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:
“Pregnant women! They had that weird frisson, an aura of magic that combined awkwardly with an earthy sense of duty. Mundane, because they were nothing unique on the suburban streets; ethereal because their attention was ever somewhere else. Whatever you said was trivial. And they had that preciousness which they imposed wherever they went, compelling attention, constantly reminding you that they carried the future inside, its contours already drawn, but veiled, private, an inner secret.”
—Ruth Morgan (1920–1978)
“A cultivated style would be like a mask. Everybody knows it’s a mask, and sooner or later you must show yourself—or at least, you show yourself as someone who could not afford to show himself, and so created something to hide behind.... You do not create a style. You work, and develop yourself; your style is an emanation from your own being.”
—Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1980)