Elizabeth Cotten wrote “Freight Train” as a child, around eleven or twelve, growing up near Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Left-handed, with no one around to tell her otherwise, she strung a guitar for a right-handed player and simply flipped it upside down, picking the bass lines with her fingers and the melody with her thumb: a reversed technique that later got its own name, Cotten picking.

Rhiannon Giddens, who grew up in Greensboro, a few hours from where Cotten did, has recorded her own version of the song for Hope Is the Thing with Feathers, her upcoming album out September 18 on Nonesuch Records. The take strips down to just her voice and Dirk Powell‘s acoustic guitar, matching the bareness of Cotten’s own 1958 recording.

Cotten grew up next to freight trains and said she used to watch them go by; the lyrics ask, plainly, to keep hearing that same sound after she’s dead, calling out to be buried close enough to hear “old Number Nine” roll past.

The album itself was recorded live at The Cypress House in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana, with few overdubs. Giddens kept the sound of the room in the mix: talk between takes, feet on the floor.

Stream “Freight Train” HERE, and pre-order Hope Is the Thing with Feathers following THIS LINK