In the late spring of 1984, we packed up a U-Haul on the upper West Side of Manhattan and bailed out of New York City.
Though I'd worked on Cotton Patch Gospel at the Lamb's Club in the Broadway district (playing fiddle, clawhammer banjo, mandolin, dobro and guitar), played the clubs, joined Tom Chapin, Pete Seeger, and bassist John Miller in a concert to celebrate the 100th birthday of the Brooklyn Bridge, had a prize-winning Old-Time band, and many good connections and memories–I also had a two-year-old, an expensive one-bedroom apartment, no room to really live, and no real prospect of making a living making music.
Living in New York and not playing music seemed foolish to me. I didn't want to raise myself in the city anymore; raising a boy in the city was out of the question.
So, off we went to North Carolina.
Leaving 'the city', I had become just enough of a New Yorker to figure I wasn't going to make a living playing in the sticks, so I decided to pursue what I wanted to play and not what was marketable (not that I was ever very susceptible to market forces in my choices, something that would be clear to anyone who knows me).
And as we went south, my musical attention turned from Old-Time back to a first love: acoustic Blues. I returned to the music of John Jackson, Robert Johnson, Blind Blake, Rev. Gary Davis, Muddy Waters, David Honeyboy Edwards, and Mississippi John Hurt, chasing the guitar parts of course, but more the singing.
I had always sung well in various elementary school productions and Christmas programs, the National Anthem, in church choirs, and then as a folk musician. But singing eight shows a week for eight months in a Broadway district 470-seat house with no sound reinforcement of any kind had given me a clearer understanding of my own vocal power.
Harry Chapin had written the songs and his brother Tom was our musical director. They'd sit in the back of the house and if they couldn't hear or understand the words, we found out about it.
There are a lot of white people who love and play the blues, but fewer who can actually sing them. After all that stage singing, I entertained the thought that I might be able to learn to sing, rather than just play the Blues.
I found out quickly that there was a lot more to it than I imagined: singing forcefully, while sometimes required, isn't nearly enough. Other deeper, personal, even spiritual, changes (and a certain fearlessness) are required.
My musical goals, though, had to wait. I had to hunt for any other non-musical work to support the family. It was a hard time with a lot of different gigs–waiting tables, short-order cooking, carpentry, tree pruning with ropes and chainsaws–this last wore me out and began what has been a forty-year dance with carpal tunnel syndrome.
Carolina Blues
As I was getting acclimated to being in North Carolina–talking at the hardware stores about Carolina basketball instead of New York baseball–if I had some free time, I went to research music at the field recordings library at the UNC Folk Music Library. I ran across Glenn Hinson there–a folklorist and future chair of the Folklore program at UNC-Chapel Hill.
He invited me to a concert of traditional Blues he was coordinating with surviving local performers.
One of the musicians who was on the bill that night was Thomas Burt who was born in 1900 and had been active in the Durham Blues scene long before Blind Boy Fuller turned up, before Blind Gary Davis moved to town, and who was there long after they'd gone.
When Burt took the stage, his wife came out with him. She sang an octave above him while clutching a purse the size of a small suitcase.
Black women of a certain age always went on stage (with or without husbands) carrying a conspicuous purse. Leaving a purse unattended backstage was simply not done. People steal them. And some of those purses–in the Blues clubs anyway–had revolvers in them.
When the concert ended, I corralled Glenn and asked if I could visit Thomas, who lived twenty minutes north in Creedmore, North Carolina. Glenn gave me Burt's address, and phone number, and encouraged me to go visit. Within the week, I made contact with Thomas and arranged to go for a visit. I took my guitar.
When I began visiting Thomas, he was 84 years old. Every couple of weeks, I would traipse up to see them.
Very quickly Thomas's wife took to her bed and never really left it. Thomas and I would sit in the little front room of a cracker box house (four rooms, no hallway, just a door cut in every wall) to visit and play.
In some ways, I regret that I never made any tapes. But I went to be with him, to play, to watch and listen, and immerse myself in the time we had together, knowing instinctively how precious and how limited they were. Putting a tape machine between us would have changed things.
Thomas was my first Carolina Bluesman–an old cat still playing, learning, reawakening old muscles and songs, remembering music, stories, personalities, and scenes from the twenties and thirties around Durham.
It was life-changing.
Way Down In Georgia On A Hog
One Saturday in November of 1985, I stood in a cold misting rain outside Thomas's door. I'd knocked but had no response. It worried me. The Burt's didn't have a car and unless a social worker had come to take them to an appointment or something, they were at home. Knocking a second time, I was considering calling the cops for a welfare check when Thomas came to the door and slowly opened it:
"Oh–hi, Scott, I'm afraid I can't play any music today, my angina has kicked up."
