Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music

Colin Asher

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Book cover for Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music
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Book cover for Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music
Image for variant 9781324051398

Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music

Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music

Colin Asher

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Description

In American popular music, we often glorify rebellious artists and "outlaws." But in The Midnight Special, Colin Asher tells a deeper story about the criminal justice system's impact on our musicians, explored through compelling portraits of five artists whose careers span the twentieth century.

Opening with folk and blues artist Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter, who was made to perform wearing prison clothes, Asher traces the intertwined histories of music and incarceration, from Southern prison farms of the Jim Crow era, through the heroin-driven mid-century drug wars that villainized a generation of jazz artists, and to our present era of mass incarceration.

Asher shows how the suggestion of criminality has often benefited white artists, while prosecutions often hurt Black musicians. Comparing the divergent trajectories of jazz pianist Elmo Hope with country singer Johnny Cash, Asher examines how violent and discriminatory policing stifled Hope's career and led to the creation of his album Sounds from Rikers Island (1963), while forgiveness and lenience brought us Cash's masterpiece At San Quentin (1969).

With keen musical analysis and sociological insight, The Midnight Special examines key themes in culture and criminal justice, from the movement for prison reform that allowed soul musician Ike White to stage thrilling concerts while locked up and record his album Changin' Times (1977), to the crushing cultural weight of mass incarceration a generation later. Closing with Tupac Shakur's Me Against the World (1995) and stories of music in prisons today, The Midnight Special recounts how prisons occasionally incubate talent but more often shorten careers and distort the public's perception of musicians and their value to society.

An urgent book about the ways music can affirm an individual's sense of humanity in dehumanizing circumstances, The Midnight Special writes the history of prisons into American music--a story as important as it is overlooked.

Critical Reviews

As Colin Asher's hauntingly beautiful The Midnight Special reveals, despite America's seemingly insatiable desire to silence human beings behind its highest and thickest prison walls, the music that so many nevertheless manage to create inside--their powerful lyrics, notes, rhythms, harmonies, beats, and refrains--has transcended those brutal spaces. Thanks to his extraordinary book, we are able truly to hear these joyful, angry, rebellious, and audacious sounds. It is a true gift--one that reminds us of the resilience of the human spirit, even in the most brutal of confines.--Heather Ann Thompson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Blood in the Water: The Attica Prison Uprising of 1971 and Its Legacy

Colin Asher's The Midnight Special finds the bitter, barbed-wire thread through the history of American music--our cruel carceral heritage--and tells this history anew through five compelling chronological stories, a masterful synthesis with prose that sings like music and slices through our hypocritical fetishization of the outlaw.--Dan Charnas, PEN Award-winning author of The Big Payback and Dilla Time

Colin Asher's The Midnight Special is a work of compassion and literary merit, and a revisionist history that demands readers question popular tropes about outlaws, criminals, and creative genius. These pages contain candid and moving portraits that highlight the creativity, resilience, and suffering that have shaped American music, and after reading them, you won't be able to hear our songs the way you did before opening this book.--Abbott Kahler, New York Times bestselling author of Eden Undone

As soulful and informative a book about slavery's children, which means all Americans, that I have read in a good long time. Music makes souls, prison steals them; this extraordinary work tells five ugly-beautiful tales of the sorcery that happens in the United States of Incarceration when those ontological opposites collide.--Rick Perlstein, New York Times bestselling author of Reaganland

Asher does especially nimble work in portraying his subjects as three-dimensional figures while detailing how the record industry exploited their links to the prison system to profit off their music, often in ways that flattened their life narratives. This is illuminating.-- "Publishers Weekly"

A rich history of prisons and music.-- "Kirkus Reviews"

Asher creates rich, vivid portraits of all five of his subjects . . . He discusses at length these artists' morally ambiguous songs about murderers and convicts, written with a touch of grace and a recognition of shared humanity. This chronicle is full of little epiphanies . . . A well-written and mesmerizing group portrait of five musical outlaws.-- "Booklist (starred review)"

Publishing Information

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Pub date: 2026-06-30
Length: 336 pages

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