Singing through the turmoil was not just common but routine at Parchman, whether inmates were musicians or not. In 1961, Freedom Riders, the civil rights activists who fought segregation on public transport, sang freedom songs throughout a cruel, wrongful imprisonment. Lomax’s many recordings of Parchman prisoners featured work songs and field hollers, performed as the prisoners dug up ground. One 1947 song is a rendition of the folk song about John Henry, in which a freedman turned steel driver outperforms a drilling machine before dying of exhaustion. “He died with a hammer in his hand,” they sing between swings. It feels crushingly apt; there was an understanding that being Black could qualify as a crime. In the book The Land Where the Blues Began, John’s son Alan, also a distinguished musicologist, wrote: “Every delta black knew he could easily find himself on the wrong side of that fence.”
The US prison is arguably the modern plantation. The 13th amendment of the constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude – except as punishment for a crime, a detail that has been leveraged ever since to the point where today, most incarcerated people are Black: 38% of the US prison population, while only 12% of US residents are Black. Ava DuVernay, whose documentary, 13th, lays out the path from slavery to the prison-industrial complex, said in 2016: “There is a really clean clear line of the black body being used for profit and for politics.”
Nowhere is this truer than Parchman Farm, which today has beds for nearly 5,000 inmate workers, many of whom are continuing its remarkable musical legacy. The producer Ian Brennan wanted to give them the opportunity to be heard. “It’s mathematical. It’s not philosophical. It shouldn’t be politicised,” Brennan says. “Mississippi has the highest poverty, the second highest rate of incarceration in the US, and African Americans are incarcerated at least five times the rate of white people. That inequity has no place in even a semblance of a democracy. That’s my motivation.” In February, he travelled to Parchman Farm to record a Sunday gospel service with the blessing of the prison chaplains, which was released last week as Some Mississippi Sunday Morning.