Origin Stories: Cotton-Eyed Joe

I am a simple woman. I think “Where did this story come from?” Then I think: “Where did it go? Where did you come from, Cotton-Eyed Joe?” All those times I heard that song at a school function must have conditioned me to think this way. Yet, I never gave a lot of thought to the meaning behind the song. I was too busy trying to nail the dance I guess in front of the other middle schoolers, but today, I’m curious, so let’s finally answer: “Where did you come from, Cotton-Eyed Joe?”

Let me state up front that the above picture is not, in fact, cotton. Instead, I believe it’s a thistle that was growing on Maine’s coast—a place that is undeniably not the South where cotton can be found. Speaking of cotton, it may come as no surprise that the song “Cotton-Eyed Joe” can be traced back to the Southern United States pre-civil war.

The first documented account of the song showed up in Louise Clarke Pyrnelle’s 1882 children’s book Diddie, Dumps, and Tot, or Plantation Child-Life. Pyrnelle wrote the book inspired by her upbringing on a wealthy plantation before the Civil War. The book has since faced backlash, romanticizing slaves and feeding into harmful black stereotypes. However, the book has been the foundation for folklorists in determining that the song Cotton-Eyed Joe came from slaves singing it in the plantation fields.

This fact was confirmed by American folklorist Dorothy Scarborough in her book On the Trail of Negro Folk-songs, published in 1925. The book explains that several people remembered hearing the song before the war, and Scarborough herself states that she learned it from an “Old Louisianna Man” who remembered hearing it sung by slaves on the plantations.

Beyond these accounts, the origins of Cotton-Eyed Joe are murky, and little can be gleaned from the actual lyrics. Different interpretations suggest that “Cotton-Eyed” refers to someone with an ocular condition like cataracts or syphilis, but the most common interpretation suggests someone who is drunk on moonshine. All we know is that Cotton-Eyed Joe may not have been the most handsome fella, but the narrator’s girlfriend fell for him all the same.

Several artists have covered the song over the last century, though the cover that took the world by storm was the rendition by the Swedish band Rednex in 1994. Like the first account of the song, the Rednex version has faced criticism. The band openly admits not knowing anything about the song’s origins or the American South before dressing up and acting as Southern U.S. stereotypes in their music video. 

I find it deeply unfortunate that I had heard the song so many times and never knew its origins as a slave song. Even more disappointing is the fact that so much of our understanding of it relies on questionable interpretations from people whose perspective could not match that of the people who first sang it. It’s important to acknowledge the origins of art, especially when those origins come from people who have had their culture appropriated for centuries. I’m certainly glad that I dug deeper into its history now.