MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
A journalism organization that reports on American prisons has launched a different kind of series. The Marshall Project sends out one song each week performed by an incarcerated person. Reporter Justin Kramon has more.
JUSTIN KRAMON: One day in 2014, Marshall Project staff writer Maurice Chammah was surfing eBay when he found a listing for a record.
MAURICE CHAMMAH: And it said on the eBay page that this was music that was recorded by men who were incarcerated in Texas back in the '70s.
KRAMON: The performance was part of an annual prison rodeo, where incarcerated people competed and provided comedy and music. When he got the record, he put on a track called "That Huntsville Rodeo."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "THAT HUNTSVILLE RODEO")
THE WYNNE UNIT BAND: (Singing) When the purple morning glories start to bloom in all around, I know it's time to head for Huntsville town.
CHAMMAH: I was surprised that a lot of the songs, first of all, were very good. And then second of all, it was very fun and a lot lighter than you might think.
KRAMON: He thought about how much prisons have changed, and eventually, it led him and his Marshall Project colleagues to an idea.
CHAMMAH: I set out to identify 25 songs that, to me, meaningfully captured the history of how music tracks with the history of mass incarceration over the last century.
KRAMON: The weekly newsletter that resulted is called Redemption Songs. The genres range from jazz to opera to a lullaby sung by an incarcerated woman to her newborn in the free world. A lot of the music was captured with professional gear, though the recording setups varied. But the overall level of musicianship is striking, like an R&B group called The Escorts, whose 1974 track is "Disrespect Can Wreck."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "DISRESPECT CAN WRECK")
THE ESCORTS: (Singing) Disrespect sure can wreck. Sure it can. It really can. I know it can. It really can.
CHAMMAH: It's, like, infectiously groovy.
KRAMON: And Chammah says it also speaks to a deeper theme in American incarceration.
CHAMMAH: Prisons have always had a really strong tension and contradiction between punitive and rehabilitative aims.
KRAMON: Prisons in the '60s and '70s emphasized rehabilitation, which meant a lot of arts programs.
CHAMMAH: And that was a kind of golden age of prison music.
KRAMON: But in the tough-on-crime '80s and '90s, many of these rehabilitative programs were dismantled. This coincided with the rise of hip-hop. Without resources, rappers in prison often recorded cheaply over phone lines. But recently, a label called FREER Records started going into prisons to produce professional recordings. One album is by an incarcerated woman, known as B. Alexis, whose 2022 track "Black Barbie" appears in the newsletter.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BLACK BARBIE")
B ALEXIS: (Rapping) I know the spotlight can get drastic 'cause everybody's fake. All your friends are made of plastic.
KRAMON: B. Alexis is incarcerated in a prison in the South. We're not using her full name because she worries she could face retaliation from that prison. She's serving a 30-year sentence for murder.
B ALEXIS: Just coming from where I'm from, being who I am, it's so many strikes already against me.
KRAMON: B. Alexis wrote poetry while she was in solitary. Turning it into music has helped make her story about more than just her crime.
B ALEXIS: We still have life after whatever we go through, whether it's mistakes, whatever we dealing with growing up, whatever. We still have life.
KRAMON: This is the heart of this project for Chammah - the pathway it opens for empathy. He says the lack of empathy for incarcerated people is a big reason we're comfortable with extremely long and punitive prison sentences.
CHAMMAH: So I see music as a way to fight that cycle, to kind of break past people's empathy gaps.
KRAMON: And along with all the great music he's discovered in prisons, he's also found some hope.
For NPR News, I'm Justin Kramon.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)
UNIDENTIFIED MUSICAL ARTIST: (Singing) Growing free. Hold on. Wait for me. Hold on to your dreams. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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