Colin Asher’s new book, “The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music,” explores the careers of five musicians, from American music icon Johnny Cash to lesser-known Ike White, and how those musicians’ ties to the American penal system affected their careers and popular culture. There are Arkansas connections in this book, including Johnny Cash, Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter’s visits and performances at Arkansas prison farms 90 years ago, and the subject of the brief introductory chapter, Calvin Leavy.
Asher: There would be a lot more about Calvin Leavy in the book if I had been able to find more out about him, I certainly. An important figure in Arkansas. Not as important a figure in music history broadly as he should have been, and that has a lot to do with where he got his start.
As I recount in the book, Leavy was a gifted musician, a working musician, and got his first real shot when he recorded a song called “Cummins Prison Farm,” which lead into the book. Fortunately slash unfortunately, it’s a great song, but he was encouraged to promote the song as memoir rather than simply as a work of art.
This had some, I would argue, some fairly devastating effects for his career. It ended up that his best opportunity at making some money off his music was also to pretend that he had a criminal history, which he did not have.
(Excerpt of “Cummins Prison Farm” by Calvin Leavy)
Asher: And that eventually sort of comes to define him in the public eye. He’s known not only for the song “Cummins Prison Farm,” which anybody who hasn’t heard it should definitely listen. It’s an amazing track. But as somebody who had done time, which again, he had not done. He took promotional photos where he was wearing fake prison garb. He recorded other songs intended to get people to buy into the idea of him as a criminal. And as I say, that sort of defines the rest of his career.
Eventually, whatever that was worth, whatever that sort of fictional history was worth to him as a musician, the diminishing returns. And very, very tragically, once that happens, Leavy does start supplementing his income by selling drugs and eventually is convicted and receives what I consider to be a completely unjustifiable and immoral sentence of more than life in prison.
To the best of my knowledge, he was never convicted of any violent crime, but ends up getting a sentence of life plus some years and is tragically and almost sort of Shakespeareanly sent to Cummins Prison Farm, whose privations he had documented so well.
(Excerpt of “Cummins Prison Farm” by Calvin Leavy)
Kellams: Each of the five musicians receiving major profiles in Colin Asher’s book, “The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music,” become synonymous during their careers with incarceration. For Johnny Cash, the outlaw association works in his favor. For others, like Lead Belly or Tupac Shakur, it does not work as well commercially or personally.
Asher: In America, we both love authority and we love to buck authority. And that plays out in our musical culture as well. There is this persistent thread that runs throughout American music, way back to English murder ballads. Again, we like to play the outlaw and both sort of embrace authority figures in the state and then also challenge them.
The way that plays out for musicians varies, I would say over time, but also, as you point out correctly, more specifically according to race. It’s very often the case that a Black musician who is encouraged to play the role of the outlaw is then presumed to actually have done the things they sing about. And it’s often a moral stain on them.
A white musician has a bit more leeway. Somebody like Johnny Cash who you let off with, Johnny Cash can play the outlaw in one song. He can record “Folsom Prison Blues” or he can record something like “Delia” where he talks about murdering a woman. And then he can the next day record a song about stealing strawberry cake or about Indigenous rights.
And Johnny Cash and many white musicians can play the outlaw and can benefit from those tropes but are not trapped by them. And also there’s no moral stain attached to their singing these songs and playing the outlaw the way there often is for Black musicians.
Kellams: There’s also a theme in the book about the role that, I don’t know, help or rehabilitation or guidance does or doesn’t play in prison. There are stories here of musicians who, someone who learns basically to play music in prison and achieves a bit of celebrity. But life on the outside with no help can be a challenge.
Asher: Absolutely. I think there’s a push and a pull there. There’s actually something I’ve thought quite a bit about in promoting the book, because I get asked about it a decent bit. Should we be thinking about music in prisons and music culture in prisons as a form of rehabilitation?
I both think that there is something to that, and also I think that it’s sort of aside from the point. I think that it is an affirmative good that human beings be allowed to express themselves, free or incarcerated, period. I think that is one thing that we are on this planet to do, I think, is to express our humanity. So I think people should be allowed that. And I think people should be allowed that whether or not there is any rehabilitative function to it, period.
Having said that, I do also think that there is probably some rehabilitative benefit. It’s something that hasn’t been studied all that well. But it is something, when I’ve spoken to incarcerated and formerly incarcerated musicians, they will say that it has this sort of protective effect to be able to be in spaces, to play music in prison, to express themselves, to connect with other people in the act of making music.
Having said all that, I should also say that on its own, it’s not enough. You’re referring to Ike White. It’s the fourth musician that I focus on a lot in the book. Very, very talented man. Somebody also who was quite damaged. Some of that comes before his time in prison. Some of that comes while he’s in prison. And someone who is quite aware of the fact that prison was harming him at the same time that it was giving him opportunities to play music.
He, as you say, he essentially learns how to be a musician in a sort of formal sense while he’s in prison. He learns to play a dozen instruments or so, writes hundreds of songs and records an album. And all of those things are great, and he’s quite talented, and he works incredibly hard at developing his talent.
At the same time, he’s in California prisons at a period when there is tons of violence inside the prison walls. Things are not run as professionally as they might be today. And he suffers quite a bit. He’s hurt in prison. He’s sent to solitary confinement, and he is able to say while incarcerated that this place made me and warped me. And those two things ends up sort of fighting inside him.
When he gets out, he has all the talent. He has some small amount of fame at least. But he also has all of these sort of twisted character traits that he himself pointed to. And ultimately, sadly, is not really ever able to put together a career or put together a sort of stable and loving family, because he had, by the end, spent about 14 years in prison.
