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Defining the Songs of Incarceration: The Lomax Prison Project at a Critical Juncture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2022

Velia Ivanova
Velia Ivanova*
Affiliation:
University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
*
Email: velia.ivanova@utoronto.ca
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Abstract

This article illuminates an underexplored moment in the formation of the well-known archive of recordings of incarcerated people collected by the folklorists John and Alan Lomax. In 1934, John Lomax wrote to 350 correctional institutions across the country, asking officials to transcribe the texts of songs “current and popular among prisoners or ‘made up’ by them.” Despite contacting institutions incarcerating people of many races, ethnicities, genders, and ages, however, the Lomaxes ultimately continued to center on music performed by Black men in Southern prisons. Because of this, I position the letter as a critical juncture in the formation of the Lomaxes’ prison work. Choices made by prison officials (whether to respond to the letter and in what manner to respond) and by the Lomaxes themselves (whether to express interest in songs addressed by correspondents) were influenced by perceptions of the role of music in relation to criminality, imprisonment, reform, and race. These perceptions in turn defined the boundaries of the Lomax prison project. The correspondence considered in this article therefore offers a counternarrative to popular representations of music and incarceration and suggests the limits of the well-known Lomax prison song collection.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , February 2022 , pp. 92 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for American Music

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References

References

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Cantwell, Robert. When We Were Good: The Folk Revival. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
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Ivanova, Velia. “The Musical Heritage of Incarceration: The Curation, Dissemination, and Management of the Lomax Collection Prison Songs.” PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2021.Google Scholar
Jess, Tyehimba. Leadbelly. Amherst: Verse Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Jones, Lindsey Elizabeth. “‘The Most Unprotected of all Human Beings’: Black Girls, State Violence, and the Limits of Protection in Jim Crow Virginia.” Souls 20, no. 1 (2018): 14–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krikun, Andrew. “Community Music during the New Deal: The Contributions of Willem Van de Wall and Max Kaplan.” International Journal of Community Music 3, no. 2 (2010): 165–173.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Lomax, John A. Adventures of a Ballad Hunter. New York: Macmillan, 1947.Google Scholar
Lomax, John A. and Lomax, Alan. Folk Song USA. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce, 1947.Google Scholar
Lomax, John A. and Lomax, Alan. “‘Sinful Songs’ of the Southern Negro.” The Musical Quarterly 20, no. 2 (April 1934): 177–187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lomax, John A. and Lomax, Alan. Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads. New York: Dover, [1941] 2000.Google Scholar
Mahoney, James. The Legacies of Liberalism: Path Dependence and Political Regimes in Central America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Miller, Karl Hagstrom. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Morris, James McGrath. Jailhouse Journalism: The Fourth Estate Behind Bars. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998.Google Scholar
Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. “Where Did All the White Criminals Go?: Reconfiguring Race and Crime on the Road to Mass Incarceration.” Souls 13, no. 1 (2011): 72–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement. Report on the Enforcement of the Prohibition Laws of the United States. Washington, DC: National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, 1931.Google Scholar
Nunn, Erich. Sounding the Color Line: Music and Race in the Southern Imagination. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Odem, Mary E. Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Pasko, Lisa. “Damaged Daughters: The History of Girls’ Sexuality and the Juvenile Justice System.” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 100, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 1099–1130.Google Scholar
Rafter, Nicole Hahn. “Prisons for Women, 1790–1980.” Crime and Justice 5 (1983): 129–181.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rothman, David J. Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980.Google Scholar
Schlossman, Steven and Wallach, Stephanie. “The Crime of Precocious Sexuality: Female Juvenile Delinquency in the Progressive Era.” Harvard Educational Review 48, no. 1 (February 1978): 65–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shankar, Shobana. “Parchman Women Write the Blues? What Became of Black Women's Prison Music in Mississippi in the 1930s.” American Music 31, no. 2 (2013): 183–202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Helen Dennison. “Music in a Reformatory.” Radcliffe Quarterly XIX, no. 2 (April 1935): 90–91.Google Scholar
Sterne, Jonathan. “The Preservation Paradox.” In 21st Century Perspectives on Music, Technology, and Culture: Listening Spaces, edited by Purcell, Richard and Randall, Richard, 153–66. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.Google Scholar
