My family and I take trips to the Blue Ridge mountains quite often, and when we do I always love to see the cotton fields we pass on the way. Especially, when they're at their peak. The region where I live was once a thriving textile area, with mills providing jobs for a majority of those who settled here. Today, most of those mills are gone, unable to compete with cheap labor in Asia. But our history with cotton will not disappear as quickly as the textile mills have, and the United States is still the world's leading exporter of cotton.
For this playlist I've selected 10 songs that pay homage cotton, so the next time you pull on a pair of jeans put this playlist on and think about where they came from.
Most likely, your jeans started as a cotton crop in America where is was harvested, packed and shipped to China, then turned into the jeans and shipped back where you picked them up at your local department store.
Ode To Cotton
1. Cotton Fields - Creedence Clearwater Revival
2. Cottonseed - The Drive-By Truckers
3. Cotton Eyed Joe (Live Version - Sept. 1959) - Nina Simone
4. Cotton Fields - The Pogues
5. Cotton - The Mountain Goats
6. Song of the Cotton Field (Recorded, February 3, 1927) - Duke Ellington and His Orchestra
7. California Cotton Fields (1973 Live Version) - Gram Parsons & the Fallen Angels
8. Low Cotton - Django Reinhardt
9. High Cotton - Alabama
10. Cotton Pickin' Blues - Gene Strasser
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