In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Colin Asher’s The Midnight Special is a powerful book about art, rebellion, and humanity that thoughtfully examines the music created by five artists who were imprisoned (Johnny Cash, Tupac Shakur, Lead Belly, Elmo Hope, and Ike White).
Booklist wrote of the book:
“Asher creates rich, vivid portraits of all five of his subjects . . . He discusses at length these artists’ morally ambiguous songs about murderers and convicts, written with a touch of grace and a recognition of shared humanity. This chronicle is full of little epiphanies . . . A well-written and mesmerizing group portrait of five musical outlaws.”
In his own words, here is Colin Asher’s Book Notes music playlist for his book The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music:
I can write in silence and sometimes need to. But editing is an out loud thing for me. Every morning I print whatever I wrote the day before, put on music, and read my text aloud with pen in hand – scribbling as I narrate so I can note leaps of logic, tweak phrases, change word choice, slash through entire sections.
I try to craft everything I write for the ear as well as the eye, and the music playing while I edit shapes the rhythm of the text.
My first book, a biography, has a consistent feel. It’s a blues. It’s Junior Kimbrough, Howlin’ Wolf, Bessie Smith, Skip James, Ma Rainey, Etta James. But The Midnight Special is a different thing. It’s a music history that meditates on the influence policing and incarceration have had on America’s musical culture. And as I wrote and revised, I listened to the songs I was writing about so each section has the feel of the music it focuses on – blues and folk, jazz, country, soul, hip hop. All in, hundreds of songs are mentioned in the book (so many, in fact, that prior to creating this playlist, I created six others to accompany the text).
Out of that vast collection, a handful of tracks stand out for their importance to the book’s narrative, the ideas they generated, or the feeling and rhythm they added as I revised.
Ka – “I Need All That”
There’s no artist I listened to more often while writing and editing this book than Ka. There’s something about his flow and the moods he creates with his beats that suit The Midnight Special. His biography and subject matter didn’t make him a likely character to include in the text, but I was able to use a couple of his lines for an epigraph. In “I Need All That” he says, “This music used to be how I got my news, as youth / Truthfully.” Music as history was always one of the threads holding my narrative together and those 13 words became a mantra after they got in my head.
Calvin Leavy – “Cummins Prison Farm”
This song plays an almost totemic role in the book – it’s only discussed at length in the introduction but it’s mentioned repeatedly, and the story of its creation and Leavy’s life have parallels throughout the book. No spoilers here (I’ve got mouths to feed so buy the book.), but I’ll say that Leavy’s song is a masterpiece in its way, and the story of his life and career are heartbreaking.
Lead Belly – “Goodnight Irene”
Huddie ‘Lead Belly’ Ledbetter sang about prison often. He recorded songs about escapees, people being worked to death on prison farms, the dogs trustees used to pursue escapees. But this song isn’t one of them. He did first record it in prison though, and when I listen to it, I think of him trying to impress his listeners so that they’ll advocate for his release by putting everything he has into the lines: “Sometimes I live in the country / Sometimes I live in town / Sometimes I haves a great notion / Jumping in, into the river and drown.”
Bessie Smith – “Jail-House Blues”
I never uncovered any evidence that Bessie Smith had significant contact with the law. But like many Black musicians working while she was alive, she sang about policing, and prisons – notably, in “Sing Sing Blues,” and on this track. I’ll use just about any excuse to listen to Bessie, and her mournful lament about remaining locked up “so long / so long” gets me every time.
Bukka White – “District Attorney Blues”
This is something like my platonic ideal of a prison song. There’s no swagger in it, no braggadocio. There’s no talk of infamy or bad man mythologizing. There’s just the hypnotically repetitive refrain that “District Attorney sho’ is hard on a man” and some lines explaining just how hard.
Joe Morris Orchestra (w/ ‘Little’ Laurie Tate) – “Anytime, Anyplace, Anywhere”
One happy discovery I made while writing this book was that some of the music bebop musicians played to pay the bills early in their careers was pretty good. Although Elmo Hope performs on this track, it belongs to ‘Little’ Laurie Tate. Her voice isn’t “great” in any traditional sense, but it makes my skin crawl in just the right way. She, essentially, disappeared from the music scene after leaving Morris’ band in the 50s but she lived until 2008 and I hope those last decades were rich and fulfilling. If there’s any justice in the world, they should have been.
Elmo Hope Trio– “Carvin’ the Rock”
Elmo Hope and Sonny Rollins co-wrote this song while incarcerated on Rikers Island and it later became one of the first Hope compositions to be recorded. It’s a thrilling, dynamic, thoughtful piece. Listen to it and then try to convince yourself that people this talented deserved the inhumane treatment they experienced on the island, or that the people locked up on the island now – some of whom, no doubt, possess comparable talents – deserve to be suffering through criminally dangerous conditions. I dare you.
Ka – “Beautiful”
Again: I can’t stress enough how much Ka I listened to while writing this book. I don’t really approve of Spotify, and I don’t like being tracked, but I was more than a little pleased when Spotify Wrapped informed me that, during a marathon editing session just before my deadline, I listened to Ka for something like eleven hours in a single day.
