Inmates at Mississippi’s Parchman Prison learn music : NPR

PARCHMAN, Miss. – Nine large men sit intently at their desks inside the Mississippi State Penitentiary—the once infamous prison labor colony known as Parchman Farm. They are wearing green and white striped trousers, and shirts with the “MDOC convicted” stenciled on the back, for the Mississippi Department of Corrections.

Their crimes range from drug possession to armed robbery to murder. But inside this austere classroom, they are all college students.

The course it is The Blues Tradition in American Literature.

They are exploring how the themes of blues lyrics—bad luck and trouble, sexual escape, and euphoric freedom—are expressed in literary forms. They are listening to blues songs by Big Joe Williams, Ma Rainey, Little Walter, Hound Dog Taylor, and Bessie Smith. They are reading a poem by Langston Hughes and a play by August Wilson.

The feeling of blue is all too familiar

For these incarcerated students, the course syllabus may be new but the feeling of the blues is all too familiar.

“Of course, the blues is not only music, but it is also life that is lived hard,” she says Adam Gussow, professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of Mississippi. He is 65, with a shock of white hair, an intense pedagogy, and a deep love for the blues. He taught this course for 25 years, usually to young undergraduates with limited life experiences. This is the first time he has had a class full of grown men living in captivity.

“I taught them things about music, per se, that maybe they didn’t know,” he says. “But they took that term and applied it to the life challenges they had and the negativity they faced.”

Ledale Williams, 46, hometown Vicksburg, Miss.: “I’ve never looked at the blues the way I look at the blues now. This is trials and tribulations that have been here for almost 29 years since I was a kid. So that it is the blue in itself.”

Mitchell Price, 55, Dallas: “My mother’s daughter was a qander and that’s what they did in the fields, they sang the blues. At the end of the rows, at break time, when they’re eating baloney and crackers and cheese. . They used to sing the blues and someone was playing the harmonica. It’s part of my history because I used to hear my family talking about these things.”

Joseph Westbrooks, 63, Pontotoc, Miss.: “It’s more to her than listening to the blues, when you live the blues. That’s our daily life. You’re oppressed every day by being in prison.”

On this day, Prof. Gussow is teaching Zora Neale Hurston’s masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God, about a Black woman’s troubled coming of age in rural Florida in the 1930s. The protagonist, Janie, goes through three men. The last one is a rogue and a blues musician named Tea Cake.

“Tea Cake deepens Janie’s feelings of blue,” Gussow teaches. “Tea Cake teaches Janie all about the blues in a particular way. He loves her and then he leaves her, and then he comes back. That’s an incredibly bluesy moment and I’m going to combine it with some music.”

We combine life’s challenges with music

He opens his laptop and clicks on a link to Bumble Bee Bluesrecorded by Memphis Minnie almost a hundred years ago.

“Bumblebee, bumblebee, where have you been so long?” she sings, to a haunting acoustic guitar, “You stung me this morning, I’ve been quiet all day.”

Gussow exhorts his students: “This is a song about a man putting desire in a woman, right?” The men respond, “uh-huh,” in knowing voices.

“They’re just saying that when he leaves, she misses him,” says Christopher Bradley, 48, of Moss Point, Miss. “It’s like saying, ‘Hey, I miss my baby.’ I’ll be happy when you get home from work.’ “

Parchman Prison spans 28 square miles of America’s musical bottom. This is the Mississippi Delta. Beyond the tall fences and concertina wire, behind the green fields of crops now farmed by contract farmers, are the tiny agricultural towns that produced some of the greatest bluesmen who ever lived: BB King , Albert King, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Son House , and Robert Johnson.

They knew to stay out of Parchman. Life on the prison farm was brutal. The institution was founded in 1901 as a huge state-run plantation. Chain gangs did mandatory field work. Harsh discipline was given by guards and trusted convicts.

The bluesman of the Delta Bukka White served time for assault in Parchman and sang about it in his classic, Parchman Farm Blues, released in 1940.

We got to work in the morning, right at the start of the day,

We got to work in the morning, right at the start of the day,

Right at sunrise, that’s when the work is done.

I’m on ole Parchman farm, I gotta go back home,

I’m on ole Parchman farm, I gotta go back home,

But I hope that some day, I will win.

“The penitentiary here at Parchman was called the camps for a reason,” says inmate Mitchell Price, who remembers those times. “They were labor camps that you say symbolize slave camps. They put them here to pick cotton and they used to whip them with actual whips.”

Melvin Johnson, 62, Jackson, Miss., was also doing time back in those days.

“About 5:30, you should be goin’ there to that field,” he says. “Sometimes it’s so cold out there they don’t care. All they want you to do is pick that cotton. You go out there or else. And one day it’s so hot there you pass. They don’t care.”

Forced farm labor in Parchman ended in the mid-2000s. But problems persist.

Last year, the US Department of Justice released results of an investigation which “revealed evidence of systemic violations that generated a violent and unsafe environment for people incarcerated at Parchman.” A spokesman for the Mississippi Department of Corrections said that report does not reflect improved conditions at the prison in recent years. He pointed to accreditation in January by the American Correctional Association—the the first time in nine years.

Using education to re-enter society

The University of Mississippi offered college courses in Parchman on Shakespeare, Mississippi writers, the civil rights movement, and now, the blues. The winning program is called the Prison to College Pipeline.

Patrick Alexander, associate professor of English and African American Studies at Ole Miss, is the director and co-founder of the program. He says education can play a role in how well an offender does when re-entering society.

“We have one student who went to Mississippi College,” says Alexander, “and he’s looking not just for the assignments and the books but the opportunity to be seen as a leader [in the classroom]. Something that won’t necessarily happen when you’re inside Parchman.”

These students will wear caps and gowns in mid-May and attend a graduation ceremony inside the prison for the completion of the three hour course.

In addition to learning about the blues literary tradition, they get a taste of playing the blues. Students take harmonica lessons on Blues Harps provided by the Hohner Company. But they can’t take the mouth harps back to their living quarters so they have to practice in the classroom. Gussow not only has a Ph.D. in English from Princeton, but is a world class harmonica player who teamed up with bluesman Sterling “Mr. Satan” Magee for more than three decades.

“I’m going to tap my foot and I’m going to take the four draw. Anyone can go…” …he plays a note and the students follow. He plays another note and the students follow. Pretty soon they’re tooting a primitive riff.

“Okay, give yourselves a round of applause!” Gussow says with a laugh. “This is the best we’ve done.”

A muscular man in a white goatee and glasses suddenly stands up from his desk at the back of the classroom. Arthur Gentry, 65, of Houston, has been locked up in Parchman for more than four decades. With a husky voice, he breaks into a spontaneous version of the Parchman Prison Blues, breathing new life and new pain into a venerable musical tradition.

I got the penitentiary blue,

day after day,

all night long,

I got the blue,

we all got the blues.