"I'd always heard that she wrote ['Freight Train'] at the age of 11 before some preacher convinced her to give up the guitar." Maybe she meant she wrote part of her version of it, which best I know she did. Considering how many guitars and folk stanzas were all over the place, it's possible but unlikely that the child Ella Nevill (as she was known then) would completely originate a song that would -- more or less as she quit playing guitar for years -- find its way to a white college student by 1919, _and_ that that same child would also later happen to work as a maid for the Seeger family.
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