Cotton pleased to receive Blues Trail honor
By Randy Bell
Eddie Cotton Jr. believes timing is everything. And he’s happy that he and two other Clinton natives have been honored with a Mississippi Blues Trail marker while they were still around to enjoy it.
“What makes this unique is that I’m still living,” Cotton laughed before a dedication ceremony for the marker in Clinton in October of 2022. “It’s so good to be alive and to see it. It’s sort of like being alive at your own funeral. And that’s very important. Because we have so many bluesmen with a marker, but they’ve gone on. This is most certainly an honor to be given in the City of Clinton. Something I didn’t see coming.”
Cotton grew up in Clinton playing his guitar in church and later drew on the influences of other blues musicians in developing his own style.
“I thank God that I was born and raised in a COGIC (Church of God in Christ) church in which they have never discriminated against music,” Cotton told the crowd under a tent at West Northside Drive and Clinton-Tinnin Road. “I don’t care if you play the washboard or a pair of spoons, if you wanted to praise God, come on in.”
He remembers sitting on a front row bench in church as a youngster watching preachers walk down the aisle carrying a long case.
“Wasn’t no rifle in it. Wasn’t no shotgun in it. But they’ll sit down and they’ll open that case, and I’m a little boy looking—and they’ll reach down and pull that six-string out of there. A lot of ‘em would say, ‘Now y’all, I can’t preach, but I got some drawing power.’ I have seen and I have felt music played to the level of where you don’t have to ask nobody to move. That stuff is real.”
He admits it was a “different upbringing.” Cotton said, “When you were in the seventh grade, you know you’re not going to the twelfth-grade prom. You already know it.
Because Friday night, you got to play. That’s church night. And growing up under those rules was kind of hard on me at times. But you know what? I wouldn’t take nothing for it, because it trained a lot of foolishness out of me. And it was getting me ready for what I had to embark upon.”
That included a full scholarship to Jackson State University to study music theory.
“When I got to Jackson State, it was like a whole other world,” Cotton said. “I didn’t know music theory, didn’t know how to read music. But it wasn’t nothing they played that I couldn’t hear. I found out that what they were doing was what I had been doing all the time.”
Cotton discovered that “a C chord is a C chord, but what you use the C chord for is on you. You want to sing about God and use your C chord, you use it. If I want to sing about my baby and use my C chord, it’s still the same C chord.”
And while the younger generation may not have the same appreciation for the blues as Cotton and his contemporaries, he said it’s simply a matter of exposure. “The [music] industry doesn’t really push it. The blues is not really mainstream.” But he said when young people hear it, “they fall in love with it.”
And years from now, Cotton believes the genre will still be going strong.
“The blues will never die. There will always be somebody to play the blues.”
Eddie Cotton Jr
EDITOR’S NOTE: This is the first in a three-part series featuring Clinton’s Blues Trail honorees, which include Cotton, Jarekus Singleton and Sterling Plumpp.
