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Libba Cotton was working at a seasonal, Christmastime, job in a department store in Washington D.C. when she discovered a lost child and returned her to her mother. That child was Peggy Seeger, sister of Mike and Pete and daughter of musicologist Charles Seeger and composer Ruth Crawfor Seeger. Cotton went to work for the Seeger family as a cook and housekeeper when her department store job was finished and was soon discovered playing one of her original compositions “Freight Train” on a guitar belonging to the Seeger family. With the Seegers’ encouragement Cotton went on to perform and record her songs, starting a new career which lasted the rest of her long life. I saw Elizabeth Cotton perform at the Philadelphia Folk Festival in 1986, when she was 92 years old.

Cotton played left handed on a guitar strung right handed. She had taught herself to play as a child in Chapel Hill North Carolina and made up her own songs. Her playing style is similar to that of Merle Travis and Chet Atkins but upside down. In folk music circles this alternating bass fingerstyle is sometimes referred to as “Cotton Picking.” (upside down not required)

Every once in a while some self taught musician comes along with an entirely different way of doing things and manages to make something of it. Kenneth Ray Carllile is one of those. He taught himself to play the dobro, starting at the age of eight, when his sister won one from some kind of sales promotion. Said sister got mad and hid the slide so little Kenny learned to play it with his thumb. Carllile became a professional guitarist but he played his guitar lying flat in his lap and fingered the strings with his left thumb and fingers, pressing down n them like typewriter keys.

There are only a couple of clips available of Thumbs Carllile playing, although there are several recordings floating around the internet, some of them very sophisticated arrangements of jazz standards. Here is one of him playing in the house band on the television show “Ozark Jubilee.” It appears that Richard Nixon is playing drums.

The enigmatc Lenny Breau, Canadian guitarist, boy wonder of country music, jazz sensation of the sixties, classical guitarist with a thumb pick. The son of country musicians Hal “Lone Pine” Breau and Betty Cody, Lenny began playing his cousin’s guitar, at the age of six. By the time he was fourteen he was the lead guitarist in his parent’s touring band and was featured playing Chet Atkins and Merle Travis instrumentals. Lenny let the band in a huff when his father objected to the jazzier chords and licks he was adding to the music.

Breau developed an extremely complex style of fingerpicking, fusing country, jazz, classical and some Indian influenced music. Breau often played a seven or even eight stringed guitar, sometimes a classical guitar, sometimes electric. in later years.

Breau recoded several solo LPs under the tutelage of Chet Atkins and appeared as a session musician on many more, he he remains a kind of cult figure. He had problems with drug abuse for many years and died under suspicious circumstances in Los Angeles in 1984, apparently murdered.

There does not seem to be much good footage available of Lenny playing the whole way through a piece of music. This clip is from a 1961 television appearance in Canada, on a program called “A Touch Of Jazz.”