The blues returns to Mississippi's Parchman Prison Farm
PARCHMAN, Miss. — Nine big men sit attentively at their desks inside the Mississippi State Penitentiary—the once infamous prison labor colony known as Parchman Farm. They're wearing green-and-white striped pants, and shirts with "MDOC convict" stenciled on the back, for Mississippi Department of Corrections.
Their crimes range from drug possession to armed robbery to homicide. But inside this austere classroom, they're all college students.
The course is The Blues Tradition in American Literature.
They're exploring how the themes of blues lyrics—bad luck and trouble, sexual escapades, and euphoric freedom—get expressed in literary forms. They're listening to blues songs by Big Joe Williams, Ma Rainey, Little Walter, Hound Dog Taylor, and Bessie Smith. They're reading poetry from Langston Hughes and a play by August Wilson.
