Cotton Eyed Joe: A Song History

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"Cotton Eyed Joe" appears to date from the era of slavery. In her 1925 study of Black folk song, folklorist Dorothy Scarborough noted that several informants who remembered the years before the Civil War vouched for it as a slavery-era song, and she took part of her text from an elderly Louisiana man who had known it since early childhood, having heard enslaved people sing it on plantations.[1] The song also turns up in Diddie, Dumps, and Tot, a children's book of plantation life first copyrighted by Harper & Brothers in 1882, where it is the tune for a dance on the plantation;[2] Mental Floss calls this the first known published version.[3] Its author, Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle, dedicated the book to her father, a Selma, Alabama, doctor, and described herself as a slaveholder by birth.[2] The Black historian and collector Thomas W. Talley also documented the song, and in a manuscript of stories he recounted a tale about a fiddler named Cotton Eyed Joe who lived before the war.[3][4] No one agrees on what the name means; suggestions range from drunkenness to eyes clouded by disease.[4]

1939 photograph of a former cowboy in a hat playing the fiddle inside his trailer home in Weslaco, Texas

Russell Lee, “Mr. Bias, a former cowboy, playing the fiddle in his trailer home, Weslaco, Texas,” photograph, February 1939. Library of Congress. No known restrictions.

The tune traveled widely as dance music. According to the Traditional Tune Archive, a Texas heel-and-toe dance went by the name in the 1880s.[4] Its first known 78 rpm recording was made in 1927 by Dykes' Magic City Trio.[3][4] Other early string-band versions, since reissued on LP, came from Fiddlin' John Carson, the Skillet Lickers, Pope's Arkansas Mountaineers and the Carter Brothers and Son.[4] In Texas the western swing bands took it up: Adolph Hofner recorded it in 1941 and claimed to be the first to do so, and Bob Wills followed in 1947; both used a G-major variant of the tune.[5][6] The Handbook of Texas names it as a fiddle-dance piece that shed its dance calls over time and gained lyrics that came to matter nearly as much as the melody.[7] A 1994 techno remake by the Swedish group Rednex carried the title far beyond fiddle circles.[3]

Most old-time versions are in A, with some in G or D, and fiddlers play it in standard tuning or in cross-tunings such as AEae.[4] In Canada, notably on Prince Edward Island, fiddlers play a tune of this name that can be counted as distinct from the Southern one, with a strong Acadian flavor in its second part; the collector Ken Perlman thought the Canadian versions probably spread from the radio and television playing of the Maritime fiddler Don Messer.[8] "Cotton Eyed Joe" appears in Stephen Seifert's mountain dulcimer book Join the Jam II.[9]

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Sources

  1. Internet Archive: "On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs" by Dorothy Scarborough (Harvard University Press, 1925).
  2. Internet Archive: "Diddie, Dumps, and Tot; or, Plantation Child-Life" by Louise-Clarke Pyrnelle (Harper & Brothers).
  3. Mental Floss: "The Murky Origins and Controversial History Behind the Song 'Cotton Eye Joe'".
  4. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Cotton Eyed Joe (1)".
  5. Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas: "Hofner, Adolph".
  6. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Cotton Eyed Joe (2)".
  7. Texas State Historical Association, Handbook of Texas: "Folk Music".
  8. The Traditional Tune Archive: "Annotation:Cotton Eyed Joe (3)".
  9. Stephen Seifert: "Join the Jam II".