Unique Style
Elizabeth Cotten began writing music while toying around with her older brother's banjo. She was left-handed so she played the banjo "backwards". Later, when she transferred her songs to the guitar, a unique style was formed, since on the banjo the uppermost string is not a bass string, as on the guitar but a short high pitched string called a drone string. This required her to adopt a unique style for the guitar, which she first played with all finger down strokes like a banjo. Later this evolved into a unique style of finger picking, and her signature, alternating bass style is known as "Cotten Picking".
Her unmistakably original chords, melodies and finger picking techniques would go on to influence many other musicians.
Read more about this topic: Elizabeth Cotten
Famous quotes containing the words unique and/or style:
“At this unique distance from isolation
It becomes still more difficult to find
Words at once true and kind,
Or not untrue and not unkind.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“His style is eminently colloquial, and no wonder it is strange to meet with in a book. It is not literary or classical; it has not the music of poetry, nor the pomp of philosophy, but the rhythms and cadences of conversation endlessly repeated.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)