Cash sang about cotton farming all his life, often describing it to his urban audiences. During his live concert album recorded at Madison Square Garden in 1969, Cash explains to the city slickers how “fair to middling” is a grade of cotton. A cotton crop is graded on the strength, length, color, smoothness, and uniformity of the fibers. “Fair to middling” is an average grade. Cotton farming is the source of the Southern idiom that when you’re doing fine, you’re doing “fair to middlin’.”
