Prison blues

Songs from Parchman Farm

by Ted Drozdowski

Hell has a soundtrack. It's in the voices of the men recorded behind the barbed wire and shotguns of Mississippi's Parchman State Penitentiary. And it can be heard on the two just-released volumes of Prison Songs: Historical Recordings from Parchman Farm, which are part of Rounder's ongoing series of releases from the vaults of music historian Alan Lomax.

Parchman Farm looks like the Delta equivalent of Dachau. If you drive south from Clarksdale, the compound will come into view after a half-hour or so, stretched over the flat, red earth until, as you drive by, it shrinks into the horizon. Its grim face, double gates secured by armed guards and trimmed with razor wire, is turned to Highway 49 West. The acres of rich plantation soil surrounded by flesh-cutting fence are dotted with glorified shotgun shacks and concrete buildings housing prisoners. What happens inside is far from the view of the roadway, but it has been immortalized as a death of the soul in the songs of Mississippi bluesmen and by those whom Lomax recorded and interviewed.

His great book The Land Where the Blues Began (Pantheon) has a lengthy chapter on life in Parchman that vividly recounts the guards' murderous brutality, the slavery work conditions, the mental collapse, the prisoner-on-prisoner rapes and beatings. On these CDs -- volume one is called Murderous Home, volume two is Don'tcha Hear Poor Mother Calling? -- we hear many of those same narrators in the flesh. Prisoners with names like Tangle Eye, Bull, Little Red, and Bama sing work songs, homespun spirituals, and a cappella blues; they spin fables and talk about how they got inside.

Lomax recorded these men in 1947 and '48 with the hope of hearing songs that had survived since the era of slavery. He found instead a new, living repertoire that drew on all the elements of the African-American experience. In the voices of Little Red, Tangle Eye, 22, and Hard Hair -- singing "Early in the Mornin' " to the cadenced chomp of their axes chipping away a live oak stump -- are echoes of the church (in the floating support of 22's lead vocal) and the levee camp, the sounds of mourning and mockery.

The latter is especially important for survival in the chains of oppression. And you'll find wryly comic stories and metaphorical satire down all byways of the blues. Here this hard-laboring quartet begin "Early in the Mornin'" bemoaning their dire conditions, but they eventually tread their way into a joke (right at the point where any guards listening would probably lose interest) about a dumb "peckerwood" -- slang for both a woodpecker and a poor white man -- with a sore penis. On volume two, Bama tells a more lighthearted tale of the "strongest" man he ever saw. The punch line: "They was a polecat in the hole, a skunk. Well they take him and put him in the hole, and the skunk come out . . . I believe he was the strongest man I ever saw."

The honesty of these songs of hard experience is the result of being stripped to the fundamentals of daily existence. The damned have no use for pretensions. So the sweet-voiced Bama doesn't flinch when he tells Lomax that he first landed in prison when he shot and cut a man, and after that initial stay he decided to "go around putting pistols on folks" instead of working for a living. The result: 18 years behind that razor fence. There's also a version of the classic bad-ass fable "Stag-o-lee," here listed as "Stackerlee." Save for the song's fatal climax, it could be the biography of one of the men on these CDs.

These are bad men making beautiful music. And it gets no more beautiful than when 22 leads the ax gang in "When I Went to Leland," a cry for freedom that compares life in Parchman to the slave times, and parole to emancipation. As their quavering harmonies rise over the bite of wood and steel, we can hear the sound of the human spirit struggling to rise above the trials of the flesh.