Various Artists - Afro-American Folklore from Texas State Prisons (2019)

Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons, is an album recorded in 1964 by folklorist Bruce Jackson. The LP features work songs, blues, spirituals, preaching and toasts (recited poems) performed by a group of inmates in the Lone Star State’s then-segregated agricultural prison farms. The recordings on this album were made in Texas prison farms in July 1964. Bruce had gone there in the hope of recording black convict worksongs, a tradition that derived from slavery, and, before that, was imported from Africa. Many of the prisons in Texas, Mississippi and Louisiana where such songs had been sung, had been built on the sites of slaverytime plantations. It was as if the owners changed, but not much else...

Incase you haven't a record player, this release comes with an exclusive download code for the whole album, so you can download to your computer...!

Tracklist:
1.01 - Johnny Jackson - Raise 'Em up Higher (Work Song) (2:59)
1.02 - Wynne - Marshall Phillips - Don't Look so Downhearted, Buddy (Toast) (1:26)
1.03 - Joseph "Chinaman" Johnson - Move Along 'Gator (Work Song) (3:32)
1.04 - Joseph "Chinaman" Johnson - Three Moore Brothers (Cante-Fable) (5:06)
1.05 - Johnnie H. Robinson - Assassination of the President (Topical Gospel) (2:40)
1.06 - G.I. Jazz" Hendricks - Don't Be Uneasy (Spiritual) (1:54)
1.07 - Johnny Jackson - Rattler (Work Song) (5:18)
1.08 - Louis "Bacon & Porkchop" Houston - Hammer Ring (Work Song) (1:27)
1.09 - Mack Maze - T.B. Bees (Toast) (1:05)
1.10 - Joseph "Chinaman" Johnson - If You See My Mother (1:36)
1.11 - Elmer Bernstein - Just Like a Tree Planted by the W (Work Song) (3:53)
1.12 - Houston Page - See How They Done My Lord (Spiritual) (2:17)
1.13 - W.D. "Alec" Alexander - Daniel in the Lion's Den (Preaching Parody) (4:21)
1.14 - Virgil Asbury - Forty Four Hammers (Work Song) (4:39)