"Did you take your pills?" I asked.
"Yeah, but they didn't seem to do no good..."
"Well, let me come in for a minute and I'll play you a couple tunes and then I'll go."
“All right. All right," Thomas said, and welcomed me to a straight-backed chair by the little kerosene heater, settling himself back into an overstuffed chair.
I turned to get my guitar out of the case, and when I turned back, Thomas was sitting, hands hanging slack off the arms of the chair, legs apart, his head tilted all the way back–I was looking at the roof of his open mouth.
I couldn't tell if he was breathing and for a moment, I thought maybe he died. It put me in somewhat of an awkward situation.
I had two thoughts:
My first was to touch him to check on him, but if he'd fallen asleep (as I hoped), I didn't want to startle him.
My second was that I'd told him I'd play him some music, and if he was dead–maybe I'd play him out.
Either way, playing a little music seemed like the safest option. Keeping an eye on him, I tuned my guitar.
I started with a version of Blind Boy Fuller's Step It Up and Go, which Thomas well knew (he'd known Fuller back in the day).
As I was playing, I noticed his foot was tapping; I thought that was a good sign (corpses will jerk around sometimes, but to my knowledge, they don't keep time).
I played a second piece that I can't remember, but Thomas's eyes slit open a little. Without moving his head or closing his mouth, he glanced horizontally across his cheeks to see what I was doing with my hands.
Lastly, I played John Jackson's wonderful Rocks & Gravel, a tune with a fancy up-tempo ragtime accompaniment.
At this, Thomas leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and watched my hands intently. He liked that one and–even at 85–he wanted to see how it was done.
When I finished the Jackson tune, I began to take my leave. But Thomas stopped me, saying:
"Well. Maybe I can play just a little bit..."
Rising from his chair, Thomas made his way past me through a doorway to fish his guitar out from underneath the bed where his wife was lying quietly. He made his way through the kitchen at the back of the house, and then emerged back in the front room, having passed through every door in the house and settled down in his chair.
We played for the better part of the next two hours–apparently, it was the best medicine for his heart, and mine.
Toward the end of our session, as it was getting dark, Thomas began playing a tune I recognized. I fell in right behind him lick for lick. He didn't sing any words, but it seemed to be a version of Elizabeth Cotten's Freight Train, the first tune many folk guitarists learned to fingerpick.
Up until then, every single person I knew who played the tune learned it from Elizabeth Cotten herself (universally known as Libba) or from Peter, Paul, & Mary's 1963 recording.
And though Cotten grew up just a little south of him in Carrboro (the black sister town across the tracks from Chapel Hill, where the help was allowed to live), it seemed unlikely Thomas learned it from Libba or a recording by a trio of professional, white, college-educated folkies.
When we finished it, volunteering nothing, I asked him about the tune:
"Thomas, where'd you learn that?"
"Oh, my daddy played that. Everybody played that. Everybody. Back at the turn of the century that was a very popular tune."
"Thomas, did it have a name? What do you call it?"
"What? THAT?"
"Yeah, that tune, what do you call it?"
"Uh, we call it, uh...Way Down In Georgia On A Hog."
"You call it WHAT?"
When you ask an 85-year-old a question like that, he assumes you're deaf, too. Thomas nearly shouted:
"WAY DOWN IN GEORGIA ON A HOG."
"Right. I heard you. But what does that mean?"
Thomas shook his head.
"You ain't been around hogs much, have you?"
"Thankfully, no."
"Well, a hog," Thomas began, "even a BIG hog" and he held his hand at nearly shoulder height from the floor, "will chase you from here to that fence out front. And he catches you, he'll bite, may throw you on the ground, break your leg, could kill you.
"But if you keep running, fence or no fence, he'll give out. They are fast and dangerous, but they don't go very far."
I nodded, "Soo???"
"So! If you are way down in Georgia and how you are trying to get home is on a hog, you can't get home. A hog won't go that far."
"Oh, so 'way down in Georgia on a hog' means you're far from home, down on your luck and can't get home."
"YOU could say that," Thomas said, getting a little exasperated with me. "But WE just say Way Down in Georgia on a Hog.'"
"Right. Does it have words?"
"YES, it's got WORDS."