Kellams: Three of the people you profile in here, Lead Belly, Johnny Cash, Tupac, they’re famous. And although you still reveal things about their lives and their stories that I didn’t know, but Ike White, how did you find out about him, and what did it take to find out about his life?
Asher: Yeah. Well, credit where credit’s due. I should note that there is a documentary about Ike White. I believe I first heard about Ike White because I heard reference to his album. His album is sampled in hip-hop, not incredibly broadly, but enough that his name was sort of around. And then some documentarians put out a film about him that was released, I believe, at the end of the pandemic. And it’s quite a good documentary, and anybody interested should check it out. So that brought him more to my attention.
I should say choosing somebody somewhat obscure was also intentional on my part. I was trying to do quite a few things with this book. Each section not only focuses on different musician and a different genre, also tries to say something about the different carceral sort of schemes that were dominant in the period that I’m talking about. But also I wanted to talk about different aspects of the effect that policing, incarceration have.
And I wanted one section that was set primarily inside prisons, so that I had an opportunity to talk a lot about the musical culture that exists in prisons. And if you’re going to do that, probably you’re going to end up writing about a more obscure musician. And so that’s how I ended up landing on Ike White.
There were a few potential subjects. In the ’60s and ’70s especially, there were a few bands that were active in prisons and that did some recording, and some that were even allowed outside of prison walls to play and to tour. Ike was really compelling to me, in part because he did put so much serious work into his musicianship and was able to record inside and did speak really openly about that push and pull I talked about a moment ago between him being able to develop his talent and him also feeling like he was being quite damaged by his experience in prison.
And didn’t want the book to be a hagiography. I didn’t want people to come away from the book thinking, oh, we can keep prisons just the same. If we just give people instruments, they’ll be fine. Because that’s not the case. And that was not the case for Ike White.
Kellams: I think one thing you do well in this book is it’s not a book of exploitation. You’re not making money off the more familiar faces or musicians here. And it’s also not just plain celebration. We learn about Ike White’s crime and his struggles. And I wonder what it was like for you to make sure that you just gave us a book like that.
Asher: Yeah. Thank you for saying that. And that was actually quite important to me. Two things are true. One, I have deep sympathy for everybody that I write about in the book. And eventually, by the end of the process of writing it, I liked all of them quite a bit to some extent or another, some more than others.
But as I said a moment ago, I did not want it to be a hagiography. I did want to make it clear that people can and very often do harm one another. That does not detract from their humanity, even if they’re harming other people. And it does also not obviate whatever talent they have.
And I think that if we want to exist as human beings in a human society, we need to be able to talk about all of those things plainly. Ike White was a great talent. Ike White also shot a man in the commission of a robbery. I don’t approve of that behavior. I also don’t think it makes him less human than me. And that is really at the heart of the book. It’s something that I sort of build up to and then talk about at the end.
The point is not that talent obviates responsibility for any moral stain that a person brings upon their character. It’s that we should all have the ability to express ourselves through music, through any other art, sort of mix our own stories, the stories of every other person that’s part of our common humanity.
Kellams: There are centuries-old songs identified as murder ballads that have been passed down through folk singers from generation to generation to generation. Twentieth-century country music was filled with hits about crimes and the cost of committing those crimes. Songs like “Delia’s Gone” by Johnny Cash that describe a man committing murder.
Asher: And again, Johnny Cash can sing “Delia.” Johnny Cash can sing “Joe Bean,” I believe, I killed 40 men by the time I was 10. And nobody presumes that he’s confessing. Everybody understands that he’s telling a story. It’s a morality play, and that’s it. And that, I should, I hasten to say that is as it should be, right? Music is music. Art is art. He should be able to sing those songs without feeling like he’s condemning himself.
Now, Black musicians very often don’t have that leeway. The example that’s most prominent in my book, at least, is Tupac Shakur, who, like Johnny Cash, at least early in his career, he’s singing parables, essentially. He’s telling stories about what he has seen in society and dramatizing things that he’s seen.
In his case, not only is it sort of presumed that every crime that he mentions in his songs is some crime that he has committed or intends to commit, but he actually ends up getting blamed for a crime committed by somebody he had never met and never would meet, just because that person supposedly had been listening to one of his songs.
He gets slandered as a result, as he’s attached to what’s called for a long time the rap murder trial. This is something that would never happen to Johnny Cash. If somebody killed their wife and then said, “I did it because I was listening to ‘Delia’s Gone,’” it would be laughed out of court.
Kellams: You did go into a prison in the course of writing this book.
Asher: I did. I got to visit Sing Sing prison, which is just north of New York. It feels a little weird to say it, but it’s easily the most fun I had writing the book. Great program called Musicambia. Anybody listening should check them out. They’re a nonprofit, and they run musical programs in a number of states. They invited me in. I was able to see some classes at Sing Sing prison. I was able to see a performance, and it was just incredibly touching.
There was an amazing amount of talent in the room. Some of the most earnest individuals I’ve spoken to in a long time. Some of the friendliest, some of the most curious. The performance I saw in there, I’m not ashamed to say, brought me to tears. And really just testament to what being able to create art and what being able to express yourself can do for people.
To a person, everybody I spoke to said, in prison generally they’re unhappy and they feel controlled. This is the purpose of prison. In the music room, in their classes, they feel as if they’re not in prison anymore. They feel as if they’re free human beings. And that is just invaluable to them.
Colin Asher is the author of the new book “The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music.” We spoke by phone late last week. This is Ozarks at Large.
Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
