From Leadbelly to Johnny Cash to Tupac, author Colin Asher gets the how but not the why.
The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music
By Colin Asher
W.W. Norton & Co.
Music, as musician and producer T Bone Burnett has said, might be America’s “greatest cultural export,” and has been for at least a century, from blues, folk, and country to jazz, rock, and hip hop: “We’ve spread our culture all over the world with this music. Music is an important part of our national identity. … It’s all regional, it’s a never-ending story, and it’s who we are.” What unites a lot of it, across styles and decades, is its devotion to a heavy backbeat, which—unlike so many other rhythmic elements in American music—doesn’t seem to have been a direct import from West Africa. The backbeat is what sets America apart, and what brings the world together.
It’s impossible to say how that beat got invented. One tantalizing and excoriating possibility comes from field recordings ethnographer Alan Lomax captured at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm, in 1947. The people held in Parchman Farm did hard labor. Before it was a prison, the farm had been a plantation; Parchman’s prisoners did work all too similar to the work enslaved people had done a few generations before. As they did that labor, they sang, keeping time with the rise and fall of their tools.
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