The story is told in first-person narrative from the perspective of an Oklahoma native, the youngest of three children from a destitute sharecropping family.
In the song's chorus, the protagonist recalls how his mother, brother and sister all picked cotton while his dad, a coal miner, suffered an untimely death.
He eventually made good on his promise in the second verse, stealing ten dollars and a pick-up truck and absconding from his homestead, never to return.
From then on the man lived a hedonistic lifestyle replete with "fast cars and whiskey, long-legged girls and fun", which he financed through armed robbery ("I had everything that money could bring, and I took it all with a gun").
Arrested and convicted for the crime, the man is sentenced to death by hanging, and the night before his execution, he reflects on his decadent life and notes that, "In the time I've got, there ain't a hell of a lot that I can look back on with pride", except that he kept his promise to himself to "never pick cotton".