Elizabeth "Libba" Cotton sings Freight Train

Elizabeth Cotten was about 8, she took the hand-made guitar her brother hid under his bed and laid it flat in her lap, flipping it upside-down to play it lefty.

She picked the strings backward, her thumb playing the melody, her index finger on the bass strings.

A quarter of a century past her death, Cotten is a household name only in a household of guitar players, and only if those players tend toward the folk-blues-Americana vein most popular among people old enough to remember the day Bob Dylan went electric. Dylan himself covered Cotten’s “Shake Sugaree.” Jerry Garcia dipped into her repertoire with “Oh Babe it Ain’t No Lie,” and according to legend, The Grateful Dead would visit the elderly Cotten to pay homage.

She thrived in the folk revival of the 1960s, discovered by crazy coincidence when folk music specialist Ruth Crawford Seeger lost her daughter Peggy in the Washington, D.C., department store where Cotten was working. The former Lloyd Street guitarist led the wandering daughter back to her mother, and way led on to way. While working as a babysitter for the Seeger family, Cotten casually picked up a guitar and played her way into the Newport Folk Festival. It’s the sort of thing that makes you believe in fate. Something, somewhere wanted Libba Cotten’s music heard.

She toured for decades, playing the most prestigious stages, making enough to quit domestic work, winning a Grammy at age 91.

If you’ve heard Cotten play, you’ve heard “Freight Train,” her most famous song and the only piece cited on the historical marker. She wrote it at age 12. The lyrics give instructions on what to do when the singer dies: Bury me deep, tell them I’ve gone to sleep.

“Freight train, freight train, run so fast,” the lyrics go. “Please don’t tell which train I’m on. They won’t know what route I’ve gone.”