Elizabeth Cotton’s Fingerstyle Ragtime
ethanhein.com
ethanhein.com
> If you are a guitarist, you might notice that there is something strange about her technique. She was left-handed, but rather than stringing a guitar in reverse the way lefties usually do, she just played a standard-strung guitar upside down. She had to learn her own idiosyncratic chord shapes, and she played them by alternating bass with her fingers and playing melody notes with her thumb. This must have required some dedication! But none of it is as important as her sound and her material.
Notice on her closing stroke she simulates a right handed player's action of a guitar pick, which had become a more familiar and expected finale indicator during her lifetime.
I also like Mississippi John Hurt. He was another musician who fell away from public view until his old age.
Your comment made me think that musicology is what me and my friends and many people I’ve met naturally began doing as teenagers. Nerding out on the stories of how music is made and believing those details are vitally important.
Forty years later a YouTube musician (Heinbach) mentions it’s his academic background in musicology just in passing and legitimates an ancient interest I dismissed long ago as immature.
Stumbling on Hein was revelatory for me too.
I have had the exact same question for a while now. If anybody here has an idea, it would really make my day :)
"Sugaree was written soon after I moved from the Garcia household to China Camp. People assume the idea was cadged from Elizabeth Cotten's Sugaree, but, in fact, the song was originally titled 'Stingaree,' which is a poisonous South Sea manta. The phrase 'just don't tell them that you know me' was prompted by something said by an associate in my pre-Dead days when my destitute circumstances found me fraternizing with a gang of minor criminals. What he said, when departing, was: 'Hold your mud and don't mention my name.'
"Why change the title to 'Sugaree'? Just thought it sounded better that way, made the addressee seem more hard-bitten to bear a sugar-coated name. The song, as I imagined it, is addressed to a pimp. And yes, I knew Libba's song, and did indeed borrow the new name from her, suggested by the 'Shake it' refrain."
But generally it's common for things passed down in an oral tradition to get respelled at some point down the chain.
Examples from music include Jock-o-mo in the song Iko Iko, where someone heard a word in a language they didn't know, then sang it and someone else wrote it down in a different way.
A quick google suggests that’s right, and the “raising” is in the sense of “summoning”, which makes sense - summoning the spirit of a famous murderer!
Used similarly to:
"raising hell".
It was/is commonly used in my upbringing in Liverpool, UK (second generation Irish catholic diaspora family). I’ve also heard the term in Texas recently.
I had a book on finger-style folk guitar in the 1980's, that I learned a thing or two from. Cotten's "Freight Train" was featured in it, along with some notes about her, and a note about her left-handed use of regular guitar strung right handed, so that her thumb was actually playing the high strings.
About a year ago, a funny thing happened. My then two-and-a-half year old wanted to hear some music so I somehow found a YouTube video of Cotten and put that on. He started crying that he wants rock and roll!
I was thinking, man, kid's gonna have to learn some respect; but chip off the old block otherwise.