That's the Sound of the Man Working on the Chain Gang Among all genres of American folk music,
prison songs may be the most viscerally compelling. They evolved from
plantation songs and
field hollers of slaves in the American South before the civil war (whose origins can in turn be traced to
patterns found in the music of West Africa) but their tone and content is quite different. Limitless in length,
bitter and
pained, offering
little hope of freedom or
redemption, these songs were first heard during Reconstruction. Harsh and unevenly enforced laws incarcerated legions of black American men, consigning them to long sentences of labor for minor offenses like insult, fistfighting, and shoplifting.
To shore up a tanking Southern economy, prisons leased convict labor to plantation owners as a low-cost replacement for slave labor. When reform efforts brought that to an end,
state governments became the contractors. Sweetheart deals awarded lucrative contracts to prisons to provide labor for rebuilding the railroads and highways of the war-destroyed South. Slavery in all but name, these work conditions gave rise to
a body of music that is one of
the most significant antecedents of the blues. In
hundreds of
variants, cadenced to
axe-fall,
hoe stroke, or the
drop of a maul, the songs set a working pace a man could sustain from dawn to dusk, while remaining fast enough to satisfy an armed '
Captain' on horseback.
posted by Miko
on Aug 27, 2006 -
33 comments
Interview with an Ol Dirty Bastard. This is the first interview with ODB I have seen since he was thrown in the slammer. ODB's first two releases were crazy brilliant and full of life. Now he sits in one of the worst prisons around, depressed and unmedicated, for parole violation. Reading this, do you think the court succeeded in breaking his spirit? Is he doomed to flame out when he gets out? Is it wrong that his new cd seems made without his input, and is weak compared to his amazing first two? Would you want to get out of prison and find someone made a book out of your throw off writings? Finally, do you like ODB?
posted by zenhues
on Mar 28, 2002 -
28 comments
