1979: Volume 3: When I’m Gone, Elizabeth Cotten
BY Laura Dzubay
I loved the idea of time travel when I was in high school, but never tried doing it with anyone who wasn’t imaginary. Walking down the street where I grew up, I went through a phase of talking to my childhood self, not as someone in my head, but as someone I could see, walking next to me. I’d think about how this street had the same pavement as back when my mom used to go for runs and walks with my dad, pushing me and my brother in the stroller—the purple stroller, all warm, our feet bouncing a bit, looking out at the leaves—and then I’d look over to my side and see her, my mom. Time was the only thing in between us, and it was small enough, I could see through it.
I’d walk with myself too, seven or eight, heading over to play with the neighbor kids in an old tee shirt, my hair darker and curlier. Every day I look in the mirror and hypnotize myself with the present day, and seeing a different version of myself, fully and not in a periphery, takes energy and time. In high school, I walked with her and tried saying a couple of things to her, but she couldn’t hear me because she didn’t know I was there. But there wasn’t much to say anyway, and really, I was just happy to see her.
This is the first way I learned how to time travel. Walking at fourteen, I imagined myself at seventeen, at twenty-two, at thirty-five. It got harder and harder. For some reason I wanted to have conversations with them about how things were in the future, and to give them the latest news from the past. If everything could come all close together like this then I might never die, and I might know some amount of things that would give me comfort. It was impossible to get very specific, but I walked down the road and imagined my older selves walking with me, wearing new clothes and asking me questions, and I gave them all sorts of nonsensical answers, so they wouldn’t be walking in silence years later.
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At one point in the liner notes for Volume 3: When I’m Gone, Elizabeth Cotten remembers a man from her childhood who used to welcome the neighborhood children into his yard to play music. She remembers learning to dance there, among a richness of instruments: horns, drums, “and this big, old guitar—double bass thing.”
“I was always humored so much,” she says. “That’s what you can do to a child. You can humor it so much until that child keeps the mind of a young child.”
Elizabeth Cotten’s music often makes me think of childhood, in part because it’s the age at which she became a musician. She was born in North Carolina in 1893 and called “Babe” or “Little Sis” until she was five, when she proclaimed that her name was Elizabeth on her first day of school. She used to borrow her brother’s homemade banjo; after he moved, she went door to door looking for work cleaning houses, and saved enough money to buy herself a guitar.
As a left-handed player, she developed her own finger-picking technique for playing the right-handed guitar upside-down, using her index or middle finger for the bass line and her thumb for the melody. She wrote songs and played them constantly; in recordings, she jokes about how her mother never saw any peace after agreeing to let her buy the guitar. This enthusiasm remained later in life; one story went that she’d play guitar all night in motel rooms after returning from two- or three-hour-long gigs.
The When I’m Gone liner notes include extensive notes from taped conversations with Elizabeth Cotten, Alice Gerrard, and Mike Seeger between 1966 and 1979. Cotten remembers growing up Black at the turn of the century, and the social dynamics and calculations of seeking out work in white neighborhoods. She remembers her intense grief when her mother died, her marriage when she was fifteen, and the early years of raising her daughter. At church, she was discouraged from playing her usual music in favor of religious songs, and she stopped playing guitar for many years.
Decades later, she was working at a department store when she helped a lost girl find her way back to her mother, who turned out to be composer Ruth Crawford Seeger. She hired Cotten to work for her family, and Cotten wound up re-teaching herself how to play using some of the guitars around the Seegers’ house. Mike Seeger started recording and producing her music in the 1950s and 1960s, and they soon performed at clubs, festivals, and concerts together. In recordings of Cotten’s music, she’s in her sixties, seventies, and eighties, playing, often, songs she composed when she was a child.
Her childhood must have felt like a lifetime ago by then, but in recordings of and interviews with Cotten, she seems like she carries that time closely. The things that made her angry as a young girl, or guilty, the things she grieved, and the things that delighted her and ignited her curiosity and made her laugh, the things that gave her satisfaction—she’s held onto and protected all of them, and she’s willing to share them.
