1972 · Behind the Songs
“Gordon Lightfoot wrote it; Anne Murray carried it to the charts.”
Before “Cotton Jenny” belonged to Anne Murray, it belonged to Gordon Lightfoot, who wrote and recorded it for his 1971 album Summer Side of Life. Murray — always quick to champion her fellow Canadians — made it the first single from her album Talk It Over in the Morning, released in January 1972 on Capitol with Brian Ahern producing and “Destiny” on the B-side.
It was a Canadian triumph: number 1 on all three RPM charts — country, pop, and adult contemporary — while in the United States it reached number 11 on the country chart, number 71 on the Hot 100, and number 32 on Easy Listening. A Canadian song, sung by a Canadian, traveling south on Murray’s clear contralto.
There is a small editorial footnote worth hearing. Murray’s version drops a verse from Lightfoot’s original lyric — the one opening “In the hot, sickly south…” — and in later years Lightfoot himself began omitting the same verse when he sang the song in concert. Whether by instinct or by example, the cover and the original quietly converged.
The song stayed with her: in 2007 she re-recorded “Cotton Jenny” as a duet with Olivia Newton-John for Anne Murray Duets: Friends & Legends. It remains a reminder of what Murray did best in the early seventies — finding a good Canadian song and giving it the widest possible road.