Ain't No More Cane

"Ain't No More Cane on This Brazos" is a traditional prison work song of the Southern United States. The title refers to work assigned to prisoners sentenced to hard labor in Texas – to cut sugar cane along the banks of the Brazos River, where many of the state's prison farms were located in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

It has been recorded by Alan Lomax on his 1958 recording Texas Folk Songs Sung by Alan Lomax as "Ain't No More Cane on This Brazis", Odetta, Lonnie Donegan, the Limeliters on their album 14 14K Folksongs (1963), Son Volt on the album A Retrospective: 1995-2000, and The Band on the album The Basement Tapes. Bob Dylan also performed the song live in the early 1960s and his version is on multiple bootleg recordings taken from The Gaslight Cafe. An extensive set of lyrics to the song, as sung by inmates of Central State Farm near Houston, Texas, appears in folklorist John Lomax's book American Ballads and Folk Songs, originally published in 1934. Lomax collected another version of the song in a recording of a performance by Ernest Williams and James (Iron Head) Baker; the recording appears on the Document Records album Field Recordings, Vol. 6: Texas (1933-1958).

The song is sometimes attributed to Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly), but a recording of him singing the song is obscure or non-existent. A song titled "Ain't No More Cane on this Brazos" does not appear in the extensive discography of Leadbelly recordings contained in Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell's book The Life and Legend of Leadbelly. Alan Lomax suggests, in the notes for his recording, another source from the Texas prison community. Possibly the song became associated with Leadbelly through his various recordings of another Texas prison song titled "Go Down, Ol' Hannah" which shares some verses with "Ain't No More Cane on this Brazos".

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