Stewart, Catherine A. Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. New York: New York University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strang, Dean. Keep the Wretches in Order: America's Biggest Mass Trial, the Rise of the Justice Department, and the Fall of the IWW. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Szwed, John. Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World. New York: Viking Penguin, 2010.Google Scholar
United States Bureau of the Census. Juvenile Delinquents in Public Institutions, Volume 3. Washington, DC: United States Bureau of the Census, 1933.Google Scholar
United States Bureau of the Census. Prisoners in State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories. Washington, DC: United States Bureau of the Census, 1934.Google Scholar
Van de Wall, Willem. “Music as a Means of Mental Discipline.” Archives of Occupational Therapy 2 (February 1923): 1–26.Google Scholar
Van de Wall, Willem. The Utilization of Music in Prisons and Mental Hospitals: Its Application in the Treatment and Care of the Morally and Mentally Afflicted. New York: National Bureau for the Advancement of Music, 1924.Google Scholar
Van de Wall, Willem. “How Music Is Saving Thousands from Permanent Mental Breakdown.” The Etude 43 (September 1925): 613.Google Scholar
Van de Wall, Willem. Music in Institutions. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1936.Google Scholar
Vest, J. Martin. “Prescribing Sound: Willem Van de Wall and the Carceral Origins of American Music Therapy.” Modern American History 3, no. 2 (June 2020): 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ward, Geoff J. The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watterson, Rodney K. Whips to Walls: Naval Discipline from Flogging to Progressive-Era Reform at Portsmouth Prison. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Wright, John S. “The New Negro Poet and the Nachal Man: Sterling Brown's Folk Odyssey.” Black American Literature Forum 23, no. 1 (Spring, 1989): 95–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lomax, John Avery, Alan, Lomax, Lightnin’ Washington, and Unidentified. Great God A'mighty. Sandy Point, Texas, 1934, American Folklife Center, Library of Congress.Google Scholar
Lomax, John A. and Alan, Lomax Papers. American Folklife Center. Library of Congress, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
Lomax, John Avery Family Papers, 1842, 1853–1986. Dolph Briscoe Center for American History. University of Texas at Austin.Google Scholar
Lomax, John, Elizabeth, Lyttleton, and Unidentified Group. “Little White Daisy,” Middle Fork, Kentucky, 1937.Google Scholar
Jail House Bound: John Lomax's First Southern Prison Recordings, 1933. West Virginia University Press, 2012, compact disc.Google Scholar
Jailhouse Blues: 1936 & 1939. Rosetta Records RR 1316, 1987, compact disc.Google Scholar
Lomax, Alan. Parchman Farm: Photographs and Field Recordings, 1947–1959. Dust to Digital DTD-37, 2014, compact disc.Google Scholar
Parks, Gordon dir. Leadbelly. 1976; Hollywood, CA: Brownstone Productions, 2015. DVD.Google Scholar
Abrams, Laura S. and Curran, Laura. “Wayward Girls and Virtuous Women: Social Workers and Female Juvenile Delinquency in the Progressive Era.” Affilia 15, no. 1 (Spring 2000): 51–52.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Blue, Ethan. Doing Time in the Depression: Everyday Life in Texas and California Prisons. New York: New York University Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Cantwell, Robert. When We Were Good: The Folk Revival. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996.Google Scholar
Clair, Alicia Ann and Heller, George N.. “Willem van de Wall: Organizer and Innovator in Music Education and Music Therapy.” Journal of Research in Music Education 37, no. 3 (1989): 165–78.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Davis, Angela. Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday. New York: Random House, 1999.Google Scholar
Davis, Angela. “Racialized Punishment and Prison Abolition.” In Blackwell Companions to Philosophy: A Companion to African-American Philosophy, edited by Lott, Tommy L. and Pittman, John P., 360–69. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2006.Google Scholar
DePastino, Todd. Citizen Hobo: How a Century of Homelessness Shaped America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dunsmore, A. N. “Educational Work in Prisons.” In Proceedings of the Annual Congress of the American Prison Association, 283–290, 1931.Google Scholar
Du Pre Lumpkin, Katharine. “Factors in the Commitment of Correctional School Girls in Wisconsin.” American Journal of Sociology 37, no. 2 (September 1931): 222–230.Google Scholar
Filene, Benjamin. Romancing the Folk: Public Memory & American Roots Music. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Sheridan, Alan. New York: Vintage, 1979.Google Scholar
Haley, Sarah. No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hall, G. Stanley. “Education and the Social Hygiene Movement.” Social Hygiene 1 (December 1914): 29–35.Google Scholar
Harbert, Benjamin J. and Gaines, Consuela. “Sounding Lockdown: Singing in Administrative Segregation at the Louisiana Correctional Institute for Women.” In Popular Music and the Politics of Hope: Queer and Feminist Interventions, edited by Fast, Susan and Jennex, Craig, 299–316. New York: Routledge, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hirsch, Jerrold. “Modernity, Nostalgia, and Southern Folklore Studies: The Case of John Lomax.” The Journal or American Folklore 105, no. 416 (Spring 1992): 182–207.Google Scholar
Ivanova, Velia. “The Musical Heritage of Incarceration: The Curation, Dissemination, and Management of the Lomax Collection Prison Songs.” PhD dissertation, Columbia University, 2021.Google Scholar
