‘It’s a charged place’: Parchman Farm, the Mississippi prison with a remarkable musical history
The Guardian, September 20, 2023: ‘It’s a charged place’: Parchman Farm, the Mississippi prison with a remarkable musical history
“The US prison is arguably the modern plantation. The 13th amendment of the constitution abolished slavery and involuntary servitude – except as punishment for a crime, a detail that has been leveraged ever since to the point where today, most incarcerated people are Black: 38% of the US prison population, while only 12% of US residents are Black. Ava DuVernay, whose documentary, 13th, lays out the path from slavery to the prison-industrial complex, said in 2016: ‘There is a really clean clear line of the black body being used for profit and for politics.’
“Nowhere is this truer than Parchman Farm, which today has beds for nearly 5,000 inmate workers, many of whom are continuing its remarkable musical legacy. The producer Ian Brennan wanted to give them the opportunity to be heard. ‘It’s mathematical. It’s not philosophical. It shouldn’t be politicised,’ Brennan says. ‘Mississippi has the highest poverty, the second highest rate of incarceration in the US, and African Americans are incarcerated at least five times the rate of white people. That inequity has no place in even a semblance of a democracy. That’s my motivation.’ In February, he travelled to Parchman Farm to record a Sunday gospel service with the blessing of the prison chaplains, which was released last week as Some Mississippi Sunday Morning.
“Brennan has been recording for nearly 40 years, with much of his work documenting underrepresented people and places. In 2011, he won a Grammy for his work in the Sahara on Tinariwen’s album Tassili, and he was nominated for another for 2015’s Zomba Prison Project in Malawi. After three and a half years (a wait exacerbated by the pandemic), Brennan was finally granted access to the Mississippi State Penitentiary with a week’s notice – in part, because of pressure applied by lawsuits filed by the rapper Yo Gotti and Team Roc, the philanthropic arm of Jay-Z’s Roc Nation label, on behalf of the inmates, citing inhumane living conditions.”
Additional reading:
Blues Blast Magazine, September 3, 2023: Parchman Prison Prayer – Some Mississippi Sunday Morning | Album Review
People, June 16, 2023: Prisoners Expose Horrific Abuse — and Shocking Deaths — on Secret Cell Phone Footage in Miss. Prison
U.S. Department of Justice, April 20, 2022: Justice Department Finds Conditions at Mississippi State Penitentiary Violate the Constitution
