Where Did You Come From, Where Did You Go?
This piece was originally written for March Fadness.
Where did you come from, where did you go, the people who popularized “Cotton-Eyed Joe”?
The answer, roughly, to both questions is “Sweden.” But that’s hardly the whole story of Rednex, the bluegrass/Eurodance musical group whose cover of the nineteenth-century American folk song became an unlikely worldwide hit in 1994. That story is long and not very interesting, and I’m not going to tell it. In short, however, it’s this:
Rednex was the brainchild of a couple of Swedish record producers who, in 1994, assembled a group of performers in an effort to meld dance and pop music with American-style country and folk. The members of Rednex wore the vestments of the imaginary American hillbilly stereotype, and may or may not have actually produced the sounds that appear on their albums. (It’s easy to find videos of Rednex holding musical instruments, but rare to find one in which they seem to be actually playing them, or displaying even the slightest familiarity with the rudiments of doing so.) “Cotton-Eye Joe”—they dropped the “D,” an alteration of which I enthusiastically approve—was their first release and biggest hit, and the group has been capitalizing on its success ever since, re-recording, remixing, and re-releasing the song at irregular intervals.
I say “the group” as though Rednex has enjoyed some kind of personnel consistency over the past two decades. They have not. The original lineup consisted of Mary Joe, Bobby Sue, Billy Ray, Ken Tacky, and Mup. The last known lineup consists of Rufus Jones, Misty Mae, Abby Hick, Sawtooth Sam[1], and Spades. In the intervening years, the group has also seen contributions, some of them legally challenged by other members of the group, from BB Stiff, Whippy, Scarlet, Dagger, Joe Cagg, Jay Lee, Ace Ratclaw, Boneduster Crock, Snake, Maverick, and Dakotah. These are not their real names.
It doesn’t matter. These people recorded dozens of songs across three albums, some of them hits in some parts of the world; or, to be more accurate, somebody or other produced three albums that some of these people maybe were involved in recording, or maybe not; and some combination of these people then promoted these albums during many waves of worldwide touring and promotion: but the important thing to understand is that Rednex is, for all intents and purposes, five scraggly-looking Swedes pretending to be American rural unsophisticates, lip-synching over and over to “Cotton-Eye Joe.” That’s their brand. They’re more concept than musical group. You might even call them a subculture.
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How on earth did “Cotton-Eye Joe” become a worldwide smash hit? I’d never heard, or even heard of, Rednex’s version of the song until recently, when a woman I’d just begun dating mentioned it to me. Initial emotional negotiations between us had included the question of dancing: is it a thing we did? Were we any good at it? Would we attempt to undertake it, if called upon to do so? The answer was no, with an asterisk: “I don’t dance,” she told me sternly, “except the ‘Cotton-Eye Joe’.”
The Cotton-Eye Joe is a dance designed, apparently, to accompany “Cotton-Eye Joe,” not just the Rednex version of the song, but all that came before it. It is, my girlfriend explained, a staple of Orthodox Jewish bat mitzvahs. Really? I asked, incredulous.
As it turns out, the Cotton-Eye Joe dance is a staple of approximately everything. It isn’t just one dance, in fact; it’s a variety of them, elaborations on a 150-year-old clog dance that draw from a pool of simple moves, in much the way that Rednex is a musical group that draws from a pool of ridiculously-named artificial hillbillies. It can involve toe-taps and heel-taps, shoe-touches and sidesteps, grapevines and handclaps and knee bends. YouTube videos reveal variations that involve high kicks, hip shimmies, hat tips, full-body spins, and marching in place. There are line-dance versions and partner-dance versions. Variations on the Cotton-Eye Joe are performed by cheerleading squads, dance-competition preteens, seventh-inning stretchers, bedroom soliloquists, and newlyweds, and a great variety of old cartoons have been re-cut to appear purpose-made as accompaniments to the song.