And he played it again and sang:
Way Down in Georgia on a Hog
Way Down in Georgia on a Hog, I'm
Way Down in Georgia on a Hog
And you can't get back home this a-way.Don't tell my mother what train I'm on
Don't tell my mother what train I'm on, I said,
Don't tell my mother what train I'm on,
Now I can't get back home this a-way.Freight train it run so level and slow,
Freight train it run so level and slow,
A freight train it run so level and slow,
And I can't get back home this a-way.
I was bowled over.
When I told this story to Mike Seeger, he immediately asked if I had it on tape. He was disappointed I did not. Sadly, a live witness is considered hearsay–less reliable than a recording. (I have since found Glenn Hinson's 1978 recording cited below.) Still, Mike was excited by it and the wheels started spinning for him, as they had for me.
https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/sfc/id/100936/rec/1
Thomas Burt, Way Down In Georgia On A Hog,
Glenn Hinson's 1978 field recording,
Southern Folklife Collection, UNC-Chapel Hill.
Elizabeth 'Libba' Cotten:
Freight Train & Way Down In Georgia on a Hog
In the mid-1950s, Libba Cotten was overheard playing this tune (or tunes like it) when she worked as a housekeeper and nanny for the Seegers in Washington DC–a family steeped in American folk music.
A member of the household came home in the middle of the day (it is not clear to me who) and heard some very refined ragtime guitar coming from behind one of the bedroom doors. No one in the family played like that. Standing outside the door they thought 'somebody's been practicing.'
On opening the door, instead of a family member practicing in secret, they found the black maid playing one of the family's guitars without permission, when she surely should have been doing something else.
Any other black maid in Washington DC would have found herself out on the street with half a week's pay (if she was lucky) and looking for another job. But the Seegers being who they were, Elizabeth Cotten wound up on the Newport Folk Festival stage that next summer.
Eventually, the royalties from Peter, Paul, & Mary's recording of Freight Train bought Libba a house. To my knowledge, she became the first member of her family in the New World to own her own home. The credit of course is hers, but it would never have happened without the Seegers and Peter, Paul & Mary behaving themselves.
Far too many whites involved with black musicians did not.
Born in 1893, Libba died in 1987. The accepted lore about Freight Train is that Libba wrote the tune as a young girl of eleven or twelve. But in an interview, Libba said she'd written it when she was a teenager, and it is now dated loosely around 1906-1912.
One of my favorite stories about Libba (and I hope it's true) is about when she went to the little one-room schoolhouse for negros in Carrboro for the first time. The teacher sat all the kids in a circle and asked each of them to stand up in turn and tell everyone their name. This struck fear in Libba's heart.
The youngest in her household, all she'd ever been called around the house and the neighborhood was either 'Babe' or 'Sis.' If she had another name, she'd never heard it.
Put on the spot, she was quite sure that if she said Babe or Sis instead of a proper name, the other kids would laugh at her and make fun of her, probably forever. As the task moved around the circle toward her, she became increasingly desperate.
When her turn came, she stood up, and in a loud voice said the prettiest name she could think of.
And named herself Elizabeth.
What happened to this tune?
Given their geographic and temporal proximity, along with the striking similarities of the tunes and words, it appears that as a youngster Libba Cotten inverted a well-known, popular song about being down on your luck and far from home, twisting it into a song about being mistreated at home and running away.
"Please don't tell what train I'm on, so they won't know where I've gone."
Someone may have mistreated her at home and she was out of there. Or maybe it was just the usual angst of a young teenager.
But, if she was going to run away, she wasn't going to mess around and walk, she was going to jump a freight train running so fast–the train that separated the right side of the tracks from the wrong side of the tracks.
Libba also sings–as any teenage drama queen might–about dying:
When I'm dead and in my grave
No more good times, here I'll crave.
Place the stones at my head and feet,
And tell everyone I'm asleep.When I'm gone won't you bury me
Way down on old Chestnut Street
Where I can hear old Number 9
As she goes rolling by
There are more stories about Libba Cotten, but they'll have to wait for another time.
Living History
That afternoon with Thomas shocked and delighted me. He changed what I had long considered a folksong into a ragtime blues standard from the turn of the century. It meant the world to me.
There were many more such moments with old people in my life–where I unwittingly received their music, life stories, wisdom, and history–and my sense of myself (and the world around us) changed.
I'll keep writing until I run out of them.
Thanks for being here.
Scott Ainslie
https://Patreon.com/ScottAinslie
https://CattailMusic.com
Absolutely fascinating. How fortunate I am to be learning about these incredible musicians through your stories and experiences. Thank you Scott.
Fascinating to learn more about Libba Cotton and "Freight Train."