Ever wonder why so much nostalgia is imbued in a crop that’s associated with intense heat, hard labor and devastating insect infestation?

References to cotton abound in American culture.

Oh I wish I was in the land of cotton/Old times they are not forgotten… .

Black workers in cotton fields that stretched to the horizon was a popular scene of late 19th and early 20th century postcards and other print media.

American artist Winslow Homer (1836-1910) countered the demeaning cotton picking fascination with a sensitive, romantic portrayal of two young black women in a Virginia cotton field.

Winslow Homer, The Cotton Pickers, oil, 1876, collection Los Angeles County Museum of Art (photo: Wikipedia Creative Commons)

Jean Toomer’s  “November Cotton Flower” poetically withered in his 1923 book, Cane. Here’s an excerpt:

                                                Boll-weevils coming, and the winter’s cold,

                                                Made cotton-stalks look rust, seasons old,

                                                And cotton, scarce as any southern snow … .

“The Cotton Blossom” was the name of the boat that was the setting of Edna Ferber’s Showboat novel and Jerome Kern’s 1928 Broadway hit musical play based on the novel. The show’s “tote that bale, lift that barge” lyric in the“Old Man River” song  refers to the arduous work of packing and transporting cotton.

View of early movie production of Kern’s Showboat with the “Cotton Blossom” painted on the side of the boat. The real Cotton Blossom showboat sailed between 1908 and 1917. (Photo source unknown)

In the 1930s, the Cotton Club was the height of white chic in New York.  High dee, high dee, high dee hi. HIgh dee, high dee, high dee low.   “Low,” not only as in “slummin’, ”  which how the white elite referred to hangin’ out in Harlem but also “low” as in the Carolina low country which produced the finest cotton in the world, a silky, long-fibered, luxuriously soft variation of the plant.

The Famous Cotton Club: the Aristocrat of Harlem. New York: ca. April 1932. (Collection of the New York Historical Society. **Am seeking repro permission**)

But the other side of nostalgia and luxury was back in the rough and racist “land of cotton”: get too close and somebody would yell, “Git yo cotton pickin’ hands off me!”

An advertisement for the Capehart phonograph-radio console in Life Magazine, November 15, 1943, compares listening to music at the end of the work day by highjacking the harsh cotton field conditions for marketing promotions that romantized the labor by transposing it to the solace that comes with the end of more condusive toil.  The ad in part reads:

Song of the Soil

“I’s Comin,” a painting by Horace Pippin. This is an interpretation of Stephen Foster's “Old Black Joe.” The work-worn old servant hears the voices of his friends “gone from the cotton fields away.”

Julie L. McGee uncovered this ad during her research for the “Field, Boil and Monument: Toward an Iconography of Cotton in African American Art,” an article in the “Oh, I wish I was in the Land of Cotton” issue of the International Review of African American art guest edited by Joyce Henri Robinson.

By the 1960s, cotton nostalgia was deemed romantically racialized and outright racist in the progressive public mind but other kinds of cotton references continued to emerge in the culture. In the 1970 “Cotton Comes to Harlem” movie, two cops discover that cotton bales stuffed with money have been hijacked and the chase is on uptown.

The invention of the cotton gin in 1793 spurred the U.S. economy to astronomical levels as the crop soon accounted for more than half the total U.S. exports. The fall out of all this wealth built on enslaved and poor people’s backs was a truly mad scramble to cop cotton allusions.  The madness was so frightfully massive that representing it below seems like a rampaging gargantuan beast.