Cotton-Eyed Joe
American folk song
"Cotton-Eyed Joe" (also known as "Cotton-Eye Joe") (Roud 942) is a traditional American country folk song popular at various times throughout the United States and Canada. The song is also an instrumental banjo and bluegrass fiddle standard.
"Cotton-Eyed Joe" has inspired more than one country-western partner dance and line dance. The 1980 film Urban Cowboy included a version of the song. In 1985, the Moody Brothers' version of the song received a Grammy Award nomination for Best Country Instrumental Performance. The Irish group the Chieftains received a Grammy nomination for Best Country Vocal Collaboration for their version of the song with lead vocals by Ricky Skaggs on their 1992 album Another Country. In 1994, a version recorded by the Swedish Eurodance group Rednex as "Cotton Eye Joe" became popular worldwide.
History
19th century
The origins of this song are unclear, although it predates the 1861–1865 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.
“Cotton-Eyed Joe” enters the record as american folk song. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Cotton-Eyed, American and folk can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 31, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q314641. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1980, 1985, 1992 and 1994.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cotton-Eyed Joe” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.