[ From blues to gospel, country to rap, people have been making
music behind bars for decades. Here’s why we should all tune in.]
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REDEMPTION SONGS: THE FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF AMERICAN PRISON MUSIC  
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Maurice Chammah
August 3, 2023
The Marshall Project
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_ From blues to gospel, country to rap, people have been making music
behind bars for decades. Here’s why we should all tune in. _

, MEREDITH RIZZO/THE MARSHALL PROJECT. IMAGES: MICHAEL OCHS
ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES, MIGUEL A. PADRIÑAN/PEXELS, TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF
CORRECTIONS AND DIE JIM CROW RECORDS

 

One morning in 2019, Kenyatta Emmanuel Hughes was released from
Fishkill Correctional Facility in Beacon, New York, and traveled 70
miles south to Carnegie Hall. That night, he stood before a crowd —
flanked by a horn section, string quartet and backup singers — and
sang words he’d written during his nearly quarter-century behind
bars.

He’d been convicted of killing a cab driver during a robbery in
1996, when he was 21 years old. “I had no value for life back
then,” he once told a reporter
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that included his own life, which he tried to end while in prison. Now
45, he sang over a steady pulse of piano chords: “Can’t we agree
there’s something wrong, if I feel the need to scream, ‘My life
matters’? And why in the world, to you, does that feel like an
accusation?”

This article was published in partnership with The New York Times
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Hughes had studied with conservatory-trained musicians at Musicambia
and Carnegie Hall’s Musical Connections, two programs that
teach composition and various instruments
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prisons. As a criminal justice journalist and musician myself, I’ve
long admired such arts programs for cultivating hope and dignity amid
all the abuse and neglect, while reducing the chances that people
will return to prison
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YOUTUBE

But focusing on rehabilitation misses the full picture. America has a
long history of prison music, and its power goes beyond helping those
inside: This music can transform _us_, changing how we think about
the people who make it. When the right song hits you at the right
moment, you can recognize something shared with the artist. “There
are things you can identify in yourself that you can also identify in
them, no matter what they did,” the formerly incarcerated rapper BL
Shirelle told me. “You see them for the humans they are.”

Why should you care? Because Americans have reached an impasse when it
comes to the criminal justice system. There remains some bipartisan
agreement
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this system is bloated, expensive, discriminatory and abusive, and
that our prisons too often fail at their key goal of rehabilitation
(when they’re not outright deadly
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But at least 600,000 people leave prisons each year, and despite talk
of “second chances,” the rest of us don’t do a great job of
helping them restart their lives. People often refuse to rent to them
and give them jobs, which then increases the likelihood they’ll end
up in prison again.

It’s easy to blame individuals for their criminal actions, but we
also know there’s more to the story, and when society’s treatment
of people who commit crimes is too punitive and merciless, the result
is often — ironically and tragically — more crime.

Artists who served time have told me they’ve seen how their work can
break this cycle, cutting past prejudices and helping other people see
them as capable of redemption. “If we experience the art being
created in those spaces,” Hughes said, “we will know, ‘These are
human beings, and we need to rethink whether we should be throwing
them away.’”

There are, of course, some in prison who don’t appear to be contrite
after harming others, but in my decade of visiting prisons, I’ve
found they are the exception; American prisons are full of earnest
attempts at redemption. Listening to and sharing music may sound like
a soft, superficial way of changing a broken system, but you can’t
get policy change if you haven’t paved the way with culture.

It also helps to look backward. The rich history of American prison
music — especially before the rise of mass incarceration began 50
years ago — offers some vivid reminders of how we used to be more
connected to people in prison.

In the 1930s, a Texas prison broadcasted a weekly radio show in which
men and women played country songs, blues, hymns and other genres to a
live audience of visitors. “Thirty Minutes Behind the
Walls” reached as many as 5 million listeners and received 100,000
fan letters each year
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according to Caroline Gnagy’s 2016 book, “Texas Jailhouse Music: A
Prison Band History.”

[A man faces the camera while dancing in front of a group of musicians
playing instruments. ]

For the Texas prison radio broadcast “Thirty Minutes Behind the
Walls,” a band plays while an incarcerated man dances, circa
1950.   TEXAS PRISON MUSEUM

Public officials made guest speeches on the show that were striking in
their empathy. “Before the advent of radio, prisoners were exiled;
citizens outside paid little attention to them,” the governor of
Texas, Wilbert Lee O’Daniel, said on the show in 1939. “But now
you hear them talk; you hear them sing; you find out they are sons and
daughters of good mothers. You find out they made mistakes, thus
proving that they are human.”

