"Cotton-Eyed Joe" is a popular American country song known at various times throughout the United States and Canada, although today it is most commonly associated with the American South. The origins of this song are unclear, although it pre-dates the 1861–1865 American Civil War. American folklorist, Dorothy Scarborough (1878–1935). noted in her 1925 book On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs, that several people remember hearing the song before the war and her sister, Mrs. George Scarborough, learned the song from a man who had known the song during his earliest childhood from slaves singing it on plantations in Louisiana. Both the dance and the song had as many variants as the old old folk song that it is. American publishing house, Harper and Brothers, published a version in 1882, heard by