Purchase: Prison Songs, Vol. 1: Murderous Home
For people that know the work
of Alan Lomax, begun in 1946 as ‘field recordings’, the history, and thus the
essentiality, of the work is equal to the power of the voices, styles, stories
and history he captured. Born in 1915, Lomax spent almost 60 years continuing
the work of his equally famous father, John, in recording literal and actual
history, as understood through the guise of folk music. Armed with
various recording devices, including an automatic disk recorder, family Lomax
traveled the United States and captured the unique songs and sounds and
voices—some of which no longer exist—that displayed the entirety of the unique
American ethnography of the people that came from so many places to call this
land home.
From Louisiana (Cajun music) to
the Midwest and the multi-ethnic immigrant European communities, and especially
the American South, from the Mississippi Delta to the Appalachian Mountains—the
Lomaxs were able to create an archive that has become a uniquely personal,
sociological and historical atlas of living art and expression. And
thus forever preserve various the kind of lives, customs and traditions that
would have faded and been forever lost.
Historically, there is no
greater sense of touching history than what comes from a tangible connection
and the Lomax family were somewhat magician-like in the way they documented
lives and the artistic fiber that made so many people who they were, at an
ethnic and cultural level, to be sure, but also in what they were beyond their
cultural identifiers. To record someone signing, reciting a poem, telling you
the story of their life: that is capturing the emotional soul of a being and in
their art, their story can be truly understood, without needing analysis or
dissection. Art lays bare what is inside someone, and through voice, the
strands of one’s emotional DNA are clear. What Alan and John Lomax did was
preserve, yes, but they were also capturing history in a way that was never
possible before.
Alan Lomax was a great
proponent of what he termed “cultural equity" and promoted a movement
called “One World.” Today, this would be termed more familiarly as
multiculturalism. What he was after was showing how a shared
cultural identity, in all its various forms, was what bound us together, and
that our differences did not divide us—it was just the opposite. There are two
statements Lomax made in defense of his world view that I feel I have to share.
He said both, “The dimension of cultural equity needs to be added to the humane
continuum of liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and social justice,” and,
"Folklore can show us that this dream is age-old and common to all
mankind. It asks that we recognize the cultural rights of weaker peoples in
sharing this dream. And it can make their adjustment to a world society an
easier and more creative process. The stuff of folklore—the orally transmitted
wisdom, art and music of the people can provide ten thousand bridges across
which men of all nations may stride to say, “You are my brother.” [1]
IInterestingly, the FBI investigated Alan Lomax
repeatedly for many years though no charges were ever filed against him. What
were the Feds looking for on a folklorist armed with a pen and recording
equipment? Take a guess…We are talking J. Edgar Hoover’s America, after
all…but, I don’t want to go into politics.
You might know that the Lomaxs were the first to
put such luminaries as Leadbelly, Muddy Waters, Honeyboy Edwards, and Woody
Guthrie to tape. The debt we owe to the Lomax family can’t be understated and
the Smithsonian’s Folkways label and the Library of Congress’s American
Folklife Center, make it possible for all the myriad sounds can still be heard,
studied and appreciated. ( A note for the historians among us: The Lomaxs
traveled much farther afield than the US, and their history is just as
fascinating as what they were able to preserve. But for our purposes, we are
going to focus on one small portion and geographical region of their body of
work.)
Of particular interest to me, and apropos of our
theme this round, are the recordings that were captured in the American South,
particularly Mississippi in 1947 and 1948. Known as the prison recordings, I
can think of no music I’ve ever heard more haunting and visceral. Southern
Penitentiaries were often forced labor work camps, and according the
Association for Cultural Equality, “Southern agricultural penitentiaries were
in many respects replicas of nineteenth-century plantations, where groups of
slaves did arduous work by hand, supervised by white men with guns and constant
threat of awful physical punishment. It is hardly surprising that the music of
plantation culture — the work songs — went to the prisons as well.” [2]
Drawing on the tradition of work songs sung in
the field by slaves on the plantations, work songs in prisons carried much the
same function of rhythm and spoke to the same sort of misery and desperation.
Meant to help keep time in tandem working gangs, the songs have an undeniable
rhythm and a raw, but beautiful cadence. But there is a palpable sense of
anguish and misery that cuts through the acapella chorus, a choir of miserable
souls bound to some duty, but somehow transcending the despair through the
lifting of their voices. Hammer falls, wood cutting, tie-tamping—the sound of
tools sinking into wood and striking the earth provide an imperfect rhythm
track, but one that is equal ghost to the pained, drawn and anguished vocals.
The Lomaxs made a multitude of these prison
recordings at the Parchman Farm, part of the Mississippi State Penitentiary
system, and the liner notes to these recordings add to the haunted nature of
the songs. The names of the inmates read like a gallery of souls from Dante’s
Inferno, which, while it is an oft-used metaphor, seems fitting. One wonders
about those men: what had they done to end up there, how long did they last?
Dig deeply into the archives and you can listen to some of the non-musical
tracks that were recorded, where the inmates talk about just that: what put
them in the klink, what they planned on doing once they got out. It’s an
amazing piece of preservation, but the songs themselves speak volumes that documentary
interviews cannot. The rhythms, the stories the signers tell, are as vivid a
portrait of pain and regret as you’ll ever hear. There is something vital in
preserving even the saddest, most miserable of human experiences. I spoke of
empathy in my previous post, but as an abstract of being invited into a
fictional portrayal of a life we’re happy not to have for our own. But, in the
prison recordings, there is no hiding from the reality. The longing, the anger,
the prayers for release are unadorned by visuals or the writer’s syntactical
flourishes. What you hear on these tapes is true, and therefore impossible to
ignore for the spirit it carries. Pleas for release, for a woman left behind to
remain true, for someone to believe their professed innocence—all these themes
and more can be found in the songs, but knowing there is very little
“performance” behind the words; the signers are being truthful in the only way
that a man behind bars can express his plight in true terms.
