Chris's Picks: Shake Sugaree

[By Christopher Eckart, from the Summer 2026 issue]

A song of sorrow; a list of things lost; a lament sung by a child. “Shake Sugaree” is all these things in the form of a compelling folk song written by Elizabeth Cotten and sung by her great-grandaughter Brenda Evans in a 1967 recording. Elizabeth Cotten is perhaps more known for the song “Freight Train” which she composed in her early teens. I first learned it in 2018 (over 100 years after it was written) as a beginning fingerstyle guitar player. Many players seeking to learn fingerstyle guitar, especially in a country blues vein, start with the alternating bass thumb and the second and third finger melody and rhythm of this classic bluesy folk song. While ``Freight Train" is fun to play, perform and embellish as a guitar player, ``Shake Sugaree" makes an impact because of its emotional tenor and tragic theme.

In the 1967 recording, a 12-year-old Brenda Evans sings while Elizabeth Cotten (age 74) plays acoustic guitar in her characteristic style. With a guitar strung for right-handed players held with the bass strings closest to the floor she plays a straight open-chord rhythm with very standard bass lines and walk-ups as she moves between the I, IV and V chords. It’s predictable, but it follows patterns that a lot of our ears and minds are trained on in Western music from childhood, and that familiarity reaches deep into my spirit and affirms that what it feels is true and good. The quietly voiced Dominant 7th chord on the refrain ``Everything I got is done and pawned" is so classical, so twinkle-twinkle-little-star, that it reassures that everything will come full circle and end as it began. The contrast of this cadence with the woeful lyrics brings to mind “O du lieber Augustin” from the Austrian Folk tradition where the refrain “Alles ist hin” (All is lost) falls over the same familiar V7 to I resolution. We humans sing our sadness often, and in different ways, but ``Shake Sugaree" does it over a classical nursery-rhyme folk song template, which somehow makes it sadder.

Above folk cadences and guitar rhythms, Brenda Evans’ vocal performance fills the melody and lyrics with emotions—lament, detachment, resignation—and even leaves ellipsis for a humorous interpretation. I’m often uninterested in songs where vocalists really work to convey emotion. When people just sing though... just remember the words and fit them to a melody... I hear a bit of who they are and feel invited to feel how they feel. Young Brenda Evans sings her list of lost things—horse, cart, watch, chain, tobacco, cow—honestly, tunefully and simply. When her voice wavers a bit before finding the pitch in her lowest register on the phrase ``done and pawned" it’s beautifully vulnerable and emotionally powerful. It moves me when I hear it and think of a child recounting her great-grandmother's list of loss. Expressed firsthand, secondhand, thirdhand or from even further away the lament is no less immediate.

We all have met or will meet with loss. We’ll all be in darkness sometimes. There’s wisdom and power in folk songs that let us sing about sorrow for, with and as children. It was a tradition learned, celebrated and continued by Elizabeth Cotten and her great-grandaughter and I’m grateful that we have their examples as inspiration today.