"Cotton Fields (The Cotton Song)"

I was thinking about "Cotton Fields (The Cotton Song)" again yester-day and had an-other small realization about it:  coinciding with the phrase "rock me in the cradle" in the introduction, the bass register of the piano starts alternating between two notes (I think they're A flats an octave apart).  This figure gives a musical impression of that "rock[ing]."

"Cotton Fields (The Cotton Song)"

Recently, the Reelin' in the Years Archive posted a video from 1969 in which the Beach Boys mime to "Cotton Fields (The Cotton Song)":

I realized that while most couplets are linkt by perfect rhymes ("rotten" with "cotton" and "warm ya" with "California") or assonance ("in a fix" and "lickety split"), this isn't the case for the lines "Came along a nice old man with- he had a hat on / 'A-wait a minute, mister; can you give me some direction.'"*  There's no strong relationship between "hat on" and "direction."  To some degree, this break from the established structure matches how the narrator has left familiar roads.

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*I'm not entirely confident in my transcription.  I referenced some lyrics websites (which I'm always skeptical of), and they all have "a nice old man, well, he had a hat on," but I think what I have is more accurate.  In any case, the ends of the lines are the salient point here.

"Cotton Fields (The Cotton Song)"

In "Cotton Fields (The Cotton Song)," "way" in the line "I had to walk a long, long way to town" is sung with a melisma (Eb C), musically giving a sense of that "long, long" distance.