Western North Carolina, the Piedmont, a farm with red soil, early fall, and cotton balls, like snow, filled the fields.
My momma liked to sing. When I was a little bitty baby, my momma would rock me in my cradle. Leadbelly wrote the song and performed it first. But momma was playing Johnny Cash on the record player and and the song was Leadbelly’s Cotton Fields. When I grew to be a boy, my Grandpa would talk about the old family farm in Tallapoosa County, Alabama, and the cotton fields back home. Too much planting, too much cotton made the soil old and tired. And my grandpa went off to war.
Years later, I was driving through Alabama. On a lark I went back to see the old family farmhouse. It was way down in the valley on a road called, I am not kidding, Booger Hollow. The farm was gone. The lumber company bought the land and nothing remained but pine trees, red soil and kudzu, that creeping vine swallows up the land.
Kansas, years later, a cotton field outside Wichita. Brings back memories.
Cotton Fields, Leadbelly’s lyrics
When I was a little baby
My mama would rock me in the cradle
In them old old cotton fields at homeWhen I was a little baby
My mama would rock me in the cradle
In them old old cotton fields at homeOh when those cotton balls get rotten
You can’t pick you very much cotton
In them old cotton fields back homeIt was down in Louisiana
Just a mile from Texarkana
In them old cotton fields back homeIt may sound a little funny
But you didn’t make very much money
In them old cotton fields at homeIt may sound a little funny
But you didn’t make very much money
In them old cotton fields at homeOh when those cotton balls get rotten
You can’t pick very much cotton
In them old cotton fields back home…
Abandoned, old, and interesting Kansas 