‘It’s a charged place’: Parchman Farm, the Mississippi prison with a remarkable musical history
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 chilling, natural 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 not just common but 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’s brother Alan wrote: “Every delta black knew he could easily find himself on the wrong side of that fence.”
The US prison is arguably the modern plantation. The 13th amendment of the constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude – except as punishment for a crime, a detail that has been leveraged ever since to the point where today, most incarcerated people are Black: 38% of the US prison population, while only 12% of US residents are Black. Ava DuVernay, whose documentary, 13th, lays out the path from slavery to the prison-industrial complex, said in 2016: “There is a really clean clear line of the black body being used for profit and for politics.”
Nowhere is this truer than Parchman Farm, which today has beds for nearly 5,000 inmate workers, many of whom are continuing its remarkable musical legacy. The producer Ian Brennan wanted to give them the opportunity to be heard. “It’s mathematical. It’s not philosophical. It shouldn’t be politicised,” Brennan says. “Mississippi has the highest poverty, the second highest rate of incarceration in the US, and African Americans are incarcerated at least five times the rate of white people. That inequity has no place in even a semblance of a democracy. That’s my motivation.” In February, he travelled to Parchman Farm to record a Sunday gospel service with the blessing of the prison chaplains, which was released last week as Some Mississippi Sunday Morning.
Brennan has been recording for nearly 40 years, with much of his work documenting underrepresented people and places. In 2011, he won a Grammy for his work in the Sahara on Tinariwen’s album Tassili, and he was nominated for another for 2015’s Zomba Prison Project in Malawi. After three and a half years (a wait exacerbated by the pandemic), Brennan was finally