Cotton Eye Joe by Rednex

Every New Zealand #1 single…

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Cotton Eye Joe by Rednex

Topped the NZ chart for 6 weeks from 5 March 1995.

Rednex

Inspired by Ricky Skaggs, Swedish producers Janne Ericsson, Örjan “Öban” Öberg, and Ranis Edenberg formed Rednex. They blended Eurodance and country – perhaps it’s not surprising that blending two cheesy genres resulted in an especially cheesy fondue.

Cotton Eye Joe

‘Cotton-Eyed Joe’ is a traditional country folk song, dating back to before the American Civil War.

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.

Wikipedia

No-one’s entirely sure what “Cotton-Eye” means. Theories include:

• 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
• the contrast of dark skin tone around white eyeballs in black people.

My Verdict

Combining country and Europop is like a recipe for maximum cheese. Accordingly, this is a corny version of a folk chestnut. The Rednex version gets tiring quickly, but ‘Cotton Eye Joe’ is a robust song that’s hard to kill too badly.

The Aftermath

Rednex enjoyed more hits – ‘Old Pop in an Oak’ very much sounds like a sequel to ‘Cotton Eye Joe’, despite the protestations of the band’s female singer:

The two melodies are completely different! The only thing that is similar is that techno beat but if you took that away and played it acoustically with violins and a banjo, then you can hear there’s a very big difference. They are totally different songs, different stories. ‘Cotton Eye Joe’ was an old, trad song. But ‘Old Pop in an Oak’ is a whole new, original song that we dedicated to an old man in our village.”

Annika Ljungberg, Smash Hits

The band turned into a franchise. In January 2012, Rednex announced that they now use a larger pool of characters from which one female and three male performers would be chosen for each performance.

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• NZ #1 hits