Record Album, "Negro Prison Songs," 1958

Folklorist Alan Lomax, believing all people and cultures deserved equal respect, spent his career documenting remote musical traditions. This record's powerful songs, collected 1947-8 at the Mississippi State Penitentiary, attest to the parallels between the Deep South's oppressive prison system--requiring arduous physical labor under constant threat of physical punishment--and the experiences of enslaved work groups on 19th-century plantations.