The Ballet of the Boll Weevil
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 23/08/2020

Day 160 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series

Sandburg writes: "What's the song you're singing?" John Lomax once asked a group of blacks, who answered,  "That's the ballet of the boll weevil." They have "ballets" (narratives/ballads), "reels" (dance songs), and  "mellows" (melodies), besides improvisations called "make-up" and "jump-up" songs. . . .

There  were planters who gazed on ravaged cotton fields and felt the multiplied myrmidons of the boll  weevil to be as terrible as one of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The imagination of the  black field workers played shrewdly and whimsically on the phantom that came so silently to destroy  the work of man on the land that man claims to own. . . .

Gates Thomas recorded three boll weevil verses in 1897, many more in 1906, and wrote in 1926 as to calamity and destruction by the insect  plague, that it had been "more than averted, thanks to the application of scientific findings to  cotton-growing and to the practical and creative work of seed breeders; but the ballad is still imaginatively true to the time and region in which it arose communally." . . .

Text and tune here  are from Texas, Oklahoma, Mississippi and Alabama; we forego boll weevil blues heard in Nashville, Tennessee, and on Lang Syne Plantation at Fort Motte, South Carolina.