The Embodied Folk Guitar of Elizabeth Cotten

This article demonstrates the specific ways that Elizabeth Cotten's music-making relies on active negotiations between her physical capabilities afforded by her guitar technique and abstract musical concerns of rhythm, melody and phrasing.Cotten played a right-handed guitar upside down, picking with her left hand and fretting with her right.Cotten developed a unique style of playing based on the reversed relationship between her hands and the order of the strings on the guitar, which required her to reconfigure her chord fingerings, strumming, and picking patterns.I show that Cotten prioritizes ergonomic principles in her approach to fretting, reconfiguring chord voicings to allow her right wrist to maintain a more neutral wrist position, and transposing hand shapes around the fretboard to facilitate minimal movement for individual fingers.This prioritization of ergonomics directly shapes characteristic melodic figures that are recognizable throughout her work.I further identify examples of novel textural patterns in Cotten's work that result from her inverted picking technique.I conclude by analyzing how her fretting and picking techniques interact to create motives and textures in the song "Washington Blues."By focusing on the embodied experience of composing with an instrument, this project as a whole contributes to the growing corpus of analytic work that emphasizes music as a dynamic, embodied performance.