The Guitar of Elizabeth Cotten

Product Description Elizabeth Cotten (1893-1987) occupies a unique niche in American finger-picked guitar. Composer of the perennial favorite Freight Train, she taught herself to play left-handed on her older brother's guitar (which was strung right-handed), leaving her playing not only left-handed, but upside down as well, picking alternating bass with her index finger and melody with her thumb. Her musical gifts might have gone unknown except to family and friends had not a chance meeting in a Washington D.C. department store resulted in her living with and working for the Seeger family, who were excited when they heard her music and enabled her to record. What then, is Elizabeth Cotten's sound? It is a beautifully flowing fingerpicked style with exceptional attention to the details of phrasing and voice leading. There is a strong improvisatory element too, because renditions of the same song performed throughout Libba's career are often surprisingly different from each other. This video includes rare film footage of Elizabeth Cotten performing all the songs that are taught and the accompanying booklet includes TAB/standard notation transcriptions and lyrics of the songs. 102 minutes. DVD is region 0, playable worldwide. About the Actor At the age of 12, John Miller was inspired to play the guitar after seeing Mississippi John Hurt perform at the Philadelphia Folk Festival. he bought his first guitar at the age of 16 and launched into an intensive period of study of Country Blues guitar, learning the music of John Hurt, Mance Lipscomb, Bo Carter, Blind Blake, and other greats. By the time he was twenty-seven, John had released five solo albums to international critical acclaim. Those albums ranged from Country blues and Old Time country music to the songs of George Gershwin. For the next 15 years, John focused on teaching, founding two music camps, composing, and building a vocabulary in Jazz and Latin music. In the last seven years, John has released CDs with a Jazz trio, Catwalk, duos with mandolinist John Reischman, violinist Ruthie Dornfeld, singer Becky Kilgore, and French cabaret music with the ensemble Rouge. Says Miller of his musical travels, I ve played many many different styles of music in recent years, but I ve come to realize that everything I ve done has been informed by my early involvement with Country Blues and the lessons I learned