In one recording of “Oh Babe, It Ain’t No Lie,” she tells a story of a neighbor woman getting young Cotten in trouble with her mother; Cotten wrote this song in revenge, playing it loudly in the hopes that they’d both hear. (Her indignation is plain in the lyrics: “There is one old woman, Lord, in this town, keep on telling her lies on me / Wish to my soul that old woman would die, keep on telling her lies on me.”) She concludes the story: “My mother died and she didn’t know what this was about…Miss Mary died and she didn’t know it was about her. So now they both is dead and I can play and sing it as much as I want.”
When I think of art as time travel, Elizabeth Cotten is who I think of. There’s an answering going on here, and in so much of her music: an anger from years ago being sounded aloud, an old grief seen and soothed, a sense of caring reawakened and re-known. To be a child, Cotten knows, does not necessarily mean to be carefree, or unaware of the world, or unknowledgeable, or unskilled, or happy. It does often mean there’s a tangibility to your feelings and experiences which others in the world around you may not recognize—but which deserves recognition, and in fact, that deserving is real enough that it will never expire.
She gives the impression that the act of sharing is part of what keeps those experiences present for her. Her inclination to tell stories between songs was what first drew me to her music; she always creates an undercurrent of rapport with whoever’s around, and when she transitions into playing, a feeling of inwardness seeps in, but not in a way that’s secluded. In the recording of “Freight Train” on Live!, a hush steals over the room at the opening of her most famous song, only to break into a room-wide exhale of laughs, applause, and soft singing-along when she asks, knowing the answer, “Y’all ever heard that before?”
When I’m Gone, the third original album Cotten released through Folkways, is a more understated album than Live!. The songs, mostly instrumentals and with a few traditional songs alongside her original compositions, were recorded between 1969 and 1978 in various people’s homes, including Cotten’s own. Her sound is light, but there’s a soft tension in the slides of “Gaslight Blues” and in the ruminative warnings of “Time to Stop Your Idling,” sung by her granddaughter, Johnine Rankin. “Jenny” is a song written initially for a child—a little girl Cotten’s daughter Lillie knew from work—and you can hear it from listening. The song guides the listener (us, now? the little girl, Jenny? the person or people sitting in the living room with Cotten at the time of the recording? maybe anyone?) along a narrative that feels kind and resolves almost easily, but spiraling gradually out from this narrative’s core is a vaster, more complex outlook on the central melody’s potential. In “Gaslight Blues” and “Street Blues,” also, you can hear Cotten’s fastidious attention to her music-making; the travels she makes down through the notes feel frenetic at times, always looking several frets ahead—but even these escalations, where she incorporates them, still come across as focused and measured.
She’s making returns constantly in these songs, but the thing revisited never feels the same as when we encountered it before. Mike Seeger and Alice Gerrard wrote of Cotten’s music that she “hardly ever plays her tunes in the same way twice, and is constantly improvising. She consciously works with her tunes, adding to them, changing licks, sometimes making almost new tunes out of them.” Each recording of her classic songs is different—less interested in attaining perfection or recreating tones and gestures familiar to the listener, and more in bringing the living heart of the song into that specific room, right then, the room in which it’s being played.
To be in a cycle, in the world of Cotten’s music, is not to be trapped, but to be presented again and again with an opportunity worth being honored. This feels true also in the broader sense of hearing her revisit songs she wrote at much earlier times in her life. We’re never destined to return fully to our past selves—but the wanting-to, and the holding-precious of those times, can become a part of how we transmit care and warmth to others, and how we create a new track to follow.
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I fell in love with folk music while in transit. I spent a lot of my childhood moving away from Indiana, my home: from fifth through twelfth grade I moved frequently between Louisiana, Florida, Virginia, and Michigan, and in between all these kept returning to Indiana, where my hometown classmates were sneakily growing up during my weeks- or months- or years-long absences. I often felt like we were all getting older, but I wasn’t mourning in real time. I spent hours in my mom’s backseat, on gray roads winding between mountains, listening to guitar and banjo music beneath the darkening edges of years I’d have to grow up in order to miss.
