Commentary and toast by W.D. 'Bama' Stewart
Other Form of Name
Lomax, Alan, 1915-2002
Identifier
T804R03; FRID (Lomax Number) 10723
Creation Date
1948
City
Parchman (Miss.); Sunflower County (Miss.)
Disclaimer
Some of the images and language that appear in the digital collections depict prejudices that are not condoned by the University of Mississippi. This content is being presented as historical documentation to aid in the understanding of both American history and the history of the University of Mississippi. The University Creed speaks to our current deeply held values, and the availability of this content should not be taken as an endorsement of previous attitudes or behavior.
Description
The Lomaxes, and other collectors of their time and also decades later, found some of the most powerful vernacular music of the American South in the region's oppressive and violent prison system. The songs they found there, John and Alan Lomax wrote, 'or songs like them were formerly sung all over the South. With the coming of the machines, however, the work gangs were broken up. The songs then followed group labor into its last retreat, the road gang and the penitentiary' (Our singing country, 1941). Bruce Jackson, writing about prison song in the 1960s, explains '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' (Big Brazos [Rounder 1826]). The tie-tamping and wood-cutting chants, field hollers, and the occasional blues, recorded by Alan Lomax on paper-backed tape at Mississippi's Parchman Farm Penitentiary in 1947 and on February 9, 1948, were anthologized on Tradition in 1958 as Negro Prison Songs, and released in 1997 in two volumes of Prison Songs in the Alan Lomax Collection (Rounder 1714 and 1715).
Subject Headings (Library of Congress)
Blues (Music); Blues musicians
Relational Format
audio recording
Extent
02:07
Original Collection
Alan Lomax Recordings
Rights
Media files in this collection are owned by the Association for Cultural Equity and made available solely for personal use. Copy or capture of media files is prohibited. Due to copyright concerns, the recordings in this collection can only be accessed by arrangement with the Department of Archives and Special Collections.
Comments
Parchman 12/47. Lomax Classification: toast; spoken. Lomax Collection Title: Mississippi Prison Recordings 1947 and 1948. Recording Note: Parental advisory. [Editor] Session Note: These recordings were made in late 1947 at the Lambert Camp at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, better known as Parchman Farm. Some were originally issued by Tradition on a 1958 LP entitled 'Negro prison songs' and they are currently available on CD in two volumes, 'Prison songs', as part of the Alan Lomax collection on Rounder Records (editor's note).