The new album “Some Mississippi Sunday Morning” collects gospel songs recorded inside a notorious penitentiary.
The best-known version of the gospel song “I Give Myself Away,” by Pastor William McDowell, is an opulent display of religious praise. For more than nine minutes, backed by swelling instrumentation and a full choir, McDowell sings of surrendering himself in lines such as “Lord, my life is in your hands.
Within this container of cruelty, amid atrocities born of the mother of all atrocities, there was always music. There were work songs, through which incarcerated people could occupy their voices and their minds while their bodies toiled. There were field hollers, rising above the repetitive sounds of sharecropping—upbeat if the work was moving quickly, slower when it had begun to take its toll.
In the late forties, Alan Lomax went back to Parchman to record both songs and interviews, which were later compiled on an album. During one interview, Lomax asks a man named Bama what makes a good work-song leader. It doesn’t matter if a person can “sing just like Peter could preach,” Bama replies. If “he didn’t know what to sing about, well, he wouldn’t do no good.
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