To celebrate my first paycheck, I made a visit to a secondhand CD store, and found myself a treasure. Murderous Home, volume one of two: prison songs recorded in 1947-8 at Parchman Farm, a segregated penitentiary where prisoners were used as a labour force for a self-sufficient farm (including several thousand acres of cotton fields). (Musical Traditions have a favourable review, including some sound clips that I can’t play.)

This is the real thing. This is chain-gang music sung by chain-gang convicts, recorded in the open air; sung to coordinate a line of men digging or four men double cutting a live tree: “standing in a square around the tree, with two men chopping from opposite corners of this square on beat one, the other pair on the alternate beat.” The work songs are sung almost painfully slowly, because the rhythm has to be kept up from early morning until dusk makes working impossible.

Anyone who saw the film O Brother, Where Art Thou? knows the sort of songs these are, but the raw reality of these recordings is quite different. These lines, after all, are being sung by men who are working, and working hard. (In my favourite track the voices break into a slight scream on the high notes, evidence of the effort they’re putting in.)

The CD also contains two short excerpts from interviews, which would be totally uninterpretable without the full lyrics list and transcripts (the broad southern accept has to be heard to be believed). Here’s a little taster, in which Bama explains how he ended up a regular in the penitentiary:

So, after I got ’um [the police] started runnin’ me, I just kept on doing wrong — fightin’, stealin’ — you know — an’ robbin’. And sometimes I wouldn’t be doing nothin’, but I’d been doin’ so much ’til that when they’d get me, I’d due to been got anyhow. An one, two time they ’rrest me, an’ I told ’um I hadn’t done nothin’; an’ they said well, “I arrest you in advance — you gonna do sompin’.” If you get a chance to listen to this gem, grab it. I’m going to hunt down the second CD also, apparently it’s just as good. Expect more raptures here when I find it.