Artist: Ernest Williams
Author: traditional
Label: Library Of Congress
Year: 1933
With a group of convicts in the State Prison Farm of Sugarland, Texas. Old call & response worksong, in this case a cane cutting song, recorded by father & son Lomax on a real sugarcane field intra muros. Came out on lp Afro-American Spirituals, Worksongs And Ballads and was reissued in the Lomax series Deep River Of Song: Big Brazos. The soil of the Brazos river bottomlands is as rich as in the Mississippi Delta.
Covers:
Alan Lomax [with Guy Carawan]
Bob Dylan & The Band [on the Basement Tapes]
Band [at Woodstock]
Walkers [as There's No More Corn On The Brazos; Top 5 NL, Top 10 B crediting Jean Innemee]
Chris Smither [in medley with Mail Order Mystic]
John Hiatt [on The Band tribute]
Comes harvest time, chain gangers in the South are frequently borrowed to nearby farmers. It's cheap labour and always at hand. Ernest Williams witnessed the days these forced laborers were toiled til they dropped. "There was a dead man at every corner". Singing sure helped delay the point of exhaustion, however: fact is, once a slave was send to cut sugarcane in Texas or south Louisiana, he had only 2 to 3 more years to live.
If you noticed blunt omissions, mis-interpretations or even out-and-out errors,
please let me know:
Arnold Rypens
Rozenlaan 65
B-2840 Reet (Rumst)