A 60-year-old woman helps a lost little girl find her mother in a Washington, D.C. department store, and the trajectory of modern folk and rock changes forever. The girl was Peggy Seeger, the mother was composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, and the woman was Elizabeth Cotten, a self-taught domestic worker from North Carolina who had invented a legendary guitar technique as a child, then walked away from music for 25 years. This episode traces a life that dismantles every assumption about the expiration date on talent.

Born around 1893 near Chapel Hill and known as Lil Sis until she named herself on her first day of school, Cotten left school at nine and earned a dollar a month as a live-in maid at 12. Her mother saved those wages to buy a 3.75 dollar Sears and Roebuck guitar, which the left-handed girl flipped upside down, playing bass with her fi ...