“Boll Weevil”
The Boll Weevil Monument in Enterprise, Alabama – erected 1919, photograph (crop) ca. 1930s, USDA – public domain
.jpg){kind=link}
Introduction – “Boll Weevil told the farmer …”
Today’s feature, “Boll Weevil,” fits into our ‘disaster songs’ category. Even so, it’s a bit of an outlier – as the photograph at the head of this post might suggest. (Don’t worry, I’ll get there more or less directly.) Anyway, the lyrics make clear that this isn’t simply another song about a mighty storm.
I can’t see no water but I’m about to drown
I can’t see no fire but I’m burning down
Oh, sure, Mother Nature brings the hurt, as we’ve seen in other examples of the genre. This time, though, she’s personified in the culprit pest that’s the subject of this blues. That little bug has some big talking to do, in between meals.
Because the emotions it evokes are so powerful, Eric Bibb’s recording of “Boll Weevil” garnered brief mention from me in an earlier post. I won’t go on and on about it today, but the performance and the song group deserve just a bit more attention. Why? The first time I heard this recording it made me shake my head and cry “Good God!” I’m not exaggerating. I still feel that way. Listen for yourself…
Lyrics for Eric Bibb – “Boll Weevil”
Bibb’s is one variant in a large and fascinating song group. I’ve known other versions for years, but this one levels me. You don’t have to be a farmer to feel the desperation. I stumbled into this track one evening online after a round of driving back and forth between my home, my father’s room at the hospital, and my mother’s at the nursing home. Both had severe cases of the flu, and as a helpless son I had to suffer my own fears in silence. Well, that’s not exactly right. After I discovered this recording, I played it LOUD on those drives, repeatedly. It made a difference – especially the lyrics about water and fire. Oh, and sure enough I was that spider, running up and down the wall.
That emotional release is what matters most to singer and listener, of course. No one wrote this song to record a bit of history. They simply needed to cry in music. But there’s a bit more to tell about the song group and its provenance that’s fascinating. Bibb’s recording derives from another of real power, for example. So, let’s get down to it all before this harvest turns empty.
“Don’t need no Ford machine…”
Eric Bibb worked with a number of musicians to produce his Louisiana-baked 2012 album Deeper in the Well. He credits the arrangement of the traditional “Boll Weevil” to his main collaborator on the project, the Grammy-winning fiddle and banjo player Dirk Powell. Nothing much more is said about their source in the liner notes, but a quick listen makes clear that the likely inspiration is a tape recording by the inimitable Tommy Jarrell. County Records remastered that tape, among others, and released it on the 2004 compilation Down to the Cider Mill. The liner notes to that CD claim the tapes originated in the 1960s or ’70s.
Bibb gets compression by combining steely string picking with a drawling harmonica and a smooth, controlled growl. Jarrell on the other hand fuses his signature low-bridge sliding fiddle ornamentation with his high Smoky Mountain singing to get his horsepower. Both are equally powerful, in quite different ways. Still, it seems clear that Jarrell’s recording was Powell’s and Bibb’s source, directly or otherwise. I don’t want to spend a bunch of virtual ink tracing it back further. I haven’t yet found an older recording of this version. However, there’s no doubt in my mind that Jarrell was re-imagining rural black folk music he’d heard in his younger days.
Weevil larva feeding – photo by James Smith, Mississippi State University, Bugwood.org
The “Boll Weevil” song group almost certainly originated in black America, but we have no definitive first source. Most of the earliest recordings come from black musicians, though not exclusively. The song is just slightly older than recorded music anyway, so that doesn’t give us precision. John Lomax collected it in Texas from black folks in the very early 20th century. But let’s not miss the point. Both poor white and black cotton farmers used song to deal with their feelings concerning the pernicious pest. It ruined them both. Their different little streams of similarly-themed and folk-processed lyrics mixed in a larger river, as it so often did America. The variety we see in the song group proves a fairly consistent cross-cultural exchange. Whoever improvised the first verse, the boll weevil was easy to sing about, as Dorothy Scarborough mused in 1925 in On the Trail of the Negro Folk-Songs.
The boll weevil is a promising subject for balladry, since he furnishes many romantic motifs. He is an outlaw, hunted in every field… [with] superhuman powers of resistance to hardship, exposure, and attacks from man, the individual, and from organized society. He has an extraordinary cunning and trickery, can outwit and flout man, and go his way despite all human efforts to stop him.
Here’s what we know for sure. The boll weevil came from Mexico and first appeared in Texas in the early 1890s. By the early 1920s, most of the deep South was infested. The pest devastated cotton production throughout the region, and it kept spreading. It hit poor farmers the hardest. In combination with the Dust Bowl and the Depression, the boll weevil helped displace huge numbers of Americans throughout the 1920s and ’30s. The people that fled their ruined fields and homes carried their music with them, of course. Given the technology that appears in the Bibb/Jarrell version, it seems to be from this inter-war period. The song has deeper roots though.
Mule-driven cart being used in 1919 in Scott, Mississippi, to dust for boll weevils – photo by B.R. Coad – bugwood.org
According to Robert Waltz and David Engle in their related entry for The Traditional Ballad Index, by 1916 “Boll Weevil” appeared in print. They also note that Carl Sandburg collected verses as early as 1897, though it’s not clear if they are part of the same song group. He loved everything about it, and even sometimes signed his letters as ‘Boll Weevil.’ Malcolm Laws cataloged the song group as “I17” in his Native American Balladry. It is also known today by its catalog number in the Roud Folksong Index, #3124, where it has over 100 citations.
There’s a lot out there for this one, folks! Just check out my Spotify playlist below. I’m not inclined to do much more cataloging myself today. There’s quite a bit of variety, but really not much mystery here. The bug was a disaster that ruined lives across a wide swath of the States. It’s safe to say that all sorts of people cried, cussed, and sang about the Boll Weevil. It seems clear as well that all that started not long after the weevil crossed the Rio Grande.