Songfacts®:

• One of Gordon Lightfoot's more pastoral songs, "Cotton Jenny" tells the story of a man from an earlier time who works at a cotton mill. He's broke, but happy, all because he gets to go home to Cotton Jenny every night. In his Complete Greatest Hits collection, Lightfoot explained that the song is about "loving work, going to the mill, get home to the family, have supper, and, if it happens, get lucky. If not, fine - wait till next week."
• The turning wheels in the lyric have a double meaning. They refer to the rollers on the cotton gin the guy in the song uses at work, and also to his eternal love for Jenny, and the wheels of love are always turning.
• The song is part of Lightfoot's sixth album, Summer Side Of Life. By this time he had broken through with his hit single "If You Could Read My Mind," released a year earlier. His next big hit came in 1974 with "Sundown."
• Lightfoot didn't release the song as a single, but fellow Canadian Anne Murray did when she covered it in 1972. Her version went to #11 on the Country chart in America and #71 on the Hot 100.
  
  Before he established himself as a songwriter, Lightfoot's songs "For Lovin' Me" and "Early Morning Rain" were covered by Peter, Paul and Mary, establishing him as a songwriter. Other artists to record his songs include Marty Robbins ("Ribbon Of Darkness"), Ronnie Hawkins ("Bitter Green") and Glen Campbell ("The Last Time I Saw Her").