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Wake Up Dead Man: Hard Labor and Southern Blues

Amazon.com Price:  $3.98 (as of 16/04/2019 08:53 PST- Details)

Description

Making it in Hell, says Bruce Jackson, is the spirit at the back of the sixty-five work songs gathered on this eloquent dispatch from a brutal era of prison life within the Deep South. Through engagingly documented song arrangements and profiles in their singers, Jackson shows how such pieces as “Hammer Ring,” “Ration Blues,” “Yellow Gal,” and “Jody’s Got My Wife and Gone” are like no other folk music forms: they’re distinctly African in heritage, diminished in power and meaning out of doors their prison context, and used exclusively by black convicts.

The songs helped workers through the rigors of cane cutting, logging, and cotton picking. Most likely most necessary, they helped get to the bottom of the men’s hopes and longings and allowed them a subtle outlet for grievances they might never voice when face-to-face with their jailers.

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