V/A - Parchman Farm: Photographs and Field Recordings: 1947-1959

"In 1947, 48 and 59, renowned folklorist Alan Lomax went behind the barbed wire into the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman. Armed with a reel-to-reel tape deck -- and, in 1959, a camera -- Lomax documented as best an outsider could the stark and savage conditions of the prison farm, where the black inmates labored from cant to cant," chopping timber, clearing ground, and picking cotton for the state. They sang as they worked, keeping time with axes or hoes, adapting to their condition the slavery-time hollers that sustained their forbears and creating a new body of American song. Theirs was music, as Lomax wrote, that "testified to the love of truth and beauty which is a universal human trait." - Dust-to-Digital.\r\n"A few strands of wire were all that separated the prison from adjoining plantations. Only the sight of an occasional armed guard or a barred window in one of the frame dormitories made one realize that this was a prison. The land produced the same crop; there was