#2 - on music and freedom
"a bird that stalks / down his narrow cage / can seldom see through / his bars of rage / his wings are clipped and / his feet are tied / so he opens his throat to sing." - Maya Angelou, Caged Bird
Dear Reader,
Let me take you on a quick journey back in time.
On 13 January 1968 (around exactly 54 years ago from this day), renowned American singer-songwriter Johnny Cash (whose life inspired the famous biopic film ‘Walk The Line’ starring Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon) began a revolution by recording the album, ‘At Folsom Prison’ of his live performance at Folsom Prison.
“Dressed in his trademark black, he paradoxically celebrated prison and outlaw life while creating a damning portrait of the prison experience that pricked the era’s concern for society’s outcasts. It was also the first live recording of a prison performance, and it crystalized Cash’s dark image. And then it thrust into the public spotlight chiseled inmate Glen Sherley, who embodied Cash’s belief that compassion for prisoners could lead to redemption for us all.” - Michael Streissguth, for Rolling Stone
“John came from very humble beginnings in Arkansas. So even though he acquired a lot of things in life, he still felt for these people and he made it very obvious, too. He was so real with it. And that’s what brought him to prisons. And a lot of them turned their lives around because of our willingness to go entertain them that told them that we cared.” - Michael Grant, original member and bassist of Cash’s Tennessee Two
Music, as an instrument of liberty, can be traced right back to the slave trade and the introduction of jazz and the blues. In A History of the World in 100 Objects, British art historian Neil MacGregor quotes J.A. Rogers, Jamaican-American author, journalist and historian:
“The true spirit of jazz is a joyous revolt from convention, custom, authority, boredom, even sorrow - from everything that would confine the soul of man and hinder its riding free on the air.”
The first African slaves arrived in British North America in 1619, brought to the American colonies on European owned ships to provide labour. MacGregor documents the history of an Akan Drum (AD 1700 - 1750), a West African drum which by 1730 had travelled from West Africa to Virginia, USA.
The Akan Drum, Source: BBC
MacGregor speculates that it was taken on a slave ship as a gift to the captain to be used not for communal merry making, but for a cruel practice of ‘dancing the slaves’: slaves were forced to dance to the rhythms of the drum to keep healthy and fight depression which could lead to retaliation and suicide. The irony is that although used to save lives, music here represented an antithesis to freedom as it was forced upon the slaves.
The drums were eventually used when singing songs of community within the plantations. The power of music in captivity can be noted when the very same drums were classified as weapons and banned in 1739 when they were employed in South Carolina as a call to arms at the outbreak of a violent rebellion. MacGregor remarks with profundity:
“these utterly dispossessed people were allowed to carry nothing with them - but they brought the music in their heads.”
// Shifting our focus back to Folsom, and more specifically on music in prisons //
There is something almost hopeful (more on this later) about volitionally consuming and creating art within the confines of a prison that bestows the concept of freedom with an entirely new dimension: one that perceives freedom to be not so much a gift that can be granted by external forces, but to be a choice, on an intrinsic level. We can chose how we react to the circumstances we are confined in, and thus we are free. The ‘hopeful’ element is present because it creates the hope that hope itself could be something that is not futile, and that it can exist - not in a fairytale-like, Disney-like, too-good-to-be-true sense; that hope can look gritty and real and tough to muster (like courage); that hope is not necessarily a dainty ‘thing with feathers’.
“That’s The Beauty Of Music. They Can’t Get That From You.” - Andy Dufresne, The Shawshank Redemption
There is a scene (linked below) in Frank Darabont’s The Shawshank Redemption - it juxtaposes both the uncontainable force of music against the labels that society attempts to confine people into. It never fails to give me goosebumps. I couldn’t say there is a single time that this scene has not permeated through the shell of numbness which I shield myself in as I navigate confrontations with the suffering in our world. Andy Dufresne (played by Tim Robbins), an inmate and the protagonist of the film, breaks prison rules when he plays an Opera record from the warden’s office via the speakers for all his fellow inmates to hear (right after locking the guard in the restroom). For this, he is given a month of solitary confinement.
