Similar idea to that in "Going to the West."
The singer is leaving for a place with better pay, and leaving 'Dinah' behind.

Lyr. Add: I'M GWINE FROM THE COTTON FIELDS
Byron Arnold, coll. in Alabama

1
I'm gwine from the cotton fields,
I'm gwine from the cane;
I'm going to leave the old log hut
That stands down in the lane.
2
The boats are on the river;
They're gwine to take me off.
I'm gwine to join the exodus
That's making for the north.
3
They tell me out in Kansas,
So many miles away,
The colored folks are flocking
'Cause they're getting better pay.
4
I don't know how they found it out,
But still I'm bound to try,
For when the sun goes down tonight
I'm gwine to say good-bye.
5
There's Dinah, she don't want to go;
She says she's growing old.
She's 'fraid that she will freeze to death
'Cause the country am so cold.
6
Talk about your work and play;
You don't believe it's true,
But she don't want to do the things
That I am bound to do.
7
I sold my little log cabin,
My little patch of ground,
The kind old master gave me
When the Yankee troops came down.
8
Now my hair is turning gray;
The tears are in my eyes,
For when the sun goes down tonight
I'm gwine to say good-bye.

Arnold suggests that this is a professional composition. Coll. from Mrs. Corie Lambert, Mobile, Alabama, 1945; "Miss Alice Walthall, my schoolteacher in Pineapple, Alabama, taught me this song."
The colloquialism 'making for ...', was heard frequently from older people when I was a child but it seems to have disappeared.
'I'm making for town', etc., instead of I'm going to town, is one I am guilty of using on occasion.
The English dialectical 'gwine' (see OED) used by rural blacks and whites in the 19th c. may have disappeared long before. I would guess that the song is post-1880, and pre-1910 but that is a wild guess. I could not find sheet music.

Robert W. Halli Jr., editor, 2004, "An Alabama Songbook, Ballads, Folksongs, and Spirituals, Collected by Byron Arnold." Univ. Alabama Press. Pages 107-108, with brief score.

Halli says "I have included all rare and local items in Arnold's Collection..." The volume adds much to Arnold's publication of 1950. The Arnold Collection is at the University of Alabama.