Cotton Eyed Joe

About Cotton Eyed Joe:

Cotton Eyed Joe according to Wikipedia:
The origins of this song are unclear, although it pre-dates the 1861–1865 American Civil War.[1] American folklorist Dorothy Scarborough (1878–1935) noted in her 1925 book On the Trail of Negro Folk-songs that several people remembered hearing the song before the war. Scarborough’s account of the song came from her sister, Mrs. George Scarborough, who learned the song from “the Negroes on a plantation in Texas, and other parts from a man in Louisiana”. The man in Louisiana knew the song from his earliest childhood and heard slaves singing it on plantations.[2] Both the dance and the song had many variants.[3]

A number of possible meanings of the term “cotton-eyed” have been proposed. The phrase may refer to: being drunk on moonshine, or having been blinded by drinking wood alcohol, turning the eyes milky white; a black person with very light blue eyes; miners covered in dirt with the exception of their white eyes; someone whose eyes were milky white from bacterial infections of trachoma or syphilis, cataracts or glaucoma; or the contrast of dark skin tone around white eyeballs in black people. Another theory is that the phrase “cotton eyed” is the process of which a person is enucleated and the eyeball is replaced with a cotton ball due to lack of medical equipment and surgical professionals.[4]

American publishing house Harper and Brothers published the first printed version of the song in 1882.[5] It was heard by author Louise Clarke Pyrnelle (born 1850) on the Alabama plantation of her father when she was a child.[6] That 1882 version was republished as follows in 1910:[7]