Poet · Songwriter · Screenwriter
Danny Wayne Cotton
Everything he wrote, in one place — 16 poems, three short stories and three screenplays, now readable in full.
About Danny
Danny Wayne Cotton was a writer. He wrote poetry, songs, short stories and screen plays. This site was created to allow others to enjoy his writings. Although he passed away in 2013, he left many works and we plan, from time to time, to add more of them to this site.
He wrote from Kentucky and about Kentucky. The mountains and the coal towns run through the work — Hazard, the Mountain Parkway, water running red down a mountainside — alongside Lexington bar rooms, pool halls, county courthouses and the long two-lane roads between them. His screenplays are set in a fictional Prichard County; his poems move between a jailhouse bunk, a Rue Bourbon dance floor and a kitchen where somebody is making macaroni exactly the way their grandmother made it.
The voice is plain-spoken, funny and unsentimental, and it does not clean itself up for company. He wrote in free verse and in Courier, in notes posted at two in the morning and in hundred-page screenplays typed and mailed off. Waylon Jennings turns up. So do Henry VIII, Mary Magdalene, the Melungeon people of Appalachia and a minor-league ballclub in Texas.
Danny Wayne Cotton died in 2013. His family maintains this archive so his writing stays readable and stays his. Every word here appears as he wrote it, spelling and all.
The Work
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Poetry
Poetry written by Danny Wayne Cotton.
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Songs
Songs written by Danny Wayne Cotton.
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Screen Play
Screen Play written by Danny Wayne Cotton.
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Short Stories
Short Stories written by Danny Wayne Cotton.
We got a hundred and twenty years of coal.
Six more generations callin’ Hazard home,
water runnin’ red down the mountain side.
In the archive
16 poems, three short stories and three screenplays — roughly 86,000 words, transcribed from the original manuscripts and free to read. The scanned originals are linked on every page.