This is a song I learned from Jeff Gilkenson. A cello playing folk singer I met via Rick Cunha. He had the perfect folky character for this song nailed. I worked it up with my Bluegrass band & we played it at every gig & concert. It resonated well with the audience.

The character who is singing the song is strongly implied in the lyric & even though I don’t think of myself as the kind of folky character who ideally would sing it, but I do sing it straight ahead, the way I sang as a folksinger back in the early 1960s.


The tune, The Old Cane Press, brings to mind visions of Harvest time
during the early days of the American Frontier.

Families would come together to make sorghum for the year ahead.

The process involved pressing sorghum cane into juice,
then boiling it over an open fire into thick sorghum molasses.

Since life on the Frontier was a relatively isolated existence,
when they got together
they usually made a big party out of it . .

And it was at these events that all the you