Katy left Memphis (O Rosie)
Other Form of Name
Lomax, Alan, 1915-2002
Identifier
T796R06; FRID (Lomax Number) 10682
Creation Date
2-1-1948
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
02:39
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 2/48. Lomax Classification: prison song; work song. Lomax Collection Title: Mississippi Prison Recordings 1947 and 1948. Session Note: These recordings were made in the early winter of 1948 at Parchman Farm by Alan Lomax. They have been released on CD as part of the Alan Lomax Collection on Rounder Records under the series title, 'Prison songs.' There are two volumes represented in that series (editor's note).