Johnny Cash – “Tell Him I’m Gone”
Cash recorded a slew of prison songs, jail songs, and bad man ballads. The ones that get all the attention have sociopathic swagger – “Folsom Prison Blues,” “Wanted Man,” “Delia.” But for my money it’s the quieter, more thoughtful pieces that deserve the glory – songs like this, which Cash recorded during a period when he was campaigning for prison reform and putting serious thought into the humanity of people living behind bars, and the circumstances of their incarcerations.
Eric Burdon and Jimmy Witherspoon – “Going Down Slow”
I love this track. For its sound, sure – of course. But also for its improbability.
Picture this: It’s 1971 and Eric Burdon, Curtis Mayfield, and Jimmy Witherspoon are at San Quentin Prison to perform at a concert emceed by Muhammad Ali. Witherspoon arrives without a backing band, trusting that a prison band will fill in, and when he and Burdon launch into “Going Down Slow,” the prison band’s singer and lead guitarist, Ike White, adds a solo that wins over the crowd. A little while later, the management company that represents Burdon and Witherspoon sign a contract with White. Later still, they paid for him to record an entire album inside a different prison.
Ike White – “I Remember George”
Ike White was tremendously talented. But he never quite had the means, the wherewithal, the discipline, or the self-control to make good on his promise. Again, no spoilers here – but suffice to say that his life was tragic and that, in his lifetime, he was both victim and victimizer. When I think about him and his work, I usually think of this song, which he wrote to honor George Jackson. It’s so dynamic and contains so many different moods and ideas that there’s no way to hear it without thinking about all the other great music he could have made.
Tupac – “Only Fear of Death”
There haven’t been many public figures in American life whose performance of their character was in sharper contrast to their private self than Tupac Shakur. He lit up our popular culture for a vanishingly short time and was seen, in that dazzling moment, as a wild, angry, irascible character. He spat at photographers. Talked loud. Beat up a film director. Got arrested, repeatedly, and was convicted of sexual assault.
But in private, for most of his life, Shakur was someone much different – a lonely, bookish child who sometimes had to read the New York Times aloud, first word to last, as punishment for misbehaving. He wrote haiku, aspired to be a Shakespearean actor, and yearned for his mother’s approval. His childhood was defined by trauma, and scarcity, and he was keenly aware of his shortcomings and mortality – facts he makes clear on this track.
Rrome Alone – “Prisoner of War”
It’s a rare interviewee who calls up their interviewer and asks how the interviewer is doing, whether their family has been well, what they’re working on, what writing advice they might be able to offer. But that’s Alim Braxton.
Braxton, who records as Rrome Alone, is locked up on North Carolina’s Death Row – where he dedicates himself to religious study, repentance, writing, and recording. This track comes from his first album, Mercy on my Soul, and if you want to hear it properly, close your eyes and picture him recording it – bearded face pressed to the receiver of an analog phone mounted to the wall of Death Row’s common room, hands darting as he spits lyrics set to the beat of a song that just started playing on the local hip hop station.
Ka – “We Hurting”
As I was nearing my deadline, Ka’s family announced a pop-up exhibition dedicated to his life and work. He died in 2024, and they wanted to honor him and give his fans a final chance to buy his vinyl – which he only ever sold in person.
So midday on a day when I really should have been working, I trekked into Manhattan. The exhibition was beautiful. It had me weepy within moments, and I was surprised when I felt proud to hand over some cash to buy as many of Ka’s albums as I could afford (only two, sadly; such is the writer’s life). After leaving, I found a bar, ordered a drink, placed the albums on the table in front of me, and edited the chunk of my manuscript that I’d printed and brought with me while the albums loomed like religious fetishes.
Elmo and Bertha Hope – “Blues Left and Right”
I love this track. I love most of Elmo Hope’s work though. I chose this recording because Bertha Hope accompanies him on it. Bertha is, truly, a living legend. When the Clifford Brown / Max Roach Quintet was rehearsing, she was in the room. She took lessons from Bud Powell’s brother, Richie Powell, and she made this recording, her first, in 1961. But when I saw her perform live sixty-two years later, in 2023, she still played with more passion and energy than any reasonable listener could expect from a talented musician a quarter of her age.
Colin Asher is the author of The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music. He also wrote Never a Lovely so Real: The Life and Work of Nelson Algren, a literary biography written as a work of creative nonfiction. That book was celebrated in The New York Review of Books, the New Yorker, and the New York Times Book Review, among others. It was named “One of the Most Anticipated Books of 2019” by Apple Books, a “Book of the Week” by Publishers Weekly, and an “Editors’ Choice” selection by the New York Times Book Review. Both Publishers Weekly and Booklist gave it starred reviews.
Born in Morgantown, WV, and raised in Brooklyn, NY, Colin dropped out of high school and spent a decade in California, working as a bike messenger, stocking shelves in a warehouse, and driving a truck. Eventually he started working in homeless services, then enrolled in the City College of San Francisco. Later, he received a Bachelors of Science from Northeastern University, and a Master of Arts from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He has received fellowships from the Leon Levy Center for Biography and the New York Foundation for the Arts.