Down on The Farm

Until June 30, the Angola Museum, the only museum operating on the grounds of a functioning prison in the U.S., is offering an exhibit revealing the history of music at Louisiana State Penitentiary (LSP), also known as Angola. Titled Angola Bound Revisited, the exhibit features displays on topics ranging from now-famous blues musicians and visiting folklorists to lesser-known jazz bands like the Knicknacks, a group which counted Charles Neville as a member for a time in the mid-1960s. 

LSP, opened in 1901, is the largest maximum security prison in the United States and has earned a special reputation among music scholars for recordings made and research by folklorists John and Alan Lomax in the 1930s and by Harry Oster in the 1950s. The exhibit will highlight three key areas of the penitentiary’s musical history: first, the music made at Angola by prisoners, especially the wide array of bands formed by inmates; second, musicians who passed through Angola—such as Charles Neville and Freddy Fender—before returning to their careers; and finally, the musicians who have visited Angola to perform for the prisoners, a list which includes Johnny Cash, Harry Connick Jr., Aaron Neville, Linda Ronstadt, and the famed bluegrass duo Flatt & Scruggs. “Music has been here forever,” said Genny Nadler, the museum’s program and development director, “and we hope this exhibit captures that.”

Featured displays focus on important eras of music at Angola. The 1930s and 1940s receive special attention as the period when John and Alan Lomax visited the prison, recorded inmate performances, and began the process of Angola’s musicians receiving wider exposure. 

The Lomaxes came to Angola for the first time in July 1933 while traveling the country recording folk music for the Library of Congress. Their recordings from this first visit, which lasted only four days, constitute some of the earliest recorded prison music. In his biography Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World, John Szwed argues that although previous folklorists had searched for folk songs played by prison inmates, “no one before the Lomaxes had appreciated the richness of creativity within prison life, and none had sought it out with such dogged persistence.”

Benjamin Harbert, an assistant professor of music at Georgetown University and the director of the documentary Follow Me Down: Portraits of Louisiana Prison Musicians, noted that even as early as 1933, the music culture at Angola encompassed a more diverse range of sounds and genres, including jazz and bebop, than can be heard on the Lomax recordings.

“But you have to consider the scale of their project,” said Harbert, in reference to the number of places and performers the Lomaxes visited during their travels throughout the South, which included two trips to Angola. “They were trying to preserve a culture that was being eroded by popular music. It was a salvage job.” 

(Left) A group called Gospel Melodies, taken in 1983. Courtesy of The Angolite. (Center) The Captain Singleton Band, one of Angola’s traveling bands, taken in the 1940s. Courtesy of the Singleton Family. (Right) An unidentified musical group at Angola prison. Courtesy of the Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum Foundation.

To this end, the Lomaxes recorded many blues and work songs because of their interest in capturing American folk music they feared would be lost. “They were looking for particular kinds of songs,” Harbert said, as an explanation for why their recordings focus on only a few strands of the music produced at Angola in the 1930s.

The Lomaxes’ most famous discovery, Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter, features prominently in the exhibit, which contains several of his manuscripts and letters, all on loan from the Lead Belly Archives and the Smithsonian Institution. Now regarded as one of the seminal blues and folk artists of the twentieth century, Lead Belly went on to record for several labels and perform regularly on the folk music circuit following his release from prison in 1934.

Another crucial era highlighted by the exhibit, the 1950s and 1960s, featured a blossoming of musical activity inspired by the reforms instituted in the wake of the notorious “heel-slashing incident” of 1951, in which inmates protested brutal work conditions. Throughout this period, according to Harbert, prisoners embraced music as a means of defeating stereotypical media images of convicts.  

Along with challenging widespread perceptions of prisoners, Harbert said, “They were also making music to raise money—collecting funds which they put into an inmate welfare fund.” By creating this organization to help sustain themselves, he added, prisoners organized themselves in campaigns toward social justice. “It shows that prison music can be both a financial activity and a political one,” said Harbert.

Angola remains infamous for its history of harsh working conditions and allegations of cruelty toward inmates, aspects of its past that feature prominently in some of the songs composed by its former inhabitants, such as Robert Pete Williams’ “Levee Camp Blues” and Charles Neville’s “Angola Bound,” (co-written with his brother Aaron Neville).

Visitors will see dozens of newly discovered images of prison musicians, including one photo of a big band orchestra featuring both male and female inmates. Another will show Captain Singletary’s Band, which Marianne Fisher-Giorlando, a board member of the Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum Foundation and the director of the Prison Music of Louisiana Project, believes was a traveling band that entertained residents throughout the area, a common practice as late as the 1970s. “At first, bands performed for themselves,” said Fisher-Giorlando, “then the prison corralled that, and traveling bands went into the community. They would even play at the Governor’s Mansion on Sunday afternoons.” These weekly performances almost earned one group a pardon from Governor John McKeithen. 

 “Our main goal is to educate the public—the history of music here is more diverse than people imagine,” said Fisher-Giorlando, “Music permeated the place,” she said. “There are accounts of visitors saying that ‘sounds of guitars and banjos floated through the air.’”

A one-day symposium is planned for June (date TBA). In addition to live performances by guest musicians, there will be panel discussions focused on key periods in the prison’s musical history. Panel participants will include current and former prison musicians, Charles Neville, Adam Machado of Arhoolie Records, and Dr. Benjamin Harbert.