From Merle Haggard and Ozzy Osbourne, Meek Mill and T.I. (all former prisoners) to radios and music-artists inside today, music sets a tone like the musical score in a prison movie. Whether as a chest-thumping rap meant to let everyone know that you’re not dead, or a song written in a fever-dream while lying in a prison cell: raps, beats, drumming, and even actual instruments echo throughout prisons across the country on a regular day.
Alcatraz, that most infamous American prison, allowed some prisoners to keep guitars in their cells. Available today in many prisons are these, and/or roll-up plastic keyboards and harmonics, while other prisoners must rely on nothing but whatever they can improvise. Many prisons have a “music-room,” and good prison choirs and religious bands are ubiquitous. Rap-battles occur regularly on basketball courts between games (over which fights, stabbings, and even murders have occurred).
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-ROCKING OUT-
It’s night as I walk to the music room, formerly a large closet-sized storage room in the prison’s multipurpose building. I give my pass to the hallway officer and go down the hall. Over fifty feet away I can hear the muffled sounds of our drummer keeping a beat through the cinderblocks. As I get closer, I start to hear the chugging of our lead-guitarist’s electric guitar. Opening the door, I’m blasted with concert-level acoustics for a moment [proof that the noise-dampening carpet-squares glued to the wall really do work], as I pick up the only bass guitar from the five cheap guitars hanging from hooks on the wall.
As for me, I took a few guitar lessons as a kid, but music wasn’t important to anyone I knew. Then, years later in prison, my bunkie got a guitar. After the novelty wore off for him and he only rarely played it, he told me I could pick it up anytime I wanted. I learned a handful of songs I liked, though I only rarely played in front of others and was too shy to sing. Still, word got out that I could play a bit, and I was asked to play in a prison band.
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-THE SOUNDTRACK TO LIFE INSIDE-
In the ’90s, desktop-sized radios with speakers could be purchased in Michigan prisons (as well as some other states). Rap, R&B, jazz, and rock blare through the remaining ones in cells and on the yard. Those old Sony Walkman cassette-tape players were available for purchase until 2010, long after cassettes disappeared from stores and only specialty mail-order companies approved by the prison system sold music for them. CDs were never allowed on the basis that they were too sharp and pointed if broken. Music changed inside when a prison-distribution company’s small, cheap, gas station-quality mp3 players worth about $10 were approved by the state to be sold to prisoners for hundreds of dollars… but despite gripes about cost, a new world of modern music became available and were purchasable by individual song [3]. Some musical artists are so popular in prisons across the country that they might not realize that their new mansion might have been fully financed by the hundreds-of-thousands of convicts each regularly spending a whole day’s wage for their songs.
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-PRISON CONCERTS-
Very few prison bands create their own music. Our prison rock band, “Collusion”, was a cover-band. This is because playing a cover of songs gave us specific goals to work together towards, and because it’s likely at least one of the band members will be transferred to another prison before everyone learns to collaborate with each other well enough to write new music as a group [5]. We were the only rock band at the time, though there were R&B bands, jazz bands, and a rap-duo that also created their own beats on the electric keyboard.
I pick up the bass guitar and plug it into the amp, and soon we’re all jamming. We plan on putting on a concert to the whole prison in a couple months, and we’re doing a “rock history” with one song from the ’60s, ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, ’00s, and ’10s. I feel the music flow through my hands as Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” gives way to Pearl Jam’s “Alive (both songs that particularly resonate with men in prison).
Prison concerts have a long history, the most famous of which were Johnny Cash’s real concerts in Folsom Prison in California at the start of his career (which also gave him some serious street-cred), and Elvis Presley’s fictional ones in “Jailhouse Rock.” Today, some prisons still get visited by outside performers (often Christian artists), but most music concerts are put on by the inmates. And the prison goes wild for them, surrounding the improvised stage of the basketball court or crowding into the gym or chapel. Unlike professional concerts, no one in the band gets paid, but they’re done for the love of music and for entertainment for everyone else. Things like soaps and ramen noodles occasionally get thrown on stage in appreciation *(ALSO: “thank you”, prisoner-fan of ours if you’re reading, for throwing those pair of tighty-whightey underwear on stage that one time)*. People show up drunk on prison hooch or high. Fights sometimes break out. The ambience is fully alive. But the best feeling, and the one that makes the effort we put into bringing the music together worthwhile, is when the audience full of rival factions and races and gangs who otherwise might be wanting to shank each other instead all break out, in unison, singing and clapping along with our music. In those moments, it feels… like we did something that made things better, if only for a moment.
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-CREATING MUSIC-
The most polished music comes in those moments, but that music is usually written by other hands. The real creativity takes place on the yard, the cellblocks, the individual cells. This is where incarcerated musicians of varying talents play around, goof off, try new riffs, new sounds, and new ideas. It happens on the outdoor benches where an elderly guitar player teaches, to a kid just learning, something he wrote after half a century in prison. A former house-band member for Motown instructs another prisoner on the keyboard for a relatively low fee of a $4 bag of instant coffee a month. One cellmate raps to the other and gets feedback. Here, music is CREATED, not specifically about prison but about life itself and the good times and the bad and all the moments in between. This is where proud men relive their glory days, where tough guys reminisce, where contemplative men reflect on love and loss, and where a life wasted in prison might (for a few moments) gain meaning, all in song. Guitars, flexible roll-up keyboards, harmonicas, and the eponymous beats against the desk or wall keep the rhythm. Sometimes beautiful and sometimes not, they often tells stories from the deepest part of the soul. They are good, bad, hopeful and sad, loud and meek. They are… real.
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-THE AUTHOR’S MUSIC-
I played guitar on-and-off for years, either on my own guitar given to me by a friend or in a prison band, with amateurs and former professional musicians. Between loss and heartbreak, mistakes and striving for better, between nearly dying on my floor of my prison cell and the countless days without even the few small distractions prison normally offers, I found feeling flowing out of me when I played. Some of it I wrote down so I could sing and play again. They became songs of mine from a life I don’t recommend following but one both different from and connected with others. I’m no expert musician, no great singer, and they’re rough around the edges in places. But I got to express myself, and it’s my hope that others can feel something similar in them too. The goal is the goal of all music: to hopefully make someone feels something… something real.
