A country store on a dirt road near Gordonton, North Carolina, 1939. Dorothea Lange. Library of Congress , public domain.
No one helped me. Everything I play for y’all tonight, I give myself credit, ’cause nobody helped me
Elizabeth Cotten Carolinian
Source
Remarks to a concert audience, 1983; quoted in Smithsonian magazine
form speech work Concert remarks year 1983 Read it at the source
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“No one helped me. Everything I play for y’all tonight, I giv…”
Elizabeth Cotten. Carolina Quotes , record CQ-39966F6381.
https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/39966f6381
More from Elizabeth Cotten
We'd take straight pins, lay them on the railroad track and make little alphabets out of them. We'd know just about the time when the train was either coming or going, and the train would run over the pins and mash them together, stick them right together, and we'd have a little box of alphabets of pins.... After that, me and my brother, we'd have to cut wood. We would each have a song, he had his and I had mine. We used to sing about trains. That was the beginning of me writing 'Freight Train,' right about then. Recollection of writing "Freight Train," quoted in her National Heritage Fellowship biography, National Endowment for the Arts, 1984 All Elizabeth Cotten quotations
Carolina Quotes