Jess, Tyehimba. Leadbelly. Amherst: Verse Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Jones, Lindsey Elizabeth. “‘The Most Unprotected of all Human Beings’: Black Girls, State Violence, and the Limits of Protection in Jim Crow Virginia.” Souls 20, no. 1 (2018): 14–37.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Krikun, Andrew. “Community Music during the New Deal: The Contributions of Willem Van de Wall and Max Kaplan.” International Journal of Community Music 3, no. 2 (2010): 165–173.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lichtenstein, Alex. Twice the Work of Free Labor: The Political Economy of Convict Labor in the New South. New York: Verso, 1996.Google Scholar
Lomax, Alan. The Land Where the Blues Began. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.Google Scholar
Lomax, John A. Adventures of a Ballad Hunter. New York: Macmillan, 1947.Google Scholar
Lomax, John A. and Lomax, Alan. Folk Song USA. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pierce, 1947.Google Scholar
Lomax, John A. and Lomax, Alan. “‘Sinful Songs’ of the Southern Negro.” The Musical Quarterly 20, no. 2 (April 1934): 177–187.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lomax, John A. and Lomax, Alan. Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads. New York: Dover, [1941] 2000.Google Scholar
Mahoney, James. The Legacies of Liberalism: Path Dependence and Political Regimes in Central America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.Google Scholar
Miller, Karl Hagstrom. Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.Google Scholar
Morris, James McGrath. Jailhouse Journalism: The Fourth Estate Behind Bars. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1998.Google Scholar
Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. The Condemnation of Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. “Where Did All the White Criminals Go?: Reconfiguring Race and Crime on the Road to Mass Incarceration.” Souls 13, no. 1 (2011): 72–90.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement. Report on the Enforcement of the Prohibition Laws of the United States. Washington, DC: National Commission on Law Observance and Enforcement, 1931.Google Scholar
Nunn, Erich. Sounding the Color Line: Music and Race in the Southern Imagination. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2015.Google Scholar
Odem, Mary E. Delinquent Daughters: Protecting and Policing Adolescent Female Sexuality in the United States, 1885–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.Google Scholar
Pasko, Lisa. “Damaged Daughters: The History of Girls’ Sexuality and the Juvenile Justice System.” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 100, no. 3 (Summer 2010): 1099–1130.Google Scholar
Rafter, Nicole Hahn. “Prisons for Women, 1790–1980.” Crime and Justice 5 (1983): 129–181.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rothman, David J. Conscience and Convenience: The Asylum and Its Alternatives in Progressive America. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980.Google Scholar
Schlossman, Steven and Wallach, Stephanie. “The Crime of Precocious Sexuality: Female Juvenile Delinquency in the Progressive Era.” Harvard Educational Review 48, no. 1 (February 1978): 65–94.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Shankar, Shobana. “Parchman Women Write the Blues? What Became of Black Women's Prison Music in Mississippi in the 1930s.” American Music 31, no. 2 (2013): 183–202.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, Helen Dennison. “Music in a Reformatory.” Radcliffe Quarterly XIX, no. 2 (April 1935): 90–91.Google Scholar
Sterne, Jonathan. “The Preservation Paradox.” In 21st Century Perspectives on Music, Technology, and Culture: Listening Spaces, edited by Purcell, Richard and Randall, Richard, 153–66. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.Google Scholar
Stewart, Catherine A. Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stoever, Jennifer Lynn. The Sonic Color Line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening. New York: New York University Press, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Strang, Dean. Keep the Wretches in Order: America's Biggest Mass Trial, the Rise of the Justice Department, and the Fall of the IWW. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Szwed, John. Alan Lomax: The Man Who Recorded the World. New York: Viking Penguin, 2010.Google Scholar
United States Bureau of the Census. Juvenile Delinquents in Public Institutions, Volume 3. Washington, DC: United States Bureau of the Census, 1933.Google Scholar
United States Bureau of the Census. Prisoners in State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories. Washington, DC: United States Bureau of the Census, 1934.Google Scholar
Van de Wall, Willem. “Music as a Means of Mental Discipline.” Archives of Occupational Therapy 2 (February 1923): 1–26.Google Scholar
Van de Wall, Willem. The Utilization of Music in Prisons and Mental Hospitals: Its Application in the Treatment and Care of the Morally and Mentally Afflicted. New York: National Bureau for the Advancement of Music, 1924.Google Scholar
Van de Wall, Willem. “How Music Is Saving Thousands from Permanent Mental Breakdown.” The Etude 43 (September 1925): 613.Google Scholar
Van de Wall, Willem. Music in Institutions. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1936.Google Scholar
Vest, J. Martin. “Prescribing Sound: Willem Van de Wall and the Carceral Origins of American Music Therapy.” Modern American History 3, no. 2 (June 2020): 1–24.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ward, Geoff J. The Black Child-Savers: Racial Democracy and Juvenile Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Watterson, Rodney K. Whips to Walls: Naval Discipline from Flogging to Progressive-Era Reform at Portsmouth Prison. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2014.Google Scholar
Wright, John S. “The New Negro Poet and the Nachal Man: Sterling Brown's Folk Odyssey.” Black American Literature Forum 23, no. 1 (Spring, 1989): 95–105.CrossRefGoogle Scholar