Elizabeth Cotten was discovered in her sixties by the Seeger family, as she worked for them as their cleaning lady. She hadn't played in forty years, because the Holiness preachers of the time condemned folk music, including anything with guitars, banjos, and fiddles, as devil music. She wrote this song when she was eleven or twelve years old, hearing the freight train pass by her window as she fell asleep.
For you guitar players, take a look at her string positions. She's playing the guitar upside down.
Click on the picture for a link to the video on youtube. My recommendation is to watch the entire clip, just for personal well-being. But the actual song doesn't come in until the last three minutes.
A Few Terms:
- Blue Notes: using b3 and b5 in a major key.
- Deceptive Motion: instead of letting a V chord lead to Major I (or a minor i), it diverts to minor vi (or major VI), creating an unexpected motion.
Form
Strophic (built on a single verse structure)
Melodic structure: a a' b c
Chord Progression:
C G G C
E7 F C G C
Sometimes Cotten will add an extra instrumental tag onto the progression, which is the last four bars (the second line of the progression, as written).
Rotation Chart:
(each number represents a cycle through the chord progression)
1- Instrumental + tag
2- Verse 1
3- Verse 2 + tag
4- Verse 3
5- Verse 1 + tag
6- Instrumental + tag
Text
Freight train, freight train, going so fast
Freight train, freight train, going so fast
Please don’t tell which train I’m on
They won’t know which route I’m gone.
When I am dead and in my grave
No more good times ere I crave
Place the stones by my head and feet
Tell them all that I’ve gone to sleep.
When I die, Lord, bury me deep
Way down on old Chestnut street
Then I can hear old Number nine
As she goes passing by.
Freight train, freight train, going so fast
Freight train, freight train, going so fast
Please don’t tell which train I’m on
They won’t know which route I’m gone.
Such a beautiful song. It's hard to believe that she wrote this when she was just eleven years old. Her views of death are so wonderfully peaceful, rooted not necessarily in Christian theology, but in Christian faith. Any thing else from me will sound like preacher-talk, so let's move on.
Blue Notes
One of the reasons I chose this recording for the analysis is her treatment of blue notes. Quick History lesson: Long before the West caught on, some African tribes would use the major 3rd and the minor 3rd interchangeably in their music. This concept came with them when they came over to America on slave ships, and started adding new notes to their masters' scales. The term "blue notes" come from the Blues, one of the most important forms of music invented by the black population in America at the end of the nineteenth century.
Blue notes are usually (in scale degrees) flat 3, flat 5, and sometimes flat 7. Depending on context, they can either refer to scale degrees in the key, or the notes in any triad of the song. Cotten uses both.
In the third phrase of each verse (the words "Please don't tell which train I'm on"), she scoops when she sings "Please don't tell." She's dancing the line between Eb and E-- the third of C major.
A good example of the other kind comes in her guitar playing, in the same section. Whenever she plays an instrumental rotation, or a tag, she adds a little A - Ab flourish to the F chord. If you look closely at her right hand, she's actually bending the string out to get the A natural. It's the major and minor third of F major. So in this case, the blue note refers to the third of the specific chord, instead of the third of the general key.
Deceptive Motion
One glaring error I've seen in many tabs of this song on the internet is using an A minor chord instead of the F major in the third phrase. This would certainly be a more simple, and understandable motion in theory-- E7 should lead to A minor, when you're in C. E7 is the V chord of A. (If you're unfamiliar with the concept of secondary dominants, go here.)
However, E7 -> F still makes sense, as deceptive motion. In a deceptive cadence, the dominant leads to the VI chord instead of the tonic. In this case, F major is the VI chord of A minor. The same holds true for movement inside a progression.
The interesting thing here is that the F chord has two functions. When thinking about it from E7 to F, it's deceptive motion in A minor. But when thinking about it in the larger phrase, F functions as the predominant. The switch happens almost instantaneously, to the point where I don't hear the deceptive motion; the predominant is too strong for me. Speak up if you hear something different. Therefore, to summarize:
- The chord progression jumps out on a limb, to E7-- a distantly related chord to C
- It resolves incompletely to F major
- F major shares functions between resolving the E7 and becoming predominant, leading to the cadence.
Closing
As you can see, even a little folk song like this can yield quite a few surprises. Something doesn't have to be complicated to analyze it. If it sounds good, it's worthy of analyzation.
