“Boll Weevil” is a traditional song about the beetle that ravaged American cotton crops in the early twentieth century. Versions of it circulated in the blues from the 1900s on, and the form most often heard today owes much to Lead Belly, who recorded it for folklorists in the 1930s.
The song follows the boll weevil as a kind of trickster: hunted, scorned, and burned out, the bug survives every attempt to destroy it, always looking for a home. The lyric carries a wry, half-admiring tone toward a small creature that ruined a whole industry.
The song passed widely through blues, folk, and string-band music.
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