Songs from Prisons in Early 20th-Century U.S. Songbooks: Incarceration, Race, Morality, and the Question of 'Prison Music'

Description

In the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. audiences gained unprecedented access to music produced in prisons. The professionalization of folklore and ethnography, an increased curiosity about the realities of imprisonment, and developments in portable recording technology precipitated the collection of music by incarcerated people. Published books containing transcriptions of songs collected in prisons brought this music to a wide audience.

In this talk, I read volumes containing songs from prisons published by several authors: Howard Odum (1926), Carl Sandburg (1927), John and Alan Lomax (1934), and Lawrence Gellert (1936). I argue that these songbooks show that the 1920s and 1930s were a pivotal moment, during which “prison music” underwent a series of shifts. Whereas earlier volumes framed songs from prisons as evidence of immorality and criminality, later on, such songs became prized objects of U.S. heritage to be conserved and analyzed by scholars. Finally, they became something people sang in their homes. This process was concurrent with the consolidation of music from prisons into a genre of sorts. Different authors used different designations for music in this genre, but always connected it directly to its genesis in the prison.

Thus, by the end of the 1930s, knowing “prison music,” owning folk song collections containing it, and singing it at home was becoming part of a well-bred, educated, and moral middle-class identity. A complicating factor to this repositioning, however, is that many of the authors involved in publishing music from prisons, as well as the bulk of their audiences, were non-incarcerated and white, while much of the music they published was by Black incarcerated people. Therefore, in the final part of the talk, I examine the moral quandaries created by encouraging such audiences to sing the music of incarcerated people. I draw on Dylan Rodriguez’s critique of the term “prison writing” as “domesticating and delimited,” to consider how the equally fraught category of “prison music” was historically constructed and to provide context for the ways that music publications from the 1920s and 1930s shaped understandings of incarceration that persist into the present.

—Speaker Bio—
Velia Ivanova is Postdoctoral Fellow at the Faculty of Music, University of Toronto. She holds a PhD in Music from Columbia University and is currently working on a book project about the musical legacy of prison ethnography. Velia’s work has been published in the Journal of the Society for American Music and has been supported by the Jon B. Lovelace Fellowship (Library of Congress), the Margery Lowens Dissertation Research Fellowship (Society of American Music), and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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