AFRO AMERICAN WORKSONGS IN A TEXAS PRISON

Pete Seeger and Toshi Seeger, their son Daniel, and folklorist Bruce Jackson visited a Texas prison in Huntsville in March of 1966 and produced this rare document of of work songs by inmates of the Ellis Unit.

Worksongs helped African American prisoners survive the grueling work demanded of them. With mechanization and integration, worksongs like these died out shortly after this film was made.

Bruce Jackson's book Wake Up Dead Man (University of Georgia Press) is a highly recommended study of work songs in Texas prisons.

The large plantations in the U.S. South were based on West African agricultural models and, with one major difference, the black slaves used worksongs in the plantations exactly as they had used them before they had been taken prisoner and sold to the white men. The difference was this: in Africa the songs were used to time body movements and to give poetic voice to things of interest because people wanted to do their work that way; in the plantations there was added a component of survival. If a man were singled out as working too slowly, he would often be brutally punished. The songs kept everyone together, so no one could be singled out as working more slowly than everyone else.

-- From Bruce Jackson's background notes on making this film.

Transcript:
http://www.folkstreams.net/pub/ContextPage.php?essay=198

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Category:

Music

Tags:

• Pete Seeger
• Toshi Bruce Jackson
• Blues
• Texas Prison
• African Worksongs
• Jazz

[harryit]

@Nayelle1290 Prisons are still used to generate profits, it's called the "prison industrial complex", the short of it is that the government gives corporations money to house it's prisoners. I could open up a prison if I had enough money and that's a pretty huge problem.

[crmsnsrpnt]

American History............

[mrallcz]

Blunt axes

[mrallcz]

Negro Prison songs. Great.

[garbage411]

this inspired little richard to write the famous song "piano riff TIMBER!"

[SpaseGoast]

Could you just imagine how ripped these men are from hard labor 6 days a week?

[peacexisxfree]

@harryit I 100% agree.

[harryit]

@Nayelle1290 4 men cutting a tree have a hard time surviving if they fall out of rhythm, so they are indeed singing to survive. Culture isn't genetic and those songs that were sung in Africa were long dead in 1960's America.

The songs here made time go quicker, made the singers not get cut to pieces and generally made life less shitty on a fucking work field. Perhaps we can agree that these songs made survival EASIER.

[MochniTalkingBird]

Any idea when this film was made? Other than the reference to Director of Prisons George Beto, whose tenure ended in 1972, it's hard to tell.

[jenniewilliamsmural]

I grew up with Alan Lomax's "Negro Prison Blues" Murderers Home etc. I'm not sure how I found it. In those days, I only had a few records - Joni Mitchell Blue, Mississippi John Hurt, Billie Holliday and Nina Simone and a few others - that music made me. I used to sing these songs when I sewed and worked all by myself - and you can still find their voices in mine.