- Description
- xx, 339 pages : illustrations; 25 cm.
- Summary
- "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, author Benjamin J. Harbert visited Angola, gathered oral histories, and conducted archival research to piece together an account of how prisoners and the administration have used music for over 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 unable to establish careers upon release. Instrument of the State: A Century of Music in Louisiana State Penitentiary traces how musicians find small but essential freedoms by playing jazz, R&B, country, gospel, rock, and fusion. In doing so, Harbert 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. Music connects to the prison's shifting and often conflicting missions: rehabilitation, slavery, and abandonment. The perspectives of incarcerated musicians will reveal how music responds to violence, reform, prisoner 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"--
- Series Statement
- American musicspheres series
- Uniform Title
- American musicspheres.
- Subject
- Genre/Form
- History.
- Bibliography (note)
- Includes bibliographical references (pages 317-329) and index.
- Contents
- Forewords / by Calvin Lewis, Myron Hodges, and Wayne Kramer -- Introduction -- Astonishment -- Association -- Politics -- Surfaces -- Inflection -- Recapitulation.
- ISBN
- 9780197517512
- 019751751X
- 9780197517505
- 0197517501
- 9780197517536 (canceled/invalid)
- 9780197517543 (canceled/invalid)
- LCCN
- 2022060595
- OCLC
- YBP 2022060595
- Author
Harbert, Benjamin J., author.
- Title
Instrument of the state : a century of music in Louisiana's Angola prison / Benjamin J. Harbert.
- Publisher
New York, NY : Oxford University Press, [2023]
- Copyright Date
©2023
- Type of Content
text
- Type of Medium
unmediated
- Type of Carrier
volume
- Series
American musicspheres series
American musicspheres.
- Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 317-329) and index.
- Other Form:
Online version: Harbert, Benjamin J. Instrument of the state [1.] New York : Oxford University Press, 2023 9780197517536 (DLC) 2022060596