Cotton-Eyed Joe

Cotton-Eyed Joe is older than the Civil War, and it came out of slavery. The folklorist Dorothy Scarborough, writing in 1925, was told by a man in Louisiana that he had heard enslaved people sing it on the plantations when he was a child, and her sister had learned it from Black singers on a Texas plantation. Its first printing, in 1882, was in Louise Clarke Pyrnelle's book of plantation childhood, set down in dialect. A dance history of Texas counts it among the tunes played for minstrel-style jigs. Thomas Talley's collection of Black folk rhymes has a verse in which Joe has been sold away. Those old verses are a record of where the song came from, and this page carries no words.

Nobody knows what the name means. The Traditional Tune Archive gathers the guesses: drunk on moonshine, eyes clouded white by trachoma (Alan Lomax's suggestion), or eyes of a very light blue (Marion Thede's). Charles Wolfe reports a stranger one from Talley's manuscript of stories, a tale about a plantation fiddler called Cotton-Eyed Joe who played a fiddle made from his dead son's coffin. That is a story, and it is told here as one.

Texas made it a dance. A man who learned it in Williamson County in the early 1880s described a heel and toe polka with clog steps added, and Wolfe called the tune a Texas dance-hall anthem. By Bill C. Malone's account, Adolph Hofner's 1941 record did the most to spread it. Bob Wills recorded it in 1947. The first records of it were made in 1927, by the Dykes Magic City Trio and by Fiddlin' John Carson, and Gid Tanner's Skillet Lickers followed. In 1994 the Swedish group Rednex made it a worldwide pop hit. That record is not the source of anything here.

There are really several tunes under this one name. The Archive calls it a pastiche of melodies trading phrases, and several old-time and mandolin settings play a sung line that sits on a run of repeated notes instead. This page carries the dance-hall breakdown, the one the fiddle settings and the western swing record share: a first strain that rocks on the open A and climbs to a held d, and a second strain that jumps up to the high a and walks back down.

On a mandolin the first bar tells the right hand what to do. c sharp, A, B, A, F sharp, A, E, A puts the open A course on every upstroke, so a strict down, up keeps the pick in place while the fingers move on the downbeats. The second strain reaches the a at the fifth fret of the E course and every note sits in first position. Both strains close on the same turn, c sharp, A, B, G sharp into A, so the jam hears the end coming.