Boll Weevil
Channel: Stephen Griffith
Date: 2020-03-25

Day 3 of the American Songbag Stay-at-Home Series  (folksongindex.com)

When I was a child and my parents were traveling through the south, I vividly remembers being stopped at State Lines to be asked if we were carrying and cotton plants, or if we had been in any cotton fields of late. That was all due to a pesky little bug, the Boll Weevil.

Boll weevils can completely destroy a cotton crop. Boll weevils eat all the buds off the plants; they destroy any cotton that the plants manage to produce by eating and laying eggs in the cotton.

Boll Weevil. ... The boll weevil's decimation of the cotton industry in the South had implications for the entire region. The pest was a driving force behind the "great migration" of poor tenant farmers into northern cities, and the state's dependence on cash-crop production left its soil depleted and prone to erosion.

Sandburg reports collections of Boll Weevil verses dating back to 1897, but the origins of the song are obscure, or at least messy. 

Bon Fleming, a local businessman, came up with the idea to build a statue, as a tribute to how something disastrous can be a catalyst for change. The monument was dedicated on December 11, 1919 and still stands at the intersection of College and Main Street, the heart of the town's business district.

Perhaps we will look back from the future and see  "corona virus" as "something disastrous that became a catalyst for change."