This all too brief but beautiful fingerpicked blues was written by Elizabeth Cotten when she was 12 years old. Here she is singing and playing it 80 years later, shortly before her death.

She plays left handed and musicians will notice that her guitar is strung for a right-handed player but she’s playing it upside-down. As a result she is playing the basslines with her fingers and the melody with her thumb – the opposite of most guitarists.

It’s a unique style that she developed herself, after learning to play her brother’s banjo as a small child, and became known, inevitably, as “Cotten picking.”

She is one of the handful of female blues musicians who tend to get left out of music history. Born in North Carolina in 1893, she had a hard life, starting work as a maid at the age of 12. Three years later she gave birth to her first child.

In her mid-20s she retired from making music and moved to Washington D.C. where, by a curious coincidence, she worked as a domestic servant for the father of Pete and Peggy Seeger in the early 1940s.

It was only after a decade that their father Charles learned of her guitar-playing skills and arranged for her to be signed by the legendary Folkways label, who released her debut album in 1957… when she was already 64.

Her signature song Freight Train, written more than half a century earlier when she was only 12, has gone on to become a classic, thanks in part to Peggy Seeger bringing her nanny’s song to England.

Cotten only gave up domestic service in 1970 and began performing live at the end of the decade, in her 80s, belatedly enjoying a music career with performances in which she mixed music with anecdotes about her life.

She finally won a Grammy in 1984, when she was 90 years old, and died three years later.