details = Prison Songs Volume 2: Don'tcha Hear Poor Mother Calling?
Various artists
Rounder Records (through Festival)
Review by James Smith
John Lomax and his son Alan might best be remembered for travelling across America and discovering Huddie Leadbelly (known as Leadbelly) in a jail. By simply sticking a microphone in front of him, the American musical tradition was hugely enriched. Leadbelly became an enormous influence on singers such as Bob Dylan and the Weavers.
Alan Lomax recorded this extraordinary collection of songs at Parchman Farm between 1947-48. The artists (or inmates) who perform these field recordings are credited only by their nicknames and prison numbers: "Tangle Eye", "Bull", "22", and "Dobie Red", for example.
The songs are accompanied by the sounds of picks, shovels and axes as the inmates work on the chain gang.
In the southern US prison system, work songs served to pace the men who hoed and chopped; to mediate between the strong and the weak; to pacify the prison bosses; and to amuse, console, and dignify the men who worked everyday from sun-up to sundown under the eyes of armed guards: "Every axe was hitting in rhythm. Boss Dead Eye sat on his horse contented, 'When the ol' nigguhs is sangin, ever thang's awright'. With a shotgun laid across his arm, he listened as we sang and sang."
The state penitentiaries were breeding grounds for this genre of American-African creativity and it is easy to romanticise a recording such as this. The singing is strong and the lyrics are loaded with sexual innuendo and joking, but this music was born from human suffering and was essential to the spiritual and physical survival of the black prisoners. In Lomax's words: "In the pen itself we saw that the songs, quite literally, kept the men alive and normal. As the gangs rolled under the hot broiling sun, the roaring choruses of the songs revived flagging spirits, restored energy to failing bodies, brought laughter to silent misery."
The leasing of black convicts to private companies was common in the southern states between the 1870s and 1920s. Starved, half-clothed prisoners were forced to perform heavy labour such as timber cutting, turpentine extraction, mining, railroad work and industrial farming from "can't see in the morning to can't see at night".
This cheap labour pool was replenished as needed by local sheriffs who framed innocent citizens or used the infamous Black Codes to make arrests for loitering, "idling", trespassing, not surrendering the sidewalk to a white person, or any number of other charges that applied only to African-Americans.
Healthy, strong black defendants became likely candidates for the work farms, but their sentences were rarely served in their entirety. The men were simply worked to death.
The growing public revulsion at the sight of men being worked to death, plus pressure from the labour movement led to calls for reform around the turn of the century. By the time that leased labour was abandoned, however, the state penitentiary system had been firmly established.
James Kimble Vardaman, then Governor of Mississippi, built Parchman Prison Farm in 1904. Several thousand acres of cotton were planted and by 1915 the self-sufficient camp was turning a profit for the state.
Prisoners serving long sentences, usually for murder, were used to intimidate other prisoners. They were entrusted with guns, and if they shot a man trying to escape were usually pardoned by the governor.
This regime stayed in place up until 1972 when a class action suit in the Federal Court deemed Parchment's treatment of prisoners unconstitutional and "an affront to modern standards of decency".
Although the prison officials did their best to delay the reform, civil rights and the cotton picking machines were rendering the old system obsolete. Parchman Farm today is a modern prison facility, but its brutal legacy remains.
This 21-track re-mastered collection tell us the story of the slave gangs, lawless work camps and the music forged out of suffering in one of the hardest prison systems in the western world.