MUS 105 Lecture Notes - Lecture 8: Prison Farm, Mississippi State Penitentiary, Rosetta Reitz
20 Jan 2016
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Week 8 reading questions: songs of prison farms of the american south i. ) Wake up dead man: hard labour and southern blues. Athens: the university of georgia press. (preface: vii-ix; introduction: xix-xxi) Every blue artist did their first singing in their church. Place where isolate black communities could most easily found were the southern prisons, where black prisoner were kept entirely segregated, continuing tradition of work songs and individual singing. Reitz, r. liner notes to jailhouse blues: women"s a cappella songs from parchman penitentiary library of congress. Black american singing must be sung speech, conversational in phrasing is the most difficult thing for a young singer to learn ease about the voice, almost as if singing is not so much the point. Major issue: free the text and let it ride in loose, easy airway. Technique is to move up above speech to singing while staying in the conversational relationship.
