” said Frank Malfitano, founder and executive producer of Syracuse Jazz Fest. “She was a legend. ... She was amazing.”
“What else is there to say? She’s an icon.”
Venus did a book report on Cotten when she was in school, and her son, Cotten’s great-great-grandson, just got an A on a poster he made about her for a sixth-grade project.
Cotten was a huge deal, said Larry, but to him and Venus and the other kids, she was first a loving matriarch who didn’t take any nonsense and whose house always smelled like a bakery.
“To me,” said Venus, “she was just granny.”
Reporter Johnathan Croyle contributed to this report.
Jules Struck writes about life and culture in and around Syracuse. Contact her anytime at jstruck@syracuse.com or on Instagram at julesstruck.journo.
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