Midnight Special

Leadbelly, Lomax, and the Changing Same

Parchman Farm: Photographs and Field Recordings: 1947-1959
Dust to Digital (www.dust-digital.com, click the image below for sample audio)

The a cappella songs of the Mississippi Delta’s prison farms left their mark on the young Alan Lomax when he first visited with his father John in the early 1930s, on a Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song mission that among other things “discovered” Leadbelly (seen by the Lomaxes as their most significant find) and brought “The Midnight Special” to the American musical vernacular. Alan Lomax returned to record at Parchman Mississippi State Penitentiary (essentially a state-owned cotton plantation run on captive black labor) in 1947, 1948, and 1959, documenting worksong vocal traditions forged under plantation slavery and The New Jim Crow.

This artfully produced book and two-CD package includes a foreword by Alan Lomax, an introduction by his daughter Anna Lomax Wood, a contextualizing 2013 essay by folklorist Bruce Jackson (longtime Lomax colleague, friend, and author of Wake Up Dead Man: Afro-American Worksongs from Texas Prisons), an unsettling transcribed interview with a Parchman lifer and worksong leader, Lomax’s stark 1959 black-and-white and color photos, and facsimiles of telling prison documents, artifacts of an era of U.S. social history whose residual animus persists into the Hands-Up-Don't-Shoot-I-Can't-Breathe-BLM present.

Listeners may well have come across some of the 44 riveting tracks of this title: the Tradition label issued 16 songs on vinyl in 1957, and Rounder Records reissued the entire 1947–1948 set in 1997 as part of its massive Alan Lomax Collection project.

Early in the 20th century Mississippi Governor James Vardaman called Parchman Farm an “efficient slave plantation” intended to enforce black work discipline and respect for white authority: Arbeit macht frei. In 1961, supremacist Governor Ross Barnett ordered the arrest of 300 Freedom Riders, a racially mixed group including James Farmer and Stokley Carmichael, sending them to Parchman to be strip searched and brutalized, only shortly after Lomax’s last session there.

Lomax’s work certainly helped to inspire the folk revival of the 1950s and 1960s. In 1958 he wrote, “Here is the dark, fertile soil which gave rise to the blues. Indeed, these recordings, made in the heart of the Mississippi Delta where the blues took shape… provide the background for America’s most important song form,” which, “touched with exquisite musicality, are testimony to the love of truth and beauty which is a universal human trait.” A product of his time and Texas upbringing, Lomax can be forgiven his romantic framing, as Parchman Farm offers incontestable witness to the verity of his fundamental insight and his dedication to document the music he encountered.

Yet Lomax also has been criticized for a sentimental, reductive notion that the most “authentic” African American expressive culture was to be found inside the prison wire: black culture as pathology. A cringe-worthy irony informs the easy cooperation between Lomax the southern gentleman and the white prison wardens who selected black singers to perform before Lomax’s microphones: What option but to comply?

By contrast, Lomax’s recordings of African American church congregations are few in number and documenting the African American culture of black middle-class communities, historically black colleges and universities, or the Civil Rights movement was a task for others. To imagine as Lomax did the existence of “pure” autochthonous black music, antecedent to white domination, reflects the historical myopia and virtuous innocence of the American democratic project, with slavery branded into its very founding charter. Indeed, an institutional structure of the socioeconomic and political landscape of the American South, state penitentiaries such as Parchman, Angola (Louisiana), and Cummins (Arkansas) institutionalized the intimate oppression and brutality linking black and white lives.

Plainly, a kindred authoritarian mentality informed the merciless institution of Native American reservations and Indian boarding schools, the Mexican American prison work camps of Texas, the relocation centers where “enemy aliens” (U.S. citizens of Japanese, Italian, and German descent) sat out World War II, immigration vigilantism, and the 21st-century national-security slammers of Bagram, Abu Ghraib, and Guantanamo.

The latter black sites have served up atrocity audio of another tortured kind for all the world to contemplate. Lomax’s prison oeuvre may have been conceptually skewed, but the voices he logged resonate, soulful and resilient before Jim Crow’s changing same, contra the latest in police brutality, concealed carry “stand-your-ground” antisocial media InstaFaceTubeX “you-shall-not-replace-us” final solutions.

Now captive in a desperate horror-shop-’til-you-drop milieu where “freedom” is a just another word for insatiable consumer “choice” and heedless narcissist calculation, in a global prison-industrial gulag where heads do roll and jumpsuit orange is the new red, white, and blue, O prisoners, may the Midnight Special shine its ever-loving light on us all.

Credit: This is a redacted version of an essay that originally appeared at RootsWorld, the online magazine of “music from someplace you aren’t, music with roots, music of the world and for the world. OK?” Beaucoup compelling reading and listening there.