Where'd all this come from?
My name is Colin Henning and I am from Carrboro, North Carolina–the birthplace of Elizabeth Cotten. Years ago I stumbled across a plaque about the Carrboro "Whopper," the freight train that once ran by the Mill in the early 1900s. This freight train, the plaque told, was unique for its smaller size and that it was, in fact, the freight train that Elizabeth Cotten wrote her song about.
I remember thinking, That song...I know I know that song... but who is Elizabeth Cotten?
It was a question that far too many people still have.
I began doing my reading and was shocked by how little information there was for a woman who had clearly made a difference for music in the 20th century.
Born in 1893, in the West End of Chapel Hill, North Carolina (there was no Carrboro at the time) she had to drop out of school to help support her mother and siblings when she was about 9 years old. At the same time, she was teaching herself guitar using her brother's guitar (which she wasn't allowed to restring to suit her left handed playing, leading her to play it 'left handed and upside down'), and worked to save enough money to buy her own guitar. Around 11 years old she wrote the immortal song "Freight Train," and by 15 was told by the Church she had to stop playing guitar.
Later in life she moved to Washington DC where she worked for the Seeger Family, coincidentally (or perhaps fatefully) a family of folk musicians. There, she was re-inspired to pick up the guitar from where she left off. The youngest son, Mike, would go on to record her first album. She was 64. In 1984 she won a Grammy. She was 90.
At the time dreaming of being an actor and filmmaker, I clearly saw a moving and important story that I felt needed making–except I was about 12 years old.
Not quite half-way through getting my BFA in Acting at Purchase College, NY, (where I graduated this year with some of the most talented young actors in America today), it was clear the opportunity to tell this story was at hand, thanks to the help and passion of Hayleigh Hart Franklin (Producer and Star).
Also a member of this BFA Acting Class, she was immediately moved by Elizabeth Cotten's story and fascinated by this woman's humor and quiet strength. She lead me, both thematically and artistically, where I needed to go.
I spent two years researching and writing the script for her. The story focuses on her girlhood, and specifically looks at what it was like for her to give up music. Our script is based around various interviews she gave throughout her life, both on TV, tape, and through the written word.
The problem became how to proceed in our pivotal scene. How and why exactly does she give up playing?
One interview, that I was fortunate enough to read a transcript of, was conducted in 1976 with the Chapel Hill Historic Society. This interview became one of the pillars for our story. She talked extensively about her childhood, career with guitar and without, and gave anecdotes about her life. It became the basis for much of the script, and in this interview, she gives a detailed, "I-said-He-said" account of how and why she gave up guitar playing as a girl (so the scene quite literally wrote itself).
I became fascinated by this transcript and was excited to hear the interview. I asked the Historical Society if I could listen to a copy of it. They said they didn't have it. I asked who did and they said a department of the UNC Library had it on loan. I went to that department which redirected me to another department, who also said they didn't have it. I was determined to track it down, and pestered the Library, Society, and everyone in between to get a copy of this tape. In the end I had copies of emails, memos, and faxes going back to the 1980s about who was in possession of this tape, but what I didn't have was the tape.
I never found it.
The fact that enough care was put in to record it, transcribe it, loan it, and keep a record of who had it (or was supposed to), but not have care enough to actually know where it was hit me hard. That's the exact reason why we need this film.
Over the next year we wrote the script. Close to half of the script is a form of Elizabeth Cotten's own words. We shot the majority of the film in May 2018, with a passionate team determined to give Elizabeth Cotten's story the same reach that her music has.
As much love as she gave to us through her music, we tried to give back to her in making this film, and we invite you to be a part of that.
What We Need
We need $3500 to help finish this movie, and get it out to see.
Most of this funding will go towards Music Permissions so we can enter the film into film festivals.
Film festivals are costly, and we also need to afford the entrance fees.
We paid out of pocket to make this film and pay for our cast and crew to come down to North Carolina, and so our Producers need reimbursement of some production costs.
If we don't reach $3500, it will be hard to make the film accessible through film festivals, and if we don't reach $1500 there's no way to enter the film without the Music Permissions.
The Challenges & Impact
Telling a true story is always difficult, and telling one that has never been told on film provided many challenges.
We wanted to do justice to Elizabeth Cotten's story. First and foremost in that discussion was the question of, should I be involved at all? In an age where telling Black Stories is becoming more important, why should I be involved in the making of this film? The easy answer is because I had the idea, but none of us, myself included, were going to accept that.
Coming from the same town as Elizabeth Cotten, I was able to play host to our cast and crew, and offer the resources to tell this story. I've had experience directing and filmmaking and always loved research and the search for truth, and so our script is largely based in Elizabeth Cotten's own words and crafted through story and theme. Our search for truth did not stop with the story, but continued throughout production. This meant my eye would never be leant to contriving the emotional experience of these characters, for which these actors would be the authority, but rather I would be thematically guiding us in the story Hayleigh and I were passionately trying to share, with the help of Creative Director, Mya Carter.
Ultimately we felt it was a story that needed telling, and since no one else was doing it, it was going to be us.
We made sure to film on Historic Sites that would emulate where she was from, and in some cases we shot at places where she would have been. We strove for truth and authenticity in making this story, not sensationalism.
The Church we shot at was only a block away from the Church where she went (and stood at the time of her childhood), the creek where we filmed her Baptism was the same creek she was Baptized in, and one of my favorite scenes is shot at a trestle; the same trestle she talks about going to all the time when she was a kid. We shot the scenes taking place in her neighborhood at Horton Grove on the Stagville Historic Site; home to the Slave quarters on this former plantation. This Site is completely unique for having the houses still standing (in most of these cases the houses fell into disrepair, or were torn down–often in an attempt to tear down the history with them). We decided to shoot there since the bulk of our film takes place in North Carolina in 1908, only 40-some years after the end of the Civil War. She would have been living in the shadow of the Civil War, and would have grown up hearing stories about it (in an interview with Mike Seeger she recalls that her Mother's side was free and her Father's side descended from slaves, with his mother, Hannah, having been a slave). That is what inspired our decision for this location: We knew this place would be able to say more than we ever could.
From Hayleigh Hart Franklin;
I didn't even know about her when he asked me to do this film. I had never heard of Elizabeth Cotten, which makes me so sad, but also it's why this story is so important because she should be known. And within folk communities, people who know folk music, she's widely known, but outside of that, this story, I don't think, is something people have heard about. And even if they know her name, don't know what lead her to the place where she's winning Grammy's (and as an older woman).
We shot on location at a Plantation, and I have never felt so changed and grateful. I felt like my ancestors–even though, you know, I don't know that my own ancestors were there but...to know that these people who are a part of me just by being black, and going through the struggle of slavery, were there helped to tell the story so much, because Elizabeth wasn't living in the mansion that Mrs Copeland, in our film, was in. These were not beautiful homes it was a place that was survival.
It's unforgettable to be a part of something like this.
Other Ways You Can Help
The best thing you can do is spread the word!
Our goal, as Hayleigh Hart Franklin puts it, is to, "get this to as many film festivals as possible so the world gets to experience Elizabeth Cotten the way that we have," so if you can't donate, or share with people who can, go listen to Freight Train and the music Libba so lovingly shared with us.
