King Cotton

The sun is as yellow as a daffodil floating in a sea of blue. From high above, it reaches down to warm a vast expanse of smoky-black earth that smells like river. The cotton is flourishing — clear-to-the-horizon fields of it are broken by groves of pecan trees, whispering to each other in a rustle of leaves. And though you can't see Old Man hidden behind the levee, you can feel his presence--the twisting, turning, mighty, muddy presence of the Mississippi River. -Valerie Fraser Luesse, Delta Journal

I wish they'd had electric guitars in cotton fields back in the good old days. A whole lot of things would've been straightened out. ~jimi hendrix

Cotton is a major crop in Mississippi. It ranks third behind poultry and forestry in state commodities with $598 million dollars of revenue produced each year.
Mississippi producers plant approximately 1.1 million acres of cotton annually. This number seems to fluctuates depending on weather, price of production and current commodity markets.

I was influenced a lot by those around me - there was a lot of singing that went on in the cotton fields. ~willie nelson

Cotton remained a key crop in the Southern economy after emancipation and the end of the Civil War in 1865. Across the South, sharecropping evolved, in which free black farmers and landless white farmers worked on white-owned cotton plantations of the wealthy in return for a share of the profits. Cotton plantations required vast labor forces to hand-pick cotton, and it was not until the 1950s that reliable harvesting machinery was introduced into the South (prior to this, cotton-harvesting machinery had been too clumsy to pick cotton without shredding the fibers).

When I was a little bitty baby
My mama would rock me in the cradle,
In them old cotton fields back home;
Oh, when them cotton bolls get rotten
You can’t pick very much cotton,
In them old cotton fields back home.
~LeadBelly

I was a typical farm boy. I liked the farm. I enjoyed the things that you do on a farm, go down to the drainage ditch and fish, and look at the crawfish and pick a little cotton. ~sam donaldson

From the time of its gaining statehood in 1817 to 1860, Mississippi became the most dynamic and largest cotton-producing state in America.

After all those days in the cotton fields, the dreams came true on a gold record on a piece of wood. It's in my den where I can look at it every day. I wear it out lookin' at it. ~carl perkins