Redemption songs

Inmates at a Mississippi prison have long sung the blues to sustain themselves, and a new recording of a gospel service continues the remarkable legacy

- Sheldon Pearce

In 1940, the Mississippi singer Bukka White released the song Parchman Farm Blues as a testament of the two years he spent in the Mississippi State Penitentiary, a notorious prison-labour work farm also known as Parchman Farm - and the site of some of the most remarkable music in American history.

While serving a sentence for shooting a man in the leg, the singer recorded a few songs for the white musicologist John Lomax, but it wasn't until he was out that he wrote and recorded Parchman Farm Blues: a warning to stay off the farm, a lament of the long work day and a cry for deliverance. The song still resonates, demonstrating the power of delta blues, the profound isolation experienced by inmates, the harshness of prison labour camps, and the deep, almost visceral need to let song sustain you; to let the voice carry you out into the open, to freedom.

Singing through the turmoil was 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 Lomax's son Alan wrote: "Every delta black knew he could easily find himself on the wrong side of that fence."