Prisons were still brutal places — you can hear it in recordings of
blues and work songs that Black prisoners sang as they hoed and
picked cotton, just like their enslaved ancestors
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And yet many wardens also saw how music could keep those inside more
hopeful and tethered to the outside world ahead of release. In the
1950s, a doo-wop group called The Prisonaires was allowed to leave
their Tennessee facility under armed guard
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Sun Studio in Memphis. Elvis Presley was reportedly a big fan.

[Five members of the singing group The Prisonaires lean against the
railing of a balcony in a prison hall. One of the musicians is holding
a guitar while the other men sing around him. On increasingly higher
balconies above the group, prisoners peer over the edge of the
railings, watching the performance.]

The Prisonaires perform for other people incarcerated at the Tennessee
State Penitentiary, circa 1953 in Memphis, Tennessee.  MICHAEL OCHS
ARCHIVES/GETTY IMAGES

Into the 1970s, producers negotiated access to record funk gems like
Ike White’s “Changin’ Times
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“Eyes of Love
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and The Escorts’ “All We Need Is Another Chance
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Museum, in Huntsville, I recently found and digitized vinyl records
that musicians were allowed to produce themselves and sell to
visitors at an annual prison rodeo well into the 1980s
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But violent crime had been on the rise, reaching a peak in 1991, and
political rhetoric turned away from rehabilitation to punishment. For
wardens running bigger and fuller prisons, letting in people and
technology was one more avoidable security risk. The racial prejudice
that underpinned the War on Drugs infected how a lot of prison music
was perceived. Merle Haggard, a former prisoner, had climbed to
country music stardom in the 1960s with applause lines like “I
turned 21 in prison doing life without parole,” while some
rappers found their lyrics used against them in court
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Throughout the 1990s, a rising victims’ rights movement framed any
creativity behind bars as a moral affront to crime survivors.

Much of society lost interest in hearing the voices of people inside
prisons, but they didn’t stop creating, and often they used music as
a form of resistance. As incarceration and harsh policing became more
common experiences for Black Americans throughout the 1990s, these
themes became mainstays of hip-hop. Before his death in 2021, Darrell
Wayne Caldwell, who performed as Drakeo the Ruler, made a critically
acclaimed album
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inside the Los Angeles County Men’s Central Jail, recording all his
verses over the phone. He was hardly the first to do such a thing
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There are hopeful signs that our prison system could return to seeing
music as a way to maintain hope inside — and prepare society to
accept the people they’re going to release. In 2020, men at San
Quentin State Prison were given clearance to release a stellar
mixtape [[link removed]], while
others were featured on “Ear Hustle
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the popular podcast made in the facility. One of the podcast’s
hosts, Earlonne Woods, told me that a good prison artist, like the
formerly incarcerated rapper Antwan Banks Williams
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to the emotions that lots of people are experiencing inside.

[Phillip “Archi” Archuleta, right, and Gilbert “Lefty” Pacheco
record music in a studio built by Die Jim Crow Records producers at
the Territorial Correctional Facility in Cañon City, Colorado.]

[Kevin Woodley records in a soundproof studio.]

 Phillip “Archi” Archuleta, right, and Gilbert “Lefty”
Pacheco record music in a studio built by Die Jim Crow Records
producers at the Territorial Correctional Facility in Cañon City,
Colorado. COURTESY OF DIE JIM CROW RECORDS  Kevin Woodley records
in a soundproof studio. COURTESY DIE JIM CROW RECORDS

Meanwhile, producers with Die Jim Crow Records are collecting
instruments to send into prisons
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building soundproof studios in prison gyms and janitorial closets out
of PVC pipe and blankets. “Technology is so advanced now, you
don’t actually need much to make it sound really good,” said BL
Shirelle, the rapper who works as the label’s co-executive director.
These promising experiments suggest that there are far more
opportunities waiting for music producers — along with book
publishers, art galleries, DJs and other cultural gatekeepers — to
discover, cultivate and promote the ocean of talent and creativity
behind prison walls.

“We get society to be able to just see us as regular people,”
Shirelle said. “Bigotry is cured by exposure.”

_Maurice Chammah is a staff writer and the author of "Let the Lord
Sort Them: The Rise and Fall of the Death Penalty
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which won the 2019 J. Anthony Lukas Work-In-Progress Book Award. His
work has been published by The New Yorker, The Atlantic and The New
York Times. A former Fulbright fellow, he helps organize The Insider
Prize, a contest for incarcerated writers sponsored by the magazine
American Short Fiction. He lives in Austin, Texas._

* US Prisons
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