The Prison Farm

Prisoners working in the fields of the Mississippi State Penitentiary, or Parchman Farm, from a 1935 photograph.

Opened in the early 1900s, Mississippi's Parchman Farm was one of several Southern prisons whose inmates worked under conditions that many compared to antebellum slavery. "There is no walled penitentiary in Mississippi," wrote William Faulkner in "The Old Man" (1939); "it is a cotton plantation which the convicts work under the rifles and shotguns of guards and trustees."

In 1947 and 1948, the folk music archivist Alan Lomax recorded a set of haunting work songs in Parchman. Lomax called this music "the finest, wildest, and most complex folk singing in the South."

On the origins and history of Parchman Farm, see David M. Oshinsky's Worse than Slavery: Parchman Farm and the Ordeal of Jim Crow Justice.