Recordings made in a notorious penitentiary are surprisingly inspirational and uplifting
WORLD CHOICE
Some Mississippi Sunday Morning Parchman Prison Prayer
Glitterbeat GBCD 143 37:28 mins
The most celebrated set of field recordings ever made was Alan Lomax’s Murderers’ Home – work songs he collected in 1947 at Parchman Farm, the American South’s most notorious jail. With Some Mississippi Sunday Morning, the intrepid collector Ian Brennan has gone back to that same jail, which, 70 years on, is still notorious for its violence: it has its own death row, and – with ghoulish appropriateness – its own cemetery.
But Brennan was not after work songs. After three years of negotiations with the authorities, he won a precious slot to record a routine Sunday morning service in which inmates – some possibly awaiting execution – sang their own version of Gospel standards. Some were performed with rudimentary instrumental backing, others with clapping or a honky-tonk piano. The oldest performer was a former rock and roll singer who had abjured crime, but had stayed on in prison as a chaplain.
From a cappella and delicately inflected tenor ornamentation to a hypnotic basso profundo chant; from an urgent rap about a singer’s remorse to a hopeful choral outburst: this is inspirational music, triumphant rather than beaten down and defeated. ★★★★★
April round-up
These are frustrating times for those wanting to catch the world’s endless varieties of local music, before globalism extinguishes them for ever. The only small record companies still supporting ethnographic research are Glitterbeat (see left) and the Paris-based Ocora label, which accompanies every CD with detailed musicological notes.
Most of Ocora’s releases these days are of recordings made 20 or 30 years ago when the world was a safer place for explorers, but the latest CD is almost contemporary. Kim Hae-Sook is the leading exponent of the gayageum, Korea’s indigenous zither and close cousin to the Chinese qin and the Japanese koto. However, its music is much more difficult to penetrate than theirs, and on Gayageum Sanjo Kim gives us an entire unadulterated suite.
It takes time to discern structure, and to appreciate the interplay of emotions which is the essence of Kim’s sanjo form. To call this music austere is a massive understatement: it proceeds decorously, with each note or chord given a slow, wide vibrato punctured every so often by the d
