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The Secret Prison History of American Music
by Colin Asher
This innovative history explores the rich tradition of music behind bars and shows how policing and prisons have shaped our musical culture from blues to hip-hop.
In American popular music, we often glorify rebellious artists and "outlaws." But in The Midnight Special, Colin Asher tells a deeper story about the criminal justice system's impact on our musicians, explored through compelling portraits of five artists whose careers span the twentieth century.
Opening with folk and blues artist Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter, who was made to perform wearing prison clothes, Asher traces the intertwined histories of music and incarceration, from Southern prison farms of the Jim Crow era, through the heroin-driven mid-century drug wars that villainized a generation of jazz artists, and to our present era of mass incarceration.
Asher shows how the suggestion of criminality has often benefited white artists, while prosecutions often hurt Black musicians. Comparing the divergent trajectories of jazz pianist Elmo Hope with country singer Johnny Cash, Asher examines how violent and discriminatory policing stifled Hope's career and led to the creation of his album Sounds from Rikers Island (1963), while forgiveness and lenience brought us Cash's masterpiece At San Quentin (1969).
With keen musical analysis and sociological insight, The Midnight Special examines key themes in culture and criminal justice, from the movement for prison reform that allowed soul musician Ike White to stage thrilling concerts while locked up and record his album Changin' Times (1977), to the crushing cultural weight of mass incarceration a generation later. Closing with Tupac Shakur's Me Against the World (1995) and stories of music in prisons today, The Midnight Special recounts how prisons occasionally incubate talent but more often shorten careers and distort the public's perception of musicians and their value to society.
An urgent book about the ways music can affirm an individual's sense of humanity in dehumanizing circumstances, The Midnight Special writes the history of prisons into American music―a story as important as it is overlooked.
"Asher creates rich, vivid portraits of all five of his subjects...He discusses at length these artists' morally ambiguous songs about murderers and convicts, written with a touch of grace and a recognition of shared humanity. This chronicle is full of little epiphanies...A well-written and mesmerizing group portrait of five musical outlaws." — Booklist (starred review)
"Asher does especially nimble work in portraying his subjects as three-dimensional figures while detailing how the record industry exploited their links to the prison system to profit off their music, often in ways that flattened their life narratives. This is illuminating." —Publishers Weekly
"A rich history of prisons and music." —Kirkus Reviews
"Colin Asher's The Midnight Special is a work of compassion and literary merit, and a revisionist history that demands readers question popular tropes about outlaws, criminals, and creative genius. These pages contain candid and moving portraits that highlight the creativity, resilience, and suffering that have shaped American music, and after reading them, you won't be able to hear our songs the way you did before opening this book." ―Abbott Kahler, New York Times bestselling author of Eden Undone
"As soulful and informative a book about slavery's children, which means all Americans, that I have read in a good long time. Music makes souls, prison steals them; this extraordinary work tells five ugly-beautiful tales of the sorcery that happens in the United States of Incarceration when those ontological opposites collide." ―Rick Perlstein, New York Times bestselling author of Reaganland
This information about The Midnight Special was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Colin Asher is the author of the critically acclaimed Never a Lovely So Real. His work has been featured in the Believer, the Baffler, the New Republic, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.
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