Emily Ann Hynes, Ph.D. 2024

Advisor: Jocelyn R. Neal

Dissertation Title: The Legacy of Incarceration: How Prison Music Became a Commodity in the Popular Music Industry

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Dissertation Abstract:

Carceral music-making in the United States has been recorded and broadcast since the 1930s. Folklorists visited prisons and captured sound recordings, prison wardens broadcast prison radio shows across the continent, and record producers funneled prisoners into recording booths while the incarcerated persons were allowed temporary leave to record. These recordings and their transcripts entered academic and public settings via archives, published books, and LP releases. Later, artists across genres from the late 1950s to the 2010s covered and sampled these carceral music recordings (particularly of Black imprisoned persons), and they further wove the music from incarcerated persons into the fabric of American and British popular music.

In this dissertation, I outline the development of carceral music culture in the United States, from the interest in carceral music-making that emerged in the late 1800s to the proliferation of carceral recordings in archival and commercial spheres in the 1930s-1950s. By analyzing the social conditions that lead to the creation and dissemination of “emotionally honest” and “confessional” carceral music-making culture, I explain how the culture of covering and sampling was and continues to be predicated on stereotypes of prisoners’ race, class, and gender, and is sustained by the coercion and exploitation of prisoners. I use archival recordings, interviews, and newspaper clippings and to argue that musicians in the late 1950s through the 2010s commodified carceral recordings and benefited from a widespread white, middle-class fascination with criminality and the suffering of Black bodies.