In all the versions I bothered to listen to, “Cotton-Eye(d) Joe” is narrated by a man whose woman has been stolen by the titular character, a gawky stranger with inexplicable powers of sexual attraction. The oldest known versions of the song have a rather self-pitying air; one complains that “I’d’a been married forty year ago” if it hadn’t been for this cross-eyed stranger. Forty years! The Rednex version dispenses with the emasculating lament; its speaker does admit that he woulda been married “a long time ago,” but ascribes to Cotton-Eye Joe abilities both supernatural and sinister. “He brought disaster wherever he went,” we are told, and also that, in a staggering syntactical anomaly, “The hearts of the girls was to hell, broken, sent.”
Is Rednex’s rendition of the song any good? Honestly, it’s really not. It’s repetitive, of course, as all versions are, but it’s also mechanical, sonically underelaborated, and incompetently sung. The official video of the song’s original release is frantic and stupid, consisting entirely of a dramatized and stylized live performance of the song in a barn that’s been converted to a rave space. (When the group re-recorded and re-released the song eight years later, they produced a new video too, for some reason recreating the original one in a sort of post-apocalyptic, Madmaxian fight cage where motorcycles roar through the audience and everybody sings into dangling light bulbs.) Rednex is merely the latest installment in a long, shameful tradition of mocking poor, rural Americans, and even if you like that kind of thing, it was done much more amusingly by Looney Tunes and Red Ingle more than half a century ago. The cover of the first Rednex album features a cowboy pissing into a chamberpot brimming with bright yellow urine (not just his, one has to imagine), in which the band members’ disembodied heads ghostily bob.
But that’s all beside the point. “Cotton-Eye Joe” doesn’t have to be good. It doesn’t have to be played on the radio, either, or watched on YouTube. You just have to dance to it. It’s on every wedding deejay’s laptop, and couples all across the class spectrum demand it.
And so, on a gray winter afternoon not long ago, my girlfriend offered to teach it to me. We moved the coffee table out of the way, and I plugged my phone into the stereo. “Would you like a shot of tequila?” she inquired, then prepared a couple of generous draughts of Espolón Reposado, accompanied by some coarse kosher salt and fresh slices of lime. Five minutes later, suppressing nausea, I was tapping, spinning, clapping, and grapevineing to the shrill, wounded sentiments of Sweden’s most opportunistic cultural appropriators. It was kind of fun. After a while, we kept doing the Cotton-Eye Joe to other, much better, music. It turns out you can dance it to whatever.
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Rednex’s “Cotton-Eye Joe” isn’t your workaday one-hit wonder. Nobody has ever sung along to it at work, or in their car. Indeed, I don’t think anyone sings along to it, for any reason. Even Rednex themselves probably don’t; they barely managed to sing it the first time. It is, let me reiterate, an empirically awful song with pathetic lyrics, expressing sentiments most people would be embarrassed to feel, let along admit to in song, all set against a backdrop of cheesy stuttering synthesizer and robotic electronic kick drum.
But few other one-hit wonders have had the staying power of this miserable piece of cultural flotsam, and it’s because it’s easy to dance to it, and a lot of people have. Its popularity is propelled not by its musical value but by the vernacular tradition that adheres to it, that requires friends to teach dance moves to friends, that compels your sister to bare her midriff with a knotted pearlsnap shirt, or your grandpa to sweat through his rented tux. And YouTube has virtually guaranteed a platform for its future dissemination and elaboration upon.
There’s a shot a few seconds into the original video for “Cotton-Eye Joe” that shows a woman dispassionately extracting a rat from her hair. The image is intended as a comic evocation of the hillbilly’s natural state of filth and dishevelment, but it also serves as an inadvertent metaphor for the song itself: “Cotton-Eye Joe” is the rat. You will never get it out of your hair. It is indestructible and everywhere on earth, and, for better or worse, will be reverberating through school gymnasiums, football stadiums, dance halls and barns long after every other one-hit wonder is dead and forgotten.
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[1] I have to admit, I think Sawtooth Sam is a great stage name for a member of Rednex, as it references not only the rusted old implement and snaggly choppers one might naturally employ to lampoon agrarian poverty, but also the most prominent synthesizer waveform used in techno and dance music.
