Jolie Holland and Elizabeth Cotton

Jolie Holland’s new album is released May 9

Nearly all Elizabeth Cotton’s work is on Folkways

Guitarist and banjoist Elizabeth Cotton was one of the most beloved figures of the 1960’s folk revival. Like Mississippi John Hurt, she played — and she somehow personally embodied — what Mike Seeger has called “black parlor music.” As a lot of folks know, she was “discovered” by the Seeger family while working in their home, a story which entirely loses the whiff of exploitation the more I learn its facts. I’m now more curious about whether Cotton seemed to take on a little of the role of mother to Penny, Peggy and Mike Seeger after their own mother died at the age of 52.

The best written account I happen to have seen of Cotton’s life is John Ullman’s moving liner notes to Shake Sugaree. Another great account, available as an mp3, is Mike Seeger’s early recollections of Cotton, which ends with one of the very first home recordings ever made of her. (The file is from “The Telling Takes Us Home.”)

Back on February 8th, the New York Guitar Festival held an event in honor of Elizabeth Cotton, featuring Mike Seeger and Taj Mahal — two of the world’s leading exponents of the African American banjo tradition, both of whom worked closely with Cotton. Also performing that night was singer-songwriter Jolie Holland.

It’s not clear what Holland knows about Cotton — no published information exists other than her mere presence on February 9. Holland’s manager informs me that Daniel Lanois introduced Holland’s work to the Festival director, David Spelman, over two years ago and a chance to have her at the festival has been sought ever since.

In any case, whoever decided to associate Jolie Holland with Elizabeth Cotton knew what they were doing. As a devotee of the indispensably obsolete, Holland has the soul of a folk revivalist and is a musical heir of the New Lost City Ramblers and the Seeger family. More directly, Holland and Cotton are both parlor musicians, through and through. Their work is native to the living room — very small, close, antique, and feminine.

It’s common to associate privacy with concealing the truth. But Holland and Cotton remind us that it’s behind closed doors that the real disclosures are made. And when they sit you down in their parlor, we’re reminded that the supposedly traditional domain of women is at least as hard and gritty as the world outside.

That’s particularly surprising and endearing coming from kindly old Elizabeth Cotton. It’s bizarre that her best-known composition, Freight Train, came to be thought of as a “nice” child’s folksong:

Freight train, freight train, run so fast
Freight train, freight train, run so fast
Please don’t tell what train I’m on
So they won’t know what route I’ve gone

When I’m dead and in my grave
No more good times here I’ll crave
Place a stone at my head and feet
And tell them all that I’ve gone to sleep

In a very similar song, also structured as a Girl Scout Camp sing-along, Holland has similar requests for the listener:

Give me that old fashioned morphine
Give me that old fashioned morphine
Give me that old fashioned morphine
It’s good enough for me

Well, it was good enough for my Grandpa
It was good enough for my Grandpa
It was good enough for my Grandpa
It’s good enough for me

Sister, don’t get worried
Sister, don’t get worried
Sister, don’t get worried
Because the world is almost done

Cotton once oversaw her grandchildren as they composed a song, using the writing of each verse or two as a bedtime activity. The result is certainly a “rounder song,” and I even think of it as being about selling your ass once you’ve got nothing else left:

Pawned my buggy, horse and cap
Pawned everything that was in my lap

     chorus:
     Oh Lordy me, didn’t I shake sugaree
     Everything I got is done in pawn

Pawned my chair, pawned my bed
Don’t have nowhere to lay my head

     chorus

I have a little secret I ain’t gonna tell
I’m goin’ to heaven in a ground pea shell

     chorus

Chew my tobacco, spit my juice
I’d raise Cain but it ain’t no use

     chorus

This strange, hardass domesticity is in everything Jolie Holland does. Here’s another sing-along, sung with one of the softest, sweetest, most intimate arrangements on her album Escondida:

The smell of burnt exhaust drifts into the bar
It’s midnight in California, it’s high noon where you are
Motorcycles and booze and this dirty old perfume
Oh it’s nothing but a goddamn shame
Is what it is
Oh it’s nothing but a goddamn shame

I tried to go to sleep in my haunted little room
The shadows are churning in the passage of the moon
It’d break my heart to tell you I couldn’t come so soon
Oh it’s nothing but a goddamn shame
Is what it is
Oh it’s nothing but a goddamn shame

Holland’s next album, Springtime Can Kill You, is due out on Tuesday. The reviews I’m seeing are positive and seem to promise more of the same, at the very least.