The songs I loved then were all from the sixties and seventies, because I loved the idea of emotion with staying power—which often translated to emotion that could, for better or worse, shift away a bit from its own contexts. There’s a neat sense of fate in some of the songs I loved growing up, which leaves those songs’ protagonists lonely with their emotions: they’re open with the listener because they’ve been forsaken, and no one else will listen to their tales. I know loneliness is real—I might not have loved those songs so much if it wasn’t real—but that doesn’t mean it’s not also something you can adorn. And the solitude of a lot of the folk and rock and pop stars I still love to listen to, it is adorned, often even by the illusion of empty space: their aloneness elevates them onto a visionary plane, where their musical personas are uncomplicated by the messy context of real lives, and nuanced decisions that have consequences on others.
Elizabeth Cotten doesn’t strike me as interested in this relationship to persona; it’s a different type of self she seems to want to answer, to want to make proud. Her music breaks down my admiration for mythology and makes me question to what I am really beholden, why I make art, and what I hope to sustain through that making. She cared for other people actionably. She spent a lot of time caring for children, which is why “Shake Sugaree” was recorded with the vocals of 12-year-old Brenda Evans—Cotten shared a room with her great-grandchildren and would often play them her songs in the evenings, and Evans was there the evening she asked the children for help coming up with some of the lyrics.
Real interest and real sharing can take us farther than ego, than style for style’s sake, than skill for fame’s sake. As a child, Cotten so loved the guitar that she found a way to make it work for herself, and invented something new through the process of that love. She invented it again years later. She did this with no guarantee of anything specific or everlasting, other than an articulation of what she was feeling. That articulation was already something freeing and powerful, even before it grew into something else.
“Freight Train” was stolen a succession of times by white artists before Cotten eventually got the credit for it. This feels particularly egregious given the private honesty that drives the song. At the heart of “Freight Train” is the idea of not wanting to be found in death: no more good times, no more contact with others, not being followed by anyone—just being able to hear that train. The relationship between Cotten and the train is personal. It was her own home she was writing and singing about, as a child writing about her neighborhood, as an elderly woman singing toward the other end of that life.
As a kid, I related to the idea of home as a place made real and eternal through imagination. I long imagined Indiana as a place that loved me; I felt that it, despite being a state, recognized when I was gone, and would always be within earshot no matter how far away I went. I imagined my childhood as safe there, and as safe in the hands of the fellow children I knew there, even though they would’ve had no idea what they were holding. They all knew so little about my life. This was the very thing that used to distress me.
In my road walks, I was trying to stitch together years that I wished had not been separated. It felt misleading that I could walk down a road from before Michigan, from before Florida, from before I’d grown into another mind. I wanted my old mind back, and I wanted a new one already. I know someday I’ll wish for my present self again. “You’re going to miss me when I’m gone,” Elizabeth Cotten says—as in this: right here. You have it. One of these days, you’re going to wish you were right here. My need for longing to always open the gate for love is one of my habits I’m trying hardest to break—but I know someday I’ll try it this way again, because I’ve talked before to that self, to the me who tries it.
But Cotten shows me time travel is not an individual architecture. Imagining something on your own is one route—but these days when I envision a type of longevity that means something to me, I try to think of it more in terms of what I’m able to share with my grandparents and my parents, and my little siblings, who still listen raptly to bedtime stories from my mother, who sometimes come shyly into my room to sit on the edge of my bed while I play guitar. Sometimes it’s not about how there’s something to say; sometimes it’s about how there are children in the room, and how you might even be one of them. I still imagine my childhood as not yet over. I imagine, because I can, so maybe I must, it might never be over. If imagination can be a realization of hope, I imagine it will keep going, will even carry me past my grave. I imagine it will become other people’s childhoods.
Laura Dzubay is a writer from Indiana with stories and essays in Mid-American Review, Electric Literature, Blue Earth Review, and elsewhere. She loves writing about music and the natural world and earned her MFA from Indiana University, where she won the AWP Intro Prize.