Songfacts®:

• In this song, "Cotton Eye Joe" is a hot potato who rides from town to town charming and manipulating all the woman, ruining them for the other guys. "If it hadn't been for Cotton Eye Joe, I'd been married a long time ago," one of these poor dudes laments in the first line. >>

  Suggestion credit:
  Tyler - Phoenix, AZ
• This song originated in America in the 1800s, and is commonly associated with the American South. It became a popular song in country bars, as it was perfect for line dancing. It's a traditional folk song, and many country artists recorded it.
• The 1980 John Travolta movie Urban Cowboy renewed interest in this song. In the movie, it's performed by a band created for the film called the Bayou City Beats, who play it while the crowd at Gilley's nightclub (where most of the action takes place) line dances to it.
• Rednex is a group of Swedish producers who recorded "Cotton Eye Joe" as a techno dance song. After putting the song together, they came up with the country bumpkin motif and named the group Rednex, a play on the word "redneck," a term for an uncultured southerner in America. They found five Swedish performers to portray the band, dressing them in tattered clothes and giving them a stereotypical hillbilly look, with unkempt hair and dirty faces. In a cagy marketing move, they refused interviews and released a bio to the press explaining that the group was rescued from an uncivilized village called Brunkeflo in the backwoods of Idaho and brought to Sweden, where they could express their musical gifts. Their names were Bobby Sue, Billy Ray, Mary Joe, BB Stiff and Ken Tacky - all inbred.
  
  The ploy worked. Throughout Europe, Rednex garnered lots of press with their outlandish story and look. It wasn't until February 1995 - about six months after the song was released - that a Swedish newspaper broke the story that Rednex was a local creation with a story crafted to hoodwink the press.
• The Rednex version is based on the 1992 recording by the Irish group The Chieftains, who teamed with various country singers for their album Another Country. Their "Cotton Eye Joe" features Ricky Skaggs, who starts the song by singing the chorus a cappella, which is followed by a clean section of fiddle. At a studio in Stockholm, the producers Janne Ericsson and Örjan Öberg sampled these parts and added a beat, creating a very danceable demo that they played at a New Year's Eve party, where the crowd started square dancing to it. With another Swedish producer, Pat Reiniz, they re-worked the song without the samples to avoid legal issues.
  
  They named the project "Rednex," developed the American hillbilly visual theme, and shopped it to record labels. The French label Scorpio passed, but their A&R man made a suggestion: add banjo and female vocals. They did, and landed a deal with the Dutch label Zomba in 1994.
  
  The song was released in Europe and took off, going to #1 in Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands, the UK, and a few other territories late in the year. In America, it got a far less enthusiastic response, peaking at #25 in May 1995. But while American radio stations shunned the song, music directors at baseball stadiums embraced it, and the song spread through sports. America is where the song dug in its boots and held the line, remaining a sporting event staple. If you see a mascot dancing on top of a dugout between innings, there's a good chance "Cotton Eye Joe" is playing.
• After the song started taking off in Europe, Rednex started work on their debut album, Sex & Violins, using a passel of Swedish producers, including a young Max Martin, who co-produced the song "Wish You Were Here" (Martin became one the top songwriter/producers of his generation, responsible for some of the biggest hits by Britney Spears, Taylor Swift, Backstreet Boys, Katy Perry and many others). They doubled down on the hillbilly theme, with songs like "Fat Sally Lee" and "The Sad But True Story of Ray Mingus, the Lumberjack of Bulk Rock City." The follow-up single, "Old Pop In An Oak," was also a big hit in Europe, as was the next one, Martin's "Wish You Were Here."
  
  After replacing their entire lineup in 2001 (this time with mostly non-Swedish performers), they soldiered on, releasing more material in the hillbilly parody vein and playing up that image with their costumes. They also pulled a few stunts, like trying to sell the band on eBay. By 2012, Rednex was a "performer pool" with interchangeable members. Group members are assigned names like Abby Hick, Pervis the Palergator, and Boneduster Crock.
• Rednex have no cruel intentions in their portrayal of American podunk culture. In a Songfacts interview with Pat Reiniz, he said: "When we released 'Cotton Eye Joe,' we knew very little about the American hillbilly/redneck culture, other than the stereotypes. For us, the redneck image was very compatible with the feeling of the music - raw, energetic, simple, party, etc. It is only afterwards that we have learned more about this culture, however. Learning about it has not really affected the Rednex image, which will remain as a 50/50 tribute/parody of that lifestyle."
• The music video was modeled on Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit," but instead of a pep rally from hell, it's a grungy hoedown. It was shot at an old power plant in Sweden.
• Traditional versions of this song are a showcase for banjo and/or fiddle, with the vocals almost exclusively the chorus, which is some variation of:
  
  If it hadn't been for Cotton Eye Joe
  I'd been married long time ago
  Where did you come from, where did you go?
  Where did you come from, Cotton Eye Joe?
  
  Singers would often ad-lib some lines like, "String up the fiddle, rosin up the bow,
  play a little tune called 'Cotton Eye Joe,'" but Rednex wrote two original verses fleshing out the story. We learn that Cotton Eye Joe rode into town in a midwinter storm and left with all the ladies in town.
• The Texas group Asleep At The Wheel have been performing this since their inception in the early '70s and recorded it for their 1985 self-titled album. "We played this song every night in the dancehalls," lead singer Ray Benson told Songfacts. "Here in Texas everybody knows that dance, and it's not a line dance, it's a partner dance. So that's why we played it. It's who we were and it's who we are when we play at a dancehall. When I heard the Rednex electronic version, I was like, 'What the hell is that?'"
• In 2002, Rednex released a remix of "Cotton Eye Joe" along with a new video directed by Patric Ullaeus, whose specialty is metal bands. This updated video looks like something between a hoedown and a cage fight.
• "Cotton Eye Joe" is a plot point in the 2013 episode of New Girl, "Elaine's Big Day," where the socially disruptive main characters try to subvert a wedding by playing the song at the ceremony. The plan works but they get busted because one of the guys is known for loving the song; he quotes some of it later in the episode when he reconciles with his girlfriend, telling her, "Where do we come from, where do we go?" It sounds profound until she realizes he's just quoting the song.
  
  It also appears in episodes of How to Get Away with Murder ("Is Someone Really Dead?" - 2016), Family Guy ("Our Idiot Brian" - 2015) and Malcolm in the Middle ("Dinner Out" - 2000)
• The female vocals are by Annika Ljungberg, who performed with Rednex as Mary Joe. The male vocal is by Göran Danielsson, who stayed behind the scenes; his part for performances and in the video was lip-synced by Anders Arstrand, who went by Ken Tacky.
• Rednex didn't perform in America until 2017. By then, "Cotton Eye Joe" was most popular in that country thanks to airplay at events. It took a while before the group understood what kind of impact the song has in the States. "We had some notions about it because of social media and people telling us, but it was not until after our visit that we understood better what impact it has on so many levels (sport events, weddings, school phys ed, line dance, etc)," Pat Reiniz told Songfacts. "To learn about this has been awesome and somewhat shocking and makes us so proud."