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Prison Blues of the South |
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Reviews
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Wednesday, 08 February 2006 00:02 |
Prison Blues of the South
By John Sinclair
Prison Blues of the South: Recorded live at the Mississippi and Louisiana State Penitentiaries by Alan Lomax (Laserlight 17 026; licensed from Tradition Records)
Wake Up Dead Man: Black Convict Worksongs from Texas Prisons, recorded and edited by Bruce Jackson (Rounder CD 2013)
The roots of American popular music are deeply embedded in the rich soil of African American life at its most extreme, and in ancient West African cultural forms which survived the precarious carriage across the Atlantic in the holds of the slave ships that delivered the captured Africans to the ugliest and most cruel circumstances imaginable.
While the physical conditions of early African American life were impossibly severe, the repression of their ancestral culture in all its manifestations was perhaps even more brutal. From a world where music and the visual arts infused every aspect of daily life and colored even the smallest details of everyday existence, where worship and careful attention to the whims and needs of the gods permeated every form of social activity, the Africans were dragged in chains and forced to dwell and labor in an alien land where art, music and worship were ruthlessly restricted to special occasions and the self-righteous Christians who possessed the Africans as human chattel treated them worse than dogs.
The American slave-masters wielded every possible means of repression to root out and eradicate the very culture of the Africans, every belief and practice that had been central to their existence, from nationality and kinship forms to their means of personal and communal self-expression and prayer through music, visual art and worship. The seeds of culture carried to America within each enslaved African were bitterly denied earth, water and sunshine here--they could be planted only in the meanest and most barren of places and nurtured in persistent pain and suffering.
The forced deculturalization of Africans in the Americas dates back 500 years and survives today, only relatively diminished, in all the canons of American popular culture. But Emancipation finally opened the way in 1865 for African Americans to reclaim and reorder the African past from the shards and tangled remnants of ancestral culture so stubbornly retained during nearly 400 years of slavery, and it made possible the rapid development of these elements into the new forms of cultural expression which have so vividly colored American life for the past 130 years: spirituals, blues, ragtime, jazz, swing, bebop, gospel, rhythm & blues, soul music, hip-hop and rap.
To trace these forms today to their roots in Africa and slavery-time America and follow the early development of African American music is virtually impossible. Few transcriptions and no recordings exist prior to the documentation on phonograph records of early spirituals, ragtime, blues, and jazz during the first three decades of the 20th Century.
By that time the circumstances of African American life had undergone radical changes which were immediately and precisely reflected in their music and social practice. Everything was changing, and the root forms that emerged under slavery--worksongs, field hollers, moans and shouts--clung to survival only in those places where people still worked the land as semi-indentured servants (called sharecroppers), or where conditions otherwise approximated the days of slavery, as in the unspeakably severe 20th-Century prisons of the Deep South.
There, in legendary hellspots like Parchman Farm, Angola, the Brazos, Black convicts served their time like slaves well into the 1960s, toiling in the fields under the whips and guns of their overseers and performing, under extreme duress, every sort of back-breaking physical labor with no relief of any sort. And only there, where the worksong continued to serve its traditional function as a means of organizing and directing the indentured workforce in its labors, did these root forms persist and develop in the modern era.
The worksong is not a song about work or a song one happens to sing
while work goes on; it is a song that helps a person
or group of persons do work.
--Bruce Jackson, Liner notes for Wake Up Dead Man
The recordings under hand collect work songs performed by groups of convicts at forced labor in the fields and work gangs of Mississippi, Louisiana, and Texas prisons prior to the late 1960s, when the civil rights movement succeeded in forcing fundamental changes in the way these institutions were organized and operated.
Wake Up Dead Man documents the worksongs sung by Black convict laborers in Texas prisons as they worked in groups at crosscutting timber, logging and log loading, flatweeding, spading, and picking cotton --from cainüft-see till cainüft-see (dawn to dark)--utilizing lyrical and rhythmic forms which had been devised during the long centuries of slavery to provide the proper tempo and length of phrase to guide the work gangs in their efforts.
These recordings were made in the mid-üf60s by Bruce Jackson for the Center for Studies in American Culture at the State University of New York at Buffalo and are beautifully illuminated by the producerüfs extensive liner notes and lyric transcriptions.
The songs on Prison Blues of the South were recorded by folklorist Alan Lomax in Louisiana and Mississippi penitentiaries somewhat earlier (no date is given) and are presented without further explanation. Although the title is somewhat misleading, it does point up the role worksongs played as one of the essential root forms of the blues, and the solo songs--called moans, shouts, and field hollers--clearly reveal their seminal influence on the blues idiom as a means of emotive expression for the lone performer. ügLevee Camp Moanüh and ügTangle Eye Bluesüh are especially instructive in this connection.
Of particular interest is the adaptation of elements taken from modern blues songs heard on the radio and incorporated into the traditional worksong repertoire. In this way the form continued to develop and grow within the functional limitations imposed by the strict requirements of prison labor. And even the most cursory listen will also reveal that the group work songs helped form the roots of gospel music as well.
The blues went on to develop as an expressive art form with an entertainment function, and gospel music as a function of group worship, but neither maintained the stark functionality of the work song, which existed first to make the work go smoothly and efficiently according to the dictates of the slavemasters and, later, the prison bosses.
In Prison Blues of the South an unidentified convict, asked by Lomax about the quality of voice required of the lead singer (as in an art music) offers explicit testimony as to the basic function of the work song leader in the prison gang:
Well, now, it wouldn't just exactly make any difference about the dependability
of the voice or nothin' like that, boss. But it take the man with the most experience,
to my understanding, to make the best leader. You see, if you'd bring
a brand new man here, if he could have a voice where he could sing
just like Peter could preach, and he didn't know what to sing about,
well, he wouldn't do no good. But here's a fella, he--maybe he ain't
got no voice for singin', but he been cooperatin' with the people so long,
and been on the job so long, till he know just exactly how it should go,
and if he can just move to talkin', why, you understand how the work--
well, it would go good. But, see, it don't make any difference about his voice.
What it takes is time, that's what it is. You can just whistle,
and if you know the time and can stay in time with the axe, you can whistle and cut
just as good as you can if you were singin'. But you have to be experienced.
These valuable recordings shine much-needed light on the roots of the blues and African-American popular music in general, and the men who ventured into the southern prisons and work camps to document these songs of involuntary servitude deserve our appreciation for keeping the music of a bygone era alive in the modern world.
But most of all, these recordings offer evidence that the human spirit can survive and be given melodious voice even in the most strenuous possible circumstances.
--New Orleans
January 17, 1997
(c) 1997, 2006 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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