The stillness that sweeps over the hundreds of men as they stop in their tracks to listen encapsulates brilliantly the softness that there is to the masculine. Redding, a fellow inmate (phenomenally played by Morgan Freeman), narrates the following words:
"I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about. Truth is, I don’t want to know. Somethings are best left unsaid. I like to think they were thinking about something so beautiful it can’t be expressed in words and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you those voices soared, higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away, and for the briefest of moments, every last man at Shawshank felt free."
At Folsom Prison (January, 1968)
Folsom Prison was just as much as ‘a gray place’ as Shawshank was. When describing the drabness of Folsom, Marshall Grant (member of the Tennessee Two) stated in an interview:
“There was just no joy here. The atmosphere in there is unlike any place you’ve ever been in your entire life. Whatever you saw outside is exactly the opposite of what you see in here. And everybody is controlled. Everybody is watched, including us. We were prisoners in these prisons. So that sort of made it uncomfortable.”
During the live performance at Folsom, most inmates were cautious not to respond with too much energy. They feared condemnation from the guards if they engaged too enthusiastically. During “Dark as a Dungeon,” one inmate began to laugh, which led to Cash laughing as well. Cash casually responded to an audience member saying “Oh, hell” with:
“I just wanted to tell you that this show is being recorded for an album released on Columbia Records, so you can’t say ‘hell’ or ‘shit’ or anything like that.”
He performed ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, which he wrote in 1953 whilst serving in Germany with the US Air Force. Cash was heavily influenced by the 1951 film, ‘Inside The Walls of Folsom Prison’ which led to the performance. ‘Folsom Prison Blues’ has one of the most daring lines in country music history; “But I shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.” Johnny has said:
“I sat with my pen in my hand, trying to think up the worst reason a person could have for killing another person, and that’s what came to mind.”
Radio stations stopped airing the song due to this line upon the assassination of Robert Kennedy on June 5th, 1968. The label edited the line out and re-released the song - shooting it to instant success at #1 on the country charts and breaking into the mainstream Top 40. Cash also won two GRAMMY awards for the song. Since its release, the album has been acknowledged by Rolling Stone and Time as one of the greatest albums of all time. The Library of Congress chose to add it to the National Recording Registry.
At San Quentin Prison (February, 1969)
‘A Boy Named Sue’ (recorded live at San Quentin Prison in 1969) - since today’s underlying theme is one of the fusion of masculinity and sensitivity, I would encourage you to hear the lyrics that explores the relationship between a father and son, along with themes of femininity as weakness. Although Cash would write his own songs, this famous song was written by well-known children’s book writer (author of ‘Where the Sidewalk Ends’) Shel Silverstein.
Johnny had kickstarted the prison performances trend, one of his most legendary artistic milestones, moving many others to participate, including the Sex Pistols. The ’70s would see him escalate the scale of prison performances. Other live prison albums were recorded as well, including at San Quentin (1969), På Österåker (Sweden 1973), and A Concert Behind Prison Walls (Tennessee State Prison 1976).
“On a very basic level, Folsom marked a personal and professional renaissance for Cash.” - Michael Streissguth, for Rolling Stone
I would like to end with a tribute to all those who are currently in confinement (of any kind) with this TED Talk by Phil Kaye - a Japanese-American poet, writer and filmmaker. In this talk, he performs a poem about his experience of teaching poetry to the inmates of a Maximum Security Prison. The complete talk can be accessed via the link above. I share an except from his poem which stood out for me (Tim is one of his students):
“Tim volunteers to read a poem.
It’s about paper, about how wonderful it is, in a place like prison, to have a space where you can see your own thoughts, hold them in your hand.
We share poems about all sorts of things. There’s a poem about learning how to whistle, a poem about first kisses, a poem about the joys of a good, long, well-timed fart.
We share the dusty corners of ourselves, the parts no one asks about, the things that don’t show up on a police record or an artist bio.
For that moment, we are 17 men sharing poetry, not defined by our age or our past but the four walls around us. Last year, I travelled thousands of miles sharing poetry, but some of the most talented artists I know rarely leave a prison cell.”