Prison Music

 

Colin Asher, The Midnight Special, The Secret Prison History of American Music, W. W. Norton and Company, 2026

The US prison and jail population has exploded.  According to an estimate of The Sentencing Project, inmate numbers have grown by 500% over the last 40 years, reaching almost 2 million. The proportion of people in prison, over 0.5%, is far higher than in any other democratic country. Black adults are imprisoned at a rate nearly five times higher than white adults. These numbers, high though they are, understate the impact of incarceration. They do not account for the fact that people move in and out of prisons and jails, so the total number of people imprisoned over a period of time, say a year, is much greater. And they do not account for the family members of the prisoners, whose lives are often uprooted.

The numbers reflect a grossly repressive society, a society bent on punishment of the poor and non-white, not on crime prevention and certainly not on rehabilitation. We have a lot of research showing that the growth of incarceration has not made us safer and has not rehabilitated most of the inmates. See a study by Vera, an organization opposed to mass incarceration.

In our varied communities, we have different experiences of the prison system. In many communities of non-white minorities, repressive law enforcement and incarceration are familiar.  In middle-class and white communities, they are not. People in the latter communities are usually unconscious of living in a society so characterized by penal institutions.

That in turn means that most of us middle-class folk are unaware of the indirect but major ways in which the prison system impacts our lives. For one thing, imprisoning people is expensive: on average it costs over $60,000 a year to imprison one person (the costs vary widely from state to state). According to Jacob Kang-Brown and Peter Wagner, writing for The Prison Policy Initiative in 2026, the US is spending $116 billion annually on corrections. This is in addition to the police and court expenses. Most of it is wasted money, unavailable for purposes like education and health care.

The wasted money is only one of the hidden ways the prison system affects us. The consequences for our cultural lives are also major. Colin Asher has written a new book, The Midnight Special, showing that much of our music comes from and is influenced by the prison system.

The Midnight Special is not a comprehensive account of the relationship between prisons and music; it is a series of examples. Asher chooses albums by five musicians, four Black and one white: Huddie Ledbetter (Lead Belly), Elmo Hope, Ike White, Tupac Shakur and Johnny Cash. Of these, I am very familiar with the music of Huddie Ledbetter and Johnny Cash, somewhat familiar with Tupac Shakur and not familiar at all with Elmo Hope and Ike White.

Ledbetter (1888 – 1949) is often thought of as one of the three foundational figures of American folk music, along with Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. Born into rural poverty, he spent many years in brutal jails and prisons, in Texas, Louisiana, and later in New York. As far as Asher can tell, he was usually innocent of the charges for which he was convicted, or at most the charges were greatly exaggerated. He was not the cutthroat murderer he was often portrayed as. He became a legendary musician in prison, and that led both to the commutation of his sentences (twice) and to his “discovery” by the musicologist John Lomax. It turned out, however, that Lomax was a racist, who distorted Leadbelly’s public image so much that it was unrecognizable. It was not until the last dozen years or so of his life that he was able to perform and record freely. He left us a treasure of folk songs, some of them based on his prison experience, many of them based on the lives of poor Black people in the Jim Crow south. That treasure is a well, dipped into by countless later musicians.

Elmo Hope (1923 – 1967) was a jazz pianist, a pioneer of bebop. He was a close friend of two better known bebop artists, Bud Powell and Thelonious Monk, and was their equal or more. He worked with some of the greats, including John Coltrane and Sonny Rawlins. He was known within the jazz community as a genius, but never received much public recognition, and was almost always poor. He struggled with drug addiction. He had many run-ins with the law, and was jailed on Riker’s Island, the principal New York city jail. Fortunately. he was able to compose there, but throughout his short life his criminal record prevented him from working in nightclubs and bars in New York. The prison system did not provide Hope with a source of material, as it did for Ledbetter, but instead denied him the opportunity to ply his trade and to develop as an artist. The story was the same for many other Black jazz musicians.

Ike White (1945 – 2014) did almost all his creative work in prison. At the age of 19 he murdered a store owner in Oakland, California. The judge determined that the murder was inadvertent, so White was spared the death penalty. For most of the rest of his life, he was moved among California state prisons. He developed his talent on guitar, piano and other instruments, and as a singer. He was given the room to exercise those talents in several (not all) of the prisons, particularly Tehachapi and San Quentin. He recorded an album in prison, but he did not acquire a reputation outside the prison walls. When he was freed, his life dissipated, and he never achieved his dream of becoming a star in the music scene. In 2014, he hanged himself. Prisons, repressive as they were, provided him the structure to be creative, yet at the same time disabled him from having a successful independent life on the outside.

Tupac Shakur (1971 – 1996) was one of the most influential hip-hop singers. His mother was a Black revolutionary and a member of the Black Panther Party; he grew up in a movement that was not consistently violent, but which did not renounce violence. His art was ambivalent about violence: sometimes he seemed to embody the persona of a thug, while often he denounced the damage that violence inflicted. He was the victim of police violence and was often arrested. His only long prison sentence resulted from a charge of rape. His album Against the World was released in 1995 while he was in prison, and rose to #1 on the charts. He proclaimed that he and his generation of young Black men would die when they were 25. When he was 25, he was gunned down in a drive-by shooting.

Johnny Cash (1932 – 2003) was one of the finest country musicians. He is the only person on Asher’s list whom I saw perform—three times. He wrote and sang many songs about prisons; the best known was Folsom Prison Blues. He and his entourage performed often in prisons, including San Quentin, and recordings of those performances became immensely popular. He had enormous empathy for the lives of prisoners, but little direct experience. In spite of numerous episodes of drunkenness, dangerous behavior and abuse of pills, he never spent more than one night in jail. Why? Well, it is no coincidence that he was white. The same life lived by a Black man would have led to multiple prison sentences. The difference in experiences is a dramatic indicator of the racism of the judicial system. In 1996, his friends put on a tribute concert for him at the Kennedy Center. The film of the concert shows him sitting beside President and Mrs. Clinton. We have no record of Ledbetter, Hope, White or Shakur sitting next to a president at a concert in their honor.

The five stories are different. The Black men experienced the brutality and degradation of the prison system. Ledbetter survived the brutality and wove it into his art. Hope was able to compose in jail, but found that the system severely restricted his art. For White, it was not so much his art as his life that was destroyed by prisons. Prison released Shakur to a life, and early death, of violence. Cash’s songs were formed by the prison system, although he himself escaped it. What is common to all five is that prisons shaped their lives and their art. And they are only examples of the effect of our grotesque penal system on our culture.

Asher wants us to think of what the world would have gained if Ledbetter, Hope, White and Shakur had been treated like Cash. And what the world would have lost if Cash had been treated like them.

John Isbister

August 8, 2026