Rural Rhythm

Music historian Tony Russell explores a collection of records of early country music from the 1920s and ’30s, unlocking and revealing their hidden stories. The seventy-eight essays on selected 78rpm discs explain what they tell us about the musicians who sang and played the songs and tunes, the listeners who absorbed them, and the development of the genre—old-time music—in which they found a home. To illuminate their world, the author details how they were recorded, the intentions and interventions of the companies that made the recordings, and their fates once they were issued. There are songs, and stories of songs, about home and family, love and courtship, marriage and separation, childhood and schooldays, old age and death, crime and punishment, farms and floods, chain gangs and chain stores, wagons and automobiles, dogs and mules, drink, disasters, jokes, journeys, money, memories, and much more. Drawing on new research, contemporary newspapers, and previously unpublished interviews, Rural Rhythm charts the tempos and styles of rural and small-town music-making, and the gearshift that accelerated country music from the barndance pace of the 1920s to the hyperdrive of late-’30s proto-bluegrass and Western Swing: from “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane” to “New San Antonio Rose.” At the same time, it notates the larger rural rhythm of life in these years in the South, Southwest, and Midwest, with its recreations, its rituals, and its oddities, to produce a narrative that blends the musical and social history of the era.

Unlocked Minds: August Wilson’s Suspects, Ex-Cons, or Soon-to-Be Convicted Characters in his American Century Cycle

This essay is a meditation on the significant number of carceral references made by the late Mr. August Wilson in his American Century Cycle. It sets out to delineate the various instances where Mr. Wilson mentions the many associated pains, both mental and corporal, that crop up in lives of his characters, related to prisons, jail, work farms, chain gangs and other forms of detainment and imprisonment.

Race matters in criminology: Introduction to the Special Issue

As race scholars and criminologists we are attuned to Du Bois’s (2007: 106) still meaningful injunction to ‘oppose this national racket of railroading to jails and chain gangs the poor, the friendless and the Black’. Yet we have become concerned that criminology seems rather inured to the long-standing and deeply entrenched patterns of race and criminal justice which characterize many high-income countries, and certainly England and Wales and Australia, which are the geographical focus of this Special Issue of Theoretical Criminology.

The Strange Career of the Convict Clause: US Prison Imperialism in the Panamá Canal Zone

This article follows the “convict clause” in the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution – the exception for slavery and involuntary servitude to continue as punishment for crime – to the Panamá Canal Zone. It argues that US officials used the prison system not only to extract labor, but to structure racial hierarchy and justify expansionist claims to jurisdiction and sovereignty. It reveals how despite the purported “usefulness” of the Black bodies conscripted in this brutal labor regime, the prison system's operational modality was racial and gendered violence which exceeded the registers of political economy, penology, and state-building in which that usefulness was framed. The Canal Zone convict road building scheme then became a cornerstone from which Good Roads Movement boosters, who claimed the convict was a slave of the state, could push for the Pan-American Highway across the hemisphere. Afro-Panamanian and Caribbean workers, who were the majority of those forced into Canal Zone chain gangs, protested the racism and imperialism of the prison system by blending anti-colonial and anti-racist strategies and deploying a positive notion of blackness as solidarity and race pride. Their efforts and insight offer an understanding of the US carceral state's imperial dimensions as well as enduring lessons for movements struggling to broaden the meaning and experience of freedom in the face of slavery's recurrent afterlives.

Prison History

Prisons are government-sanctioned facilities designed for the long-term confinement of adults as punishment for serious offenses. This definition of prisons, frequently belied by actual practice but an accurate representation of the prison as an ideal type, emerged relatively late in human history. For most of Western history, incarceration played a minor role in punishment and was often reserved for elites or political offenders; however, it was rarely considered a punishment in its own right for most offenders. The notion of the prison as a place of punishment emerged gradually, according to most accounts, over the 17th through 19th centuries. Although there were several precursors to penal incarceration, the most influential was the 17th-century Dutch workhouse, the first formal uses of penal incarceration in a prison as a distinct institution began with the American proto-prison in late 18th century and evolved into the modern prison in the early to mid-19th century. These modern prisons proved influential around the world. In late-19th-century America, however, the modern prison experienced a series of re-imaginings or iterations beginning with a proliferation of different forms, including distinctive forms of Southern punishment (convict leasing, chain gangs, and plantation-style prisons), specialized prisons across the country (women’s prisons, adult reformatories, and maximum-security prisons), and efforts to reduce reliance on prisons (drawing on innovations from Australia and Ireland). This flurry of activity was followed by a period of serial re-creation in the 20th century in the form of the big-house prison, the correctional institution, and the warehouse prison, including its subtype: the supermaximum-security prison. In this recent period, American prisons have once again become models copied by other countries.