By Coleman Scott

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“Picking Cotton,” the memoir of Jennifer Thompson, focuses on her intertwining story with Ronald Cotton, who was wrongly convicted of rape and imprisoned for about 11 years.

While the book tells the long journeys of both Thompson and Cotton, some students may have noticed Cotton’s passion for music and singing.

“I continued to sing with the choir, my voice rising up out of the hundred-year-old walls of Central Prison. Maybe it even reached God, because it seemed like my luck was changing,” wrote Cotton on page 119 of Picking Cotton.

Cotton mentioned his passion for singing throughout the book. Singing was a passtime that kept him sane while he was in prison.

“I immediately joined the band (choir) once I settled in prison,” Cotton said. “I knew I wasn’t going anywhere, and music is something I like to do. Music kept me strong. It kept me going on.”

During his time in Central Prison in North Carolina, Cotton began to sing on a regular basis with a small inmate choir.

“(Singing) put us on a friendship of a certain level, because we knew eventually we were going to separate,” Cotton said.

Perhaps one of the biggest musical events during Cotton’s trials and imprisonment occurred in court. After he was tried and wrongfully convicted for a second time after another woman accusing Cotton of rape came forward, he sang a self-written song.

Some of the lyrics of the song are: “Decisions I can no longer make, because my future is so unknown to me, and that I could no longer take, cause during the day I wander, at night I hurt with fear, call out your name so much ’til suddenly tears appear … until God came in my life.”

Cotton originally titled the song, “Until You Come Back,” but later changed it to, “Until God Came Into My Life.”

“I wrote that song because I was incarcerated in a county jail, and I was missing my girlfriend. It had been so long away from her. It started as a poem that I reconverted to other words and made into a gospel song,” Cotton said. “(My girlfriend) eventually got to hear me sing that song to her. She loved it.”

Cotton said he used the song in court as a way to express his inner self during a time when he was at a loss of words. When words failed for Cotton, music spoke.

“It keeps you young and it keeps you strong. Music can make you happy when you’re sad,” Cotton said. “It touches your heart about special people in your life. It’ll keep you going on.”

Cotton said, every one can all relate to music.

“A lot of people say they don’t sing, but I’m quite sure everyone sings somewhere in their life,” Cotton said. “Especially when they’re by themselves. They say that they’re not the best, but I say that everyone just has their own style.”