Where did Cotton-Eyed Joe come from? And where did he go?
Do you have a pop song that follows you around like the plague? A song so powerful yet so insipid that it has managed to infect every fibre of your being like a parasite? A song that has been with you your entire life and makes you wish you lived in a parallel world where it never existed? You know what I’m on about, and there’s no doubt that there’s a song that you can apply this to on your own personal level.
Even typing out the name of the song here makes my skin crawl, but ‘Cotton Eye Joe’, as popularised by Swedish Eurodance group Rednex, has rather, unfortunately, dogged me since birth. Sitting ugly at number one in the UK charts on the day I was extracted from the womb, I haven’t been able to escape the inextricable link between the song’s popularity and my very existence for almost 30 years, and I never will.
In what is perhaps an effort to exorcise the demons that the song has tormented me with and to finally find peace with the fact that I will live with this tangential and inconsequential connection to the song for eternity, two questions must be answered – just where did Cotton-Eyed Joe come from, and where did he go?
While the Rednex version that became a continental hit contains original elements, such as the verses sung by Annika Ljungberg, aka Mary Sue, it’s well established that the chorus that poses our burning queries is adapted from a traditional song. However, where exactly this irksome ditty originated from is a much more contested piece of information, and there are many claims surrounding the song’s roots that seemingly contradict one another.
Where did Cotton-Eyed Joe come from?
Some sources claim that the earliest instances of ‘Cotton-Eyed Joe’ being recited as a folk song stem from plantations in the southern states of America, with these oral accounts coming from before the Civil War began in 1861. Dorothy Scarborough, an American folklorist and historian from Texas, wrote in her 1925 book On the Trail of Negro Folk-songs that it was being sung by enslaved workers in the Lonestar State, but that her sister had also learned other parts of the song across the border in Louisiana.
Nobody is certain of what Joe’s descriptive nickname is in reference to either. Considering its origins supposedly stem from plantations where cotton would have been picked, it is likely that this has something to do with the title and may even be filled with racist stereotypes about black people, but several other theories have been proposed as to what ‘cotton-eyed’ could mean. One reasonable suggestion is that it refers to a man with eyes that were noticeably off-white, like cotton, leading to theories that Joe may have been a man with glaucoma, an infection that can cause discolouration in the eyes.
The lyrics were first written down and published in a dialectal form of English in 1882 by the Harper and Brothers publishing house, but several translations into standardised English would soon follow in the early 20th century. The first known recording of the song would later arrive in 1927, courtesy of Fiddlin’ John Carson, an early pioneer of country music from Georgia.
The lyrics that are most commonly recited today pose the same question of where Cotton-Eyed Joe came from and disappeared to, and within the context of the rest of the lyrics, it can be established in the first verse that the titular character ran off with the narrator’s girlfriend who he had intended to marry:
“Cotton-eyed Joe, Cotton-eyed Joe,
What did make you serve me so,
For to take my gal away from me,
And carry her down to Tennessee?
If it hadn’t been for Cotton-eyed Joe,
I’d have been married long ago.“
Why exactly our mysterious protagonist chose to elope with the narrator’s crush is briefly touched upon in later verses, with the lyrics suggesting that his tall and slim physique and her good looks were why the couple fell for each other. Lamenting the loss of his true love, the narrator, and possibly the original writer of the song, turned his woes into prose, thus giving us some sort of answer to the first of our questions.
And where did he go?
In terms of the character in the song, we know that Cotton-Eyed Joe ran away with the lyricist’s lover to Tennessee, perhaps living happily ever after, or perhaps pulling the same stunt with another man’s girlfriend and darting off to his next destination. We won’t ever know the true whereabouts of the man in the song, but the information provided is satisfying enough.
As for the song itself, it arguably reached the peak of its popularity in late 1994 with the Rednex version that fused country and techno in the most unholy fashion imaginable, but thankfully, there are several other more faithful renditions of the song that have existed over the years. Nina Simone recorded a version of the track on her 1959 album Nina Simone at Town Hall, while folk singer Karen Dalton would release her take on the traditional tune in 1962, going as far as to name the album it appeared on Cotton Eyed Joe.
Since the Swedish group topped the charts with it, the song has arguably had an even more peculiar trajectory, with the song being used in the 2017 film Swiss Army Man, where Daniel Radcliffe’s flatulent corpse performs his rendition of the song. Even stranger is the Rednex version’s recent renaissance, which became part of an inexplicably absurd internet meme that as a millennial I am too old to understand or explain with enough authority.
So, where did ‘Cotton-Eyed Joe’ go? Seemingly, he went on to worldwide notoriety and continued his legacy across multiple centuries, turning a possibly racist song from one of history’s darkest eras into a novelty hoe-down anthem. Unfortunately, ‘Cotton-Eyed Joe’ didn’t go anywhere. He’s everywhere, and he’s etched himself into every one of our minds. Forever.
