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“Freight Train” is one of the best-loved songs to come out of American folk tradition, and unusually for such a piece it has a known author: Elizabeth “Libba” Cotten, who wrote it as a child in North Carolina in the early years of the twentieth century. By her own account she made it up as a girl, inspired by the trains she could hear passing near her home outside Chapel Hill.
Cotten was self-taught and left-handed, and she played a right-handed guitar flipped upside down, producing the distinctive alternating-bass fingerpicking style that still bears her name. She set the song aside for decades until, working as a housekeeper for the musical Seeger family in the 1950s, she was encouraged to play and record again, and “Freight Train” emerged as a cornerstone of the folk revival.
The song traveled to Britain, where it became a skiffle hit — and where other writers briefly and wrongly claimed its copyright before Cotten’s authorship was restored. It has since been recorded across folk, country, and bluegrass.
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