THE PRICE OF COTTON

THE PRICE OF COTTON

Times are good on the old plantation

Selling our cotton to the other nations

Cotton crop is booming, enslaved blacks are hitched

Plantation owners getting rich, rich, rich

Sitting on the porch of the mansion place

Keeping free labor enslaved in place

Free profits to the sky, all ill gotten

Making a pretty penny on the price of cotton

Took black families and broke them up

Cause mounds of cotton money, can’t get enough

The way we are treated, sure is rotten

Misery beyond words is the price of cotton

Sunrise to sundown I work for free

Great Lord almighty, have mercy on me

Picking this cotton till my hands and fingers bleed

To fulfill a whiteman’s ungodly, inhuman greed

Money and power keeps some people free

Money and power maintains slavery

Drunken fights by poor whites another pitiful fact

Who are worked as slaves in the cotton patch

Yes, the plantation owner’s happiness is in the air

Mixed with the stench of overwhelming despair

Never ever, ever, ever, let it be forgotten

The great, great difference in the price of cotton