The following is posted because I think some musicologists will find the history of the covers interesting.
When Ram Jam came out with its song "Black Betty" (Bam-ba-lam), my local radio station was really big on it, and I liked it. It was not for many years that I learned the nature of this cover.
The most well known previous recording of it was by Hudie Ledbetter (better known as Leadbelly) in 1939, and he has historically been given credit for creating it, even though he never claimed for it himself and there are previous recordings. His version is the one Ram Jam followed. Leadbelly had been in prison for many years (you probably have heard many covers of his version of "Midnight Special" about being released), and all agree that the song was used by prison chain gangs. As Leadbelly explained it, its rhythm was used to time sledge hammer hits.
The meaning of "Black Betty" is disputed, and the phrase appears in writing as much as 300 years ago. It appears to have referred at times to a bottle of liquor. In reading the various explanations, I believe that in terms of its usage with chain gangs, it most likely refers to the bullwhip used to keep prisoners working.
In doing further research on this topic, I learned that prison work groups in the south were used as a substitute for slavery. When a black man committed a crime (or maybe not), even a minor one, he would be sentenced to an inordinately long sentence. Those prisoners were then leased out to work year round (without pay) on different projects, including, yes, picking cotton on the plantations where their fathers and grandfathers had once worked as slaves.