With so many powerful songs to choose from, it’s
hard to pick one or two that most capture the essential nature of the work.
But, two of the more powerful tracks that have always stuck with me are “Early
in the Morning” and “Rosie.”
“Early in the Morning” was sung by four inmate at
the Parchman Farm in 1947. The palpable pain of the lead vocalist, credited as
Tangle Eye, strikes an intense, material counter to the hollow thunking rhythm
track which is actually the inmates’ axes striking wood. The lyrics are more
about the rhythm than about making meaning. Though there is a bit of humor in
what is being said, the lyrics cover traditional subjects that might accompany
the experience of a man forced to work, forcibly taken far from home:
complaints about having to get up early in the morning, admonishing his woman
not to believe stories some other man might be her, and how he’s counting on
her to remain faithful. That prayerful begging to keep a promise and remain
true is one that can be found throughout these recordings and in “Early in the
Morning”, we get a strange bit of juxtaposition, between the work and the
woman:
Well-rocks ’n gravel make -a
Make a solid road
It takes a good lookin woman to make a
Regardless of who he is singing to, Tangle Eye’s
voice is fragile as a cracked vase and the axes striking wood, or perhaps it’s
hoes striking dirt, bring to mind the desperation of the nearly dead. Or the
kind of sadness that makes one wish for that specific release.
The other track I want to highlight is called
“Rosie.” “Rosie” resonates with me as it was one of the first selections I
heard from the Lomax archive. So, there is that sense of nostalgia, coupled
with the power of how a song can muscle its way in and sink into your
conscious, thus becoming part of your deeper understanding of music, the kind
not easily described in terms that make sense of the feeling. “Rosie”
is a sad song, and a simple one in its sentiment: be true while I’m
away. It’s a classic call and response, the lead singer calling: “Be my woman,
gal—“ and the rest of his gang answering back, “—I’ll be your man!” the lead
vocal reminds Rosie to “Stick to the promise, gal, that—“ / “—you made me.” And
that promise is not marry to “til I go free!” But, by the end, we
have an understanding of what worries the convict most, while his love is out
there free and he’s locked away:
Call: "When she walks she reels
and-"
Response: "-rocks behind."
Call: "Ain't that enough to worry-"
Response: "-[a] convict's mind."[4]
Response: "-rocks behind."
Call: "Ain't that enough to worry-"
Response: "-[a] convict's mind."[4]
“Rosie” has a lighter tone than many of the songs
in the prison collections, and I’ve heard renditions where Rosie is a young
woman who sashays temptingly just beyond the gate, but ever out of the
prisoners reach and thus as much a torment as she is a beauty. She might even
have made some promises that to a desperate man might mean more than she
bargained for. One of the interesting things I read while researching Lomax’s
notes was the strange setup of many of these labor camps: "These
recordings were made in 1947 in the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman.
The singers were all Negro prisoners, who, according to the practice of
Mississippi, were serving out their time by working on a huge state cotton
plantation in the fertile Yazoo Delta. Only a few strands of wire separated the
prison from adjoining plantations. Only the sight of an occasional armed guard
or a barred window in one of the frame dormitories made one realize that this
was a prison. The land produced the same crop; there was the same work for the
Negroes to do on both sides of the fence. And there was no Delta Negro who was
not aware of how easy it was for him to find himself on the wrong side of those
few strands of barbed wire...”[5] Being so close to civilization, yet inexorably
separated from it, had to be its own explicit kind of torture.
And, regarding that unique sound of the rhythm,
and why the prisoners could sing such complex tunes wile working, I found this:
“Songs like "Rosie" not only coordinated the dangerous teamwork of
several men chopping trees but also made the workers more productive and helped
the time pass. As with slave songs, the work songs also helped prisoners give
vent to intense pent-up feelings, whether the words were specifically about
that or not. Such singing and chanting can also ease the spirit, bring harmony
to the group, and can even bring some pleasure to the moment. [6]
The prison recordings have been collected and
released in many collections, and the Smithsonian’s Folk Ways releases are a
good place to start. You can find a few collections in the Spotify library, as
well. To read more about what went into these recordings, who you are hearing,
the when and the where, so to speak, there is a wealth of information on the
web, but culturalequity.org is an invaluable resource. The site puts the
history into a fascinating perspective.
I’ll end with what I touched on earlier:
recordings like these, and the rest of the Lomax archives are beyond music, for
listening’s sake. Preserving the voices, and thus the experience, of those
minority segments of society, either due to simple numbers, marginalization, or
poor choices that land one in jail, is essential to understanding who we are as
a collective. That sense of collective humanity is one our modern world’s great
failings: the lack of recognizing it, in particular. Hearing another’s voice,
and the experiences behind that voice, reminds us of the essential sense that
we are more connected than we are separate. And when we forget that we really
are more similar than different, we tend to forget that first and foremost, we
are on this earth to treat each other well. Music, of all the arts, can remind
us of this in the most profound ways.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Lomax#Cultural_equity
[2] http://research.culturalequity.org/get-audio-ix.do?ix=session&id=PR47&idType=abbrev&sortBy=abc
[3] https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Alan-Lomax/Early
in the morning
[4] https://www.musixmatch.com/lyrics/Alan-Lomax/Rosie
