The Flames.

The parents of this song can still be heard in the flat fields along the Brazos River where the farms of the state prison system lie, some of them crowded now by the sprawling edge of Houston suburbs.

Young convicts turn out to work the fields by hand labor methods that exist practically no where else and to learn the redundant song phrases "Don't ease me in" and "All night long" with the multiple meanings that gave them special significance in prisons where women never came and where the lights in the dormitories were never turned out.

Curiously they sing also about a man they know nothing about. A century ago a businessman named Cunningham leased convicts from the state prison to work the sugar cane fields along the Brazos. His name became immutably fixed in the prison song tradition, surviving in songs through generations of convict song leaders, and even cropping up on recorded blues derived from the prison tradition.

Aside from this instance provided by Henry Thomas there is Smokey Hogg's 1952 Penitentiary Blues with its dialogue between mother and convict song:
My mama called me -
I answered "Ma'am"
"You tired of rolling -
For Cunningham?"