Artist: Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee
Author: traditional
Label: Pye
Year: 1958

Chain gang song, first released in '59 on lp Folk Songs Of Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee, along with a version of Change The Lock On The Door, also covered by Taj & Ry. An earlier Sonny & Brownie version was cut in London in '58 and released on a Pye EP in '60, but it's way more interesting to realise where this song is about: Sonny learned it from a Mississippi chain ganger force-labored on the levee works aroud Vicksburg in the early 1920s. How their monotone diet, repeated dayly over and over again, caused massive pellagra, a vitamine discrepancy disease. Similar chronical skin irritation had only been diagnosed in japanese prison camps and soviet goelags and soon as federal investigation was deployed to test the case, it was boycotted.