Instrument of the State

Abstract

Abstract Angola Prison is the largest and one of the most notorious state prisons in the United States, built into a slave plantation that Louisiana bought in 1901. It has also been the most musically significant. Following a documentary film project, this book combines oral histories and extensive archival research to piece together an account of how prisoners and the administration have used music for more than 120 years. The book brings together well-known musicians who served time there, including Lead Belly, Charles Neville, and James Booker, as well as a litany of musicians who made significant contributions to the prison’s music scene only to die there or be unable to establish careers upon release. Instrument of the State: A Century of Music in Louisiana’s Angola Prison traces how musicians find small but essential freedoms by playing jazz, R&B, country, gospel, rock, and fusion. In doing so, the history expands folkloric definitions of “prison music.” The book considers the broader musicality of the prison as a way of understanding state power and the fragments of hope and joy that remain in its wake. Through many decades, music both clings to and resists the prison’s shifting and often conflicting missions: rehabilitation, slavery, and abandonment. The perspectives of incarcerated musicians reveal how music responds to violence, reform, prisoners’ rights, sensationalism, and power through the twentieth century. Instrument of the State is an indictment of the brutality of prison, its disproportionate effects on African Americans, and the desperate profiteering of a deliberately underfunded state agency.

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