Nearly five years ago, I had my first in depth experience diving into music history with my late mentor Joan Crane. This new record "Folk Songs For Old Time's Sake" is a culmination of what she taught me, and harbors mostly traditional material revisited and rearranged that Joan inspired in me. Some of the songs are by pioneers such as Elizabeth Cotten, The Carter Family, Mississippi John Hurt and Jimmie Rodgers, with the mindset of preserving their legacy and exposing their history to my generation and its successors. After starting the music history podcast "American Songcatcher", my desire for preservation has become a mission, and inside the liner notes of the limited edition vinyl gatefold resides a summary of the song or artists history behind the 14 tracks. This installment is the first of many to come honoring the legacy of American roots music.
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The granddaughter of freed slaves, Elizabeth or “Libba” Cotten was born in 1893, near Chapel Hill, NC. She taught herself to play the banjo starting around 5 years old, and working as a house maid she was able to purchase her own Stella guitar at age 11. Elizabeth was left-handed, so to make the guitar and banjo easier, she just turned them upside down and thus created her own method of playing the bass strings with her forefingers, and the melody with her thumb - eventually becoming widely known as "Cotten picking". After writing songs like “Freight Train” in her early teens and getting married at 15, she was pressured to give up playing guitar by the church, and she did. Nearly 40 years later, after helping a young lost child named Peggy Seeger find her mother, Libba started cleaning house for the famous folk-singing Seeger family. Over the next few years, she relearned how to play guitar while the family was gone, until she was caught by Peggy one day. The family was blown away by what they heard, and Peggy’s brother Mike recorded Libba’s first record in an upstairs bedroom when she was 62 years old, right before the blues and folk revival took shape. Soon she was touring the circuit with the other great blues performers coming out of retirement or obscurity. “Shake Sugaree”, released in 1967, is a lullaby she wrote with her great-grandchildren, and was sung by her great-granddaughter Brenda Evans. It’s about dejected poverty, pawning everything to make ends meet while making time to “shake sugaree”, a reference to having a good time by throwing sugar on the floor and dancing to make a percussive sound. Libba won a Grammy at 90 years old, and passed away in 1987.
lyrics
Have a little song, won't take long
Sing it right, once or twice
Oh, lordy me
Didn't I shake that sugaree?
Everything I got is done and pawned
Pawn my watch, pawn my chain
Pawn everything that was in my name
Pawn my chair, pawn my bed
Ain't got nowhere to lay my head
Pawn my tobacco, pawn my pipe
Pawned everything that was in my sight
Pawn my farm
Pawn my plough
Pawned everything, even my cow
credits
from Folk Songs For Old Times' Sake,
track released October 10, 2021
Nicholas Williams - Guitar, Vocals, Banjo, Harmonica, Stomp
Gordon Inman - Clarinet
Cody Ray - Guitar
Host of the music history podcast
"American Songcatcher", Nicholas is a 37 year-old multi-instrumentalist and
storyteller who is dedicated to playing it forward by preserving the songs and styles that have shaped America: ragtime, Piedmont blues, traditional folk, old time and early country. He's opened for Taj Mahal and The Wood Brothers.
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