The Embodied Folk Guitar of Elizabeth Cotten
Journal: Music Theory Online
Year: 2025

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 he