![]() ![]() He was thirteen at the time.īut in these prison-farms, remarkably, music thrived – mostly as a survival mechanism. They called it the Black Annie…Every time he hits this guy, flesh and blood actually come off this cat…He was out and they were still beating him.”ĭixon goes on to relate how, for being caught watching this, he too was beaten with the strap round the head, resulting in deafness for the next four months. ![]() It’s leather, about five or six inches long, a handle on it about two feet long and holes in the end of this strap about as big as a quarter. Boy, they’ve got five guys on this one guy…and this guy – they called him Captain Crush – has got a strap about eight inches wide. “They’d haul us out there to work and put us on a great big ditch…We were on top cutting and all of a sudden I hear somebody screaming, “Oh Lawdy! Oh, Lawdy, captain please stop doing it…I run over there peepin’. Bluesman Willie Dixon, who was born in 1915 was once sentenced to 30 days for vagrancy on the Harvey Allen County Farm. They worked from dawn to dusk in the brutal heat, surviving on worm-infested food, kept at it by the brutal application of the “Black Annie,” a heavy leather strap. Prisoners were put to work as if they were slaves, with men working until they dropped dead or burnt out with sunstroke. “The end result was a stream of back bodies to the county chain gangs and local plantations” (Oshinsky).Īfrican Americans were also worked in unbearable conditions in Mississippi’s penitentiary, Parchman, which sprawled over 20,000 acres of rich Delta farmland. Many of the convicts had fallen foul of local ordinances for minor infractions, were simply not able to pay the hefty fines levied, and then fell foul of well-off whites who paid their fines and forced them into indentured slavery characterized by back-breaking and life-threatening labour. “Convicts dropped from exhaustion, pneumonia, malaria, frostbite, consumption, sunstroke, dysentery, gunshot wounds and “shackle poisoning” says historian David Oshinsky – and in the process made fortunes for plantation owners. They were savagely beaten, made to work seemingly endless workdays and treated with murderous neglect. Black people convicted by the law were leased to farmers and businessmen and literally worked to death. Consider, for example, the convict leasing which took hold in Mississippi towards the end of the nineteenth century and went on for decades. Because under Jim Crow, African Americans were abominably treated by a justice system that might better be called an injustice system. Songs from the 1920s onward complain about the privations of life in prison, loneliness, lost love and injustice. The blues grew up not only in plantations but in prisons. But with the blues, it’s not just drinkers, ramblers and vagrants who take a starring role, but also convicts. We don’t normally expect prisons to play a role in the history of music. ![]()
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