Ride this train to Dyess Arkansas see this cottonland    Some of us are so poor now you'd have to sell 'em a sack of fertilizer    To raise an umbrella    They grade the cotton according to the length and strength of the fibre    And they been raisin' a lot of fair to middlin' grade here which ain't good    But there was a time    Yeah there was a time when the cotton grew tall    Not far from here I had the finest plantation you ever saw    About 600 acres of the finest cottonland in the country    Now I believe this was about 1855 and I had a bumper crop that year    I had the best bunch of slaves you ever saw and I treated 'em right    Well a lot of em even stayed with me after the war    But gettin' back to what I was gonna tell you    See I have a rule that all the slaves got to be back in out of the fields    And accounted for by sundown every day    And one day when they came in there was one short    Well I found out right away that it was old uncle Moses that was missin'    And figured that somethin' might have happened to him old as he was    So I went out into the cottonfield to look for him    Well uncle Moses was way down at the end of the road sittin' on his cottonsack    Well I walked up and said Uncle Moses don't you know the rule    That you're supposed to be punished if you're not back in and accounted for by dark    And he said Boss Jack I know that sir    But I was pickin' along on my road    And all of a sudden somethin' seemed to come over me    And the finest words started comin' through my head and the finest music    So I rememorized them words and that music till I had it all in my head    Now that I got the song all through I guess Boss Jack    I was ready to take my punishment    Well I didn't hardly know what to say    But I asked Uncle Moses to sing that song for me    And he stood up there and for the first time he sang Swing Low Sweet Chariot    Well after that I kinda laid old Uncle Moses off and let him peddle around the house    And every night at dark you could hear him sing    And he sang another song once in a while that made me feel awful proud