Parchman Farm — Mississippi State Penitentiary

Parchman Farm — formally the Mississippi State Penitentiary — is a working prison farm of some eighteen thousand acres in Sunflower County in the Delta, established in 1901 and operating to this day as both a correctional facility and a cotton farm where inmates have historically provided agricultural labour. Its place in the blues and American folk music traditions is enormous: Parchman was where many of the musicians recorded by Alan Lomax and John Lomax for the Library of Congress in the late 1930s and 1940s were found, singing work songs and field hollers that represented the oldest surviving strata of African-American music in the South.

Muddy Waters was recorded by Alan Lomax near Clarksdale in 1941, but the Lomax field recordings at Parchman — where inmates sang in the cotton fields under conditions that had changed little from the era of slavery — captured a raw, unmediated music that predated the recording industry's influence entirely. The tradition of singing at Parchman, where work songs coordinated labour and preserved community, is documented in Lomax's extensive archive and in later recordings. Lead Belly — Huddie Ledbetter — was imprisoned at a different Louisiana prison but was also discovered and recorded by the Lomaxes in a similar context, establishing the pattern of finding the music in the most extreme conditions.

Parchman's physical brutality and its role in the suppression of Black civil rights in Mississippi has been extensively documented. It housed civil rights workers arrested during the Freedom Rides in 1961. Its relationship to blues music is the relationship of extreme suffering to its expression: the form was not produced by the institution but survived within it, carried by the people the institution tried to break. The prison continues to operate and has been the subject of sustained legal action over its conditions.