Libba Cotten's "Freight Train"

The other day I made a call to Duke Hospital because they hadn't provided my health provider pretax payment company an itemized receipt. As I've learned from experience due to inevitable problems medical bills bring I asked the customer service person her name. She told me her last name was 'Cotten.' I asked, 'C-O-T-T-E-N,' emphasis on the E. 'Yes' she answered. 'Any relation to the Cotten family of Carrboro and Chapel Hill?' I asked. 'Well no, but I am related to the woman who started Mama Dip's.' Now Mama Dip's real name is Mildred Edna Cotton Council. Note the Cotton with the two 'o's. Mama Dip's family hails from nearby Chatham County but the Cotten on the phone says she's related to this Cotton family.

Unsurprisingly the same family in the extent of its tree uses both spellings. But that's what wasn't important. I was very excited to say, 'you may have another perhaps even more famous relative--Elizabeth Cotten, the musician. Do you know her?'

I explained that Libba Cotten was born about 100 years ago and spent her childhood in Carrboro and became a famous musician later in life, the songwriter of the great blues/folk standard, 'Freight Train.'

'Freight Train' was one of the first songs I learned to play on the guitar at a time when I had first moved to Chapel Hill nearly 22 years ago. It has always been a favorite of mine, a haunting dark poetic song, a song that was allegedly written by Libba Cotten when she lived on Lloyd St.

Later that night I checked out online the specifics of the history of the song and Cotten. Cotten wrote 'Freight Train' around 1909 or so (some earlier sources specify she was born in 1893, not 1895, and that she wrote the song at the age of 12 in 1905). Now that year stuck out in my mind because Carrboro was about to become an actual town rather than merely the west side of Chapel Hill. The location became incorporated as 'Venable' in 1909. The remarkable thing is, Cotten is about 13 or 14 years old at the time.

In that song Cotten sings one stunningly poetic verse, the depth of which I've rarely come across elsewhere:

When I die please bury me deep
Down at the end of Chestnut Street
So I can hear old Number Nine
As she goes rolling by

Except...is it 'Chestnut Street'? Is there a burial site where West End was, a place Cotten would have known of in 1909, a place near the rail that runs by Lloyd Street, the railroad that inspired Cotten to write the song, the railroad that connected her melodically to a line of flight, an escape, a release, a peace?

So I looked first at Google Maps and found nothing called Chestnut Street in west Chapel Hill, Carrboro, or anywhere in Carrboro, Chapel Hill, northern Chatham, and so on. Certainly nothing within reach of a 14 year old's life in Venable in 1909. I couldn't see any graveyards along the tracks accessible by roads connected to Lloyd Street on Google Maps.

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Naturally I looked at several YouTube videos of Cotten performing the song late in life. Mostly she had someone else sing it while she played her amazing fingerstyle (for guitar geeks who aren't familiar with Cotten, hers is a style that appears to have influenced the great fingerstylist John Fahey). And it doesn't sound like she's singing 'Chestnut Street.'

Here's one from a television show with Pete Seeger, for whom she worked as a house cleaner in DC, who later had some influence on her returning to guitar playing many years after her new husband stopped her when she was 15. this video drives me crazy because just as we're about to hear the last little bit of her inspiration, Seeger talks over her, instructing her to get started:

At 2:48 Cotten sounds as if she's saying, 'Chelson' or 'Chelsea.' Whatever it is, as you can hear from the above video, it's definitely not 'Chestnut,' not even the sound of 'chestnut' with the 't' sound elided.

But maybe it's a nervous moment for Cotten, a slip of the tongue, a mistake. So I checked another version.

Now, mind you, I'm not interested in the authentic version of the song. What I am interested in is the connection between her creation of the song and its place in the world. If I know what she is saying maybe I can know for sure where this place actually is. I also understand that this could be some appropriated fragment of a fragment from another blues song. If you know where it may have come form, please share in the comments. I've listened to a bit of old blues and folk and I'm not familiar with any 'Chestnut Street' cemetery riff that's been circulated. So my hunch is, if it has been appropriated, its appropriation is pretty local. Back to the issue of what street in Carrboro or Chapel Hill corresponds, back to what she's actually saying....

In the following video we get a little more information about Cotten and the song. Libba says she worked to get herself a guitar when she was 11 making $0.75 a month. (The narrator saying that Seeger "discovered" her makes me want to bathe it's so icky but I digress.) But at 5:45 in the video linked to here you can hear her clearly sing the line, 'way down on ol' Chelson Street.' This video shows she's clearly saying 'Chelson.'

Well going back to Google I can't find any Chelsea, or Chelson, or Chelssen, or Chelsen, or any other sort of homophonous spellings.

Maybe the 'l' I am hearing is really the vowel in the first syllable of 'Chestnut' being bent into two sounds, a very say-uh-thern (southern) vowel pattern, she is saying 'Chestnut.' Listen to 2:27 in the following video:

Sounds like 'Chestnut,' 'like 'Chay-ehls-nit.'

What street was that?

Regardless of exactly what she's saying, I've got a good idea of what she's saying, but still, I don't see any evidence of such a street around Chapel Hill.