November 16, 2020 Thank you, Barbara Schock, for sharing your extraordinary gift of these vignettes of Galesburg & 19th century American history.
By Barbara Schock
This is the introductory paragraph written by Carl Sandburg
in THE AMERICAN SONGBAG about the boll weevil song. A boll weevil couple, arriving in a cotton field in the springtime, will have, by the end of the summer, more than twelve million descendants to carry on the family tradition. So it is estimated. They are a species of creatures among whom there is no talk at all about ‘the first families.’ The billion dollar devastation of this little eater of cotton crops are America’s traditions of tragedy. J. Russell Smith, the geographer, says the economic loss caused by the boll weevil equals in amount that of the four year war in the ‘sixties. (That is the Civil War.) John Lomax first sang this for the present writer, and of four different airs and sets of words the Lomax version is the most important, the other boll weevil songs are worth printing, however, for artistic and scientific purposes. I have known this song for eight years, since the year John Lomax and his family lived in Indian Hill, Illinois, and it never loses its strange overtones, with its smiling commentary on the bug that baffles the wit of man, with its whimsical point that while the boll weevil can make a home anywhere the negro, son of man, hath not where to lay his head, and with its intimations, perhaps, that in our mortal life neither the individual human creature, nor the big human family shall ever find a lasting home on the earth. Elements, weather, crop gambling, fate, Lady Luck, flit in the backgrounds. It is a paradoxical blend of moody, quickstep and dirge, hilarious defiance and bowed resignation. The boll weevil is a beetle which feeds on cotton heads and
flowers. It crossed the Rio Grande River from Mexico in the late nineteenth
century. The pest overwinters in well drained areas around cotton fields. It
comes out in late spring and feeds on the immature plants. Eggs are laid inside
the cotton bolls. Each female can lay two hundred eggs in a ten to twelve day
period. By the 1920s the boll weevil was devastating cotton
production of the South. Thousands of sharecroppers fled the cotton fields
seeking employment and a better life in northern cities, such as Chicago and
Detroit. It is now known as “The Great Migration.” The creation of insecticides after World War II led to the
eradication of the insect. The insecticides were later found to cause cancer and
their use was banned. “The Boll Weevil Song” was a traditional blues song and
became popular around the turn of the twentieth century. Carl Sandburg recorded
the song for Victor Records in 1926. John Lomax made a recording of Lead Belly’s
(Huddie Leadbetter) version of the song which became popular in 1934. John Lomax and his son, Alan, made field recordings of some
10,000 American songs which are now in the Archive of American Folk Song in the
Smithsonian Institution. Carl Sandburg sings “The Boll Weevil Song” (YouTube)
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