Ain't No More Cane

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"Ain't No More Cane" is a traditional prison work song of the American south.

It has been recorded by Leadbelly, Son Volt, and by 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. In 2006, the Austin, Texas-based Band of Heathens [1] included their distinctive arrangement of the old song on their "Live at Momo's" album. The Band of Heathens, composed of singer-songwriters Colin Brooks, Gordy Quist, and Ed Jurdi, along with bassist Seth Whitney and drummer John Chipman, emerged the next year as Best New Band at Austin's South-by-Southwest music festival. In 2007 Lyle Lovett released two versions of the tune on his album It's Not Big, It's Large. On February 16, 2008, Lovett and John Hiatt performed the song live at the Ulster Performing Arts Center in Kingston, New York, along with The Band's Garth Hudson.

The refrain of the song is:

Ain't no more cane on the Brazos

It's all been ground down to molasses.

"Ain't No More Cane" is featured also in the film Festival Express, in which Rick Danko, Janis Joplin, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and various other musicians drunkenly sing it on the train going to the next concert on the tour.

The Brazos River extends through Central Texas to the Gulf of Mexico near Freeport, Texas. It features in many prison songs because it runs past virtually all of the old prisons in Texas. "Old Hannah" is the name given to sun. "Captain" is one of the ranks in the hierarchy of prison guards, the man in charge of half the workers in a field. The term was also used outside the prisons to mean the white boss. In some of the old slave songs the singers call Jesus their captain. A "bully" is an inmate working in the line. The word can also be used as a verb, in which case it means working hard.