Der im Januar mit 94 Jahren verstorbene Musiker und Bürgerrechtsaktivist Pete Seeger begab sich 1966 zusammen mit seiner Frau Toshi und seinem Sohn Daniel in das Huntsville Gefängnis in Texas, um dort die Arbeitslieder der Strafgefangenen der Ellis-Einheit zu dokumentieren. Begleitet wurde die Familie Seeger vom Volkskundler Bruce Jackson.
Ergebnis dieser Exkursion ist eine knapp 30-minütige Videodokumentation der Arbeitsbedingungen der ausschließlich afroamerikanischen Strafgefangenen im Huntsville Prison und ihrer work songs.
Trailer: Afro-American Work Songs in a Texas Prison (Pete and Toshi Seeger with Bruce Jackson, 1966)
Der Film ist in in voller Länge zu sehen unter: http://www.folkstreams.net/film,122
Bruce Jackson (1972) „Wake Up Dead Man. Hard Labor and Southern Blues“ (University of Georgia Press)
Bruce Jackson veröffentlichte 1972 das Buch „Wake Up Dead Man. Hard Labor and Southern Blues“ (University of Georgia Press), in dem er verschiedene der in Huntsville und anderen texanischen Gefängnissen aufgezeichneten Arbeitslieder analysiert.
Bruce Jackson identifiziert folgende vier Hauptfunktionen der work songs:
- They helped supply a meter for work, which was useful for survival in the dangerous work of tree-cutting, efficient in other kinds of work, and, according to the singers, a more aesthetically pleasing way of working.
- They helped pass the time, which is nice, because prison labor is usually boring.
- They offered a partial outlet for the inmates‘ tensions and frustrations and angers. There is a long tradition in the South of the black man being permitted to sing things he is not permitted to say; the whites never assumed the words blacks sang had any meaning. „In the river songs,“ one inmate said, „you tell the truth about how you feel. You can’t express it to the boss. They really be singing about the way they feel inside. Since they can’t say it to nobody, they sing a song about it.“ (In Texas, black convicts called the worksongs „river songs“ because all of the Texas prisons were located on the Brazos or Trinity river bottomlands.)
- They kept a man from being singled out for whipping because he worked too slowly. The songs kept all together, so no one could be beaten to death for mere weakness. In Texas, slow workers were punished by ten or more licks with the „Bat,“ a strip of leather 30 inches long, four inches wide, one-quarter inch thick, attached to a wooden handle. One inmate said, „When the hide’d leave, the skin’d leave with it.“