DON GONYEA, HOST:
There's a kind of character, an archetype that's deeply embedded in American music history - an outlaw, a gangster, a criminal, someone who's maybe served time. There's an entire treasure trove of music that revolves around an artist's experience with prison.
In a new book, author Colin Asher traces some of that history and explores how it's been exploited and manipulated. His book is called "The Midnight Special: A Secret Prison History Of American Music." Colin Asher joins us now. Welcome to the program.
COLIN ASHER: Thank you very much for having me. It's an honor.
GONYEA: First, I'd like you to talk about the title of the book. It references the song "Midnight Special," written from the point of view of an inmate in prison, hearing a train roll past outside late at night.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MIDNIGHT SPECIAL")
LEAD BELLY AND THE GOLDEN GATE QUARTET: (Singing) Yonder come Miss Rosie. How in the world do you know?
GONYEA: Tell us about that song and why it tees things up for you.
ASHER: A few things - one, it's venerable. It's been played for a long time. It's a reference point that a lot of people have. Secondly, I think the metaphor in it is actually quite beautiful and says quite a bit about the American experience of prison. As you explained, the myth that shapes the song is if you're in this prison, the train passes by at night. If the train's light shines upon you through a window, then you'll be released next.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "MIDNIGHT SPECIAL")
LEAD BELLY AND THE GOLDEN GATE QUARTET: (Singing) Let the midnight special shine the ever-loving light on me. Well, I went to the nation and the territo (ph).
ASHER: And I think there's something really interesting in there about the notion of precisely how much justice is involved in the incarceration of those folks who are hoping the light will shine on them.
GONYEA: You frame your book around five musicians, starting with folk and blues singer Huddie Ledbetter. People know him better maybe as Lead Belly. Why did you choose to begin the book with his story?
ASHER: I wanted to talk about the influence that policing and incarceration have had on American music from the Southern prison farm era up until the modern mass incarceration era. And Lead Belly just made a lot of sense. He was born in 1889. Unfortunately, he does end up spending a lot of time in Southern prison farms, performs quite a bit in there, learned quite a bit of music while he was inside, and then when he comes out, sadly and unfortunately, is very much defined by his prison experiences, which is an experience that many artists since have had to wrestle with. It's a way to talk about the way prison used to influence music right at the period when we're moving from slavery into prison sort of replacing slavery.
GONYEA: There are five artists profiled, including Lead Belly. Tell us what your criteria was first.
ASHER: What I really wanted to do was tell a slightly different story with each section. I was trying to cover a lot of ground historically, roughly a hundred years. I also wanted to capture different aspects of the musical culture that I'm trying to describe. So the section about Huddie Ledbetter, about Lead Belly, is about southern prison farm era, but it's also about the way the image of incarceration attaches itself to him and how that lives through time. I wanted to talk about, as a contrast, urban policing and the development of jazz.
GONYEA: If we skip ahead to the jazz age...
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
GONYEA: Another artist you profile, Elmo Hope, had a very different experience.
ASHER: Absolutely. During the development of modern jazz, there was, I argue, a very rational desire to escape the sort of image that had attached itself to blues musicians and to Lead Belly, right? The idea was, modern jazz is an intellectual endeavor, which it is. It is genius. It is one of the great gifts America has given to the world.
And the effort to separate modern jazz from earlier forms of Black music involved hiding any criminal records, involved never sort of pandering to that outlaw image. I think that this was a very rational thing to do, and I think that it did a lot to preserve the way the music was received.
I also think there was a downside. A lot of suffering was unacknowledged. A lot of challenges were sort of swept under the rug. If Elmo had gone unmolested by the police and he had been given the right to perform live, he could have had a career that lasted much longer and resulted in many more recordings. The same can be said for any number of jazz musicians.
GONYEA: So we started with Huddie Ledbetter. Johnny Cash - someone who makes the book but who was never actually sentenced to prison despite his reputation, despite playing in prisons and being a hero to prisoners, was not of that system.
ASHER: Exactly right. I wanted sort of a counterpoint in my narrative, a white musician whose story would shine a light on the disparities between the ways that white musicians and Black musicians experience the criminal justice system. He is somebody who made literally millions of dollars singing about policing and singing about incarceration and, as you point out, never spent more than a night in jail.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "FOLSOM PRISON BLUES")
JOHNNY CASH: (Singing) And I ain't seen the sunshine since I don't know when. I'm stuck in Folsom prison, and time keeps dragging on.
ASHER: And I'd like to be clear, I don't begrudge him any of that. He made a great many mistakes. He engaged in some questionable behavior. He was an addict, as some of the other people in the book are. And he was treated with, you know, grace and humanity by the criminal justice system. My take is not that that's a problem. My take is that everybody else should have been treated with the same grace and humanity.
GONYEA: And throughout Johnny Cash's career, we should note that he spent a good deal of time elevating the voices of the incarcerated.
ASHER: Cash, as you say, was an advocate for prison reform and an earnest one - did specifically help out some musicians who were incarcerated, raised money to make improvements inside some prisons.
The fourth section of the book focuses on Ike White. He might be the most obscure musician in the book. He was a young man who was incarcerated at the end of his teenage years in California and ended up spending almost his entire musical career inside prison. In that section, what I really wanted to talk about was the musical culture that can exist inside institutions.
GONYEA: The final section of the book, you focus on the life, the career and the death of Tupac Shakur. Describe why you chose him.
ASHER: He was conceived while his mother was on trial. She was a Black Panther. She was somebody who spent a lot of her time and energy trying to fight against police abuses. She's eventually exonerated. But that experience really ends up defining his life. And once he becomes a young man, he's growing up in a world that is profoundly different from the one that I start the book with. You know, he's growing up in sort of the beginnings of the mass incarceration era.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ME AGAINST THE WORLD")
2PAC: (Rapping) It's just me against the world.
ASHER: He ends up living a life that is defined - literally from conception to death, in some way or another - by contact with the criminal justice system.
GONYEA: I'm wondering if you think - is prison music its own genre? And along with that, why do we keep returning to it?
ASHER: If I had to say, I'd say prison music is probably 10 genres. One thing that I try to really get at in the book is, there are a couple of contradictory strains of the American psyche, and one is this incredible creative urge. That urge has gifted the world blues and jazz and hip-hop and country music.
But the other urge is this sort of repressive one that runs throughout American history where we are constantly fearful of each other and trying to legislate away our liberties and incarcerate people. And those two things are directly in contradiction to one another.
(SOUNDBITE OF ELMO HOPE'S "THREE SILVER QUARTERS")
ASHER: Music is about individuality and expression, and this carceral repressive urge is trying to fight against that. So I don't know that we will ever be free of this because those two things, I suspect, will continue to exist in American society.
GONYEA: Colin Asher is the author of "The Midnight Special: A Secret Prison History Of American Music." Colin, thank you.
ASHER: Thank you so much.
(SOUNDBITE OF ELMO HOPE'S "THREE SILVER QUARTERS") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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