THE MIDNIGHT SPECIAL

American prison music in five albums.

A complete history of music in American prisons might be impossible—much of this music would be as lost or ignored as the prisoners who made it. Instead, Asher (Never a Lovely So Real, 2019) chose five albums that capture how prison has influenced musicians and how incarcerated musicians have reflected American culture. In a chapter on Ike White’s Changin’ Times (1977), Asher shows how prison reforms focusing on rehabilitation made it possible for White to record the album entirely inside Tehachapi prison in California. Another chapter on Johnny Cash’s live album At San Quentin (1969) details the musician’s visits to the California prison—Cash said that he performed at San Quentin “to give a man some hope.” From the outset, Asher connects prison music to issues in American history, most notably racism, given that Black Americans were inordinately imprisoned and therefore have an outsized influence on this music. In a chapter on Lead Belly’s The Midnight Special and Other Southern Prison Songs (1940), Asher details how the blues musician, encouraged by his white manager, used “the myth of the Black criminal” to present what Jim Crow-era listeners thought was an “‘authentic’ Black performer.” The book is most compelling when he connects these albums to a wider history, as when he links the characters in Tupac Shakur’s raps to the similar downtrodden characters in Lead Belly’s blues. At times, however, the author’s analysis of both music and prisons takes a backseat to the life stories of these musicians. The final section, on Tupac’s Me Against the World (1995), features little analysis of the rapper’s lyricism, and while it deftly connects his music to wider issues facing Black Americans at the time, his incarceration itself receives less attention. Still, Asher overcomes the difficulty of describing music in words, placing the reader in the room, for example, as one band produces a “skin-tingling record.”

A rich history of prisons and music, though light on analysis.