Overview

In American popular music, we often glorify rebellious artists and “outlaws.” But The Midnight Special reveals an untold story about the way criminal justice has impacted the lives and work of US musicians. Examining five pivotal albums, Colin Asher’s narrative traces the history of twentieth-century incarceration from southern prison-farms to the heroin-driven drug war that villainized a generation of jazz artists to the dawn of mass incarceration. He argues that white artists, unlike their Black colleagues, often avoided severe punishment or even profited from jailtime. And he shows how prisons occasionally incubated talent, but more often shortened careers and distorted the public’s perception of musicians and their value to society. With keen musical analysis and thrilling biographical portraits of Huddie Ledbetter, Elmo Hope, Johnny Cash, Ike White, and Tupac Shakur, The Midnight Special writes the history of prisons into American music—a story as important as it is overlooked.

Full Product Details

9781324051398

Table of Contents

Reviews

A rich history of prisons and music.-- ""Kirkus Reviews"" 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"" 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 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 Colin Asher's hauntingly beautiful 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

Author Information

Colin Asher is the author of the critically acclaimed Never a Lovely So Real. His work has been featured in the Believer, the Baffler, the New Republic, and the Los Angeles Review of Books. He lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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