{"id":101388,"date":"2016-08-10T12:14:02","date_gmt":"2016-08-10T16:14:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=101388"},"modified":"2016-08-10T18:33:54","modified_gmt":"2016-08-10T22:33:54","slug":"no-more-good-time-in-the-world-for-me","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/08\/10\/no-more-good-time-in-the-world-for-me\/","title":{"rendered":"No More Good Time in the World For Me"},"content":{"rendered":"

The \u201cunlove and unfreedom\u201d in Johnnie B. Smith\u2019s work songs.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"All<\/a>

All photos by Bruce Jackson,\u00a0brucejacksonphotography.us.<\/p><\/div>\n

Max Nelson is writing a series<\/a> on prison literature.<\/em><\/p>\n

During the thirteen years he spent jailed for murder on a Texas prison farm, Johnnie B. Smith sang work songs. In 1964, the ethnomusicologist Bruce Jackson met Smith during a trip through the state prison system to document the dwindling number of older, black prisoners who still knew the sorts of songs Smith led. He taped Smith\u2019s renditions of a handful of standards: \u201cDrop \u2019Em Down Together,\u201d \u201cSure Make a Man Feel Bad,\u201d \u201cPoor Boy.\u201d But Smith, Jackson soon learned, also sang songs of his own writing, stranger and more private than the ones he\u2019d heard passed down.<\/p>\n

These songs share a structure and melody, but they allow for a nearly limitless range of embellishments and improvisations. Their stanzas, for the most part, have four lines each\u2014a single couplet sung in two variations. Their melody, which Smith adjusts verse by verse and song by song, is more difficult to describe. Its tempo accelerates and slows downs unexpectedly; its volume swells and falls; it changes gears rattlingly; it\u2019s marked by disquieting pockets of silence. The shortest of these songs is over six minutes long; the longest, more than twenty-three.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the time Jackson conducted his fieldwork, Ramsey\u2014where Smith was held\u2014was one of fourteen prisons in the Texas Correctional System. It comprised a sprawling farm property produced by combining five former plantations. Inmates felled trees, picked cotton, and worked the fields; the resulting products were either used within the prison or sold to cover the cost of housing the prisoners themselves. (As late as the early 1960s, the work teams were entirely segregated.) Ramsey\u2019s inmates were, in effect, funding their own imprisonment, and for many decades black prisoners did so under conditions not much different from those of chattel slavery. The \u201criders\u201d and \u201ccaptains\u201d Smith addresses across his songs were horse-mounted bosses whose brutality toward the work crews was widely known and feared.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In his 1972 work-song study Wake Up Dead Man<\/em><\/a>, one of the only extensive sources of information about Smith\u2019s life and music, Jackson devoted some twenty-seven pages to testimonies by inmates about the field captains whose regimes they\u2019d survived at Ramsey and two other prisons, Ellis and Wynne. A prisoner recalled seeing one captain\u2014who was said to have killed the revered inmate \u201cJack O\u2019Diamonds\u201d and inherited his epithet\u2014\u201cwhip a man down to the ground if he plant a crooked row.\u201d A second inmate reported that the captain \u201csaid he had a graveyard of his own\u201d; a third and fourth, that when he himself sat down in the fields to die in 1948, shaking and \u201cwhite as a sheet,\u201d he muttered, \u201cI hate for all these niggers to see me die. Well, I don\u2019t give a damn: I seen a many a them die.\u201d<\/p>\n

Both men named Jack O\u2019Diamonds\u2014the convict and the captain\u2014appear often in the work songs Jackson collected at the three prisons at the center of his book. Wynne had an older population of inmates that, Jackson wrote, \u201cserved as a kind of check when I tried to date some of the songs.\u201d Younger prisoners hardly sung work songs by the time Jackson made his interviews and recordings; the music came from a set of circumstances that had faded or no longer held. Work crews were just being integrated; field captains couldn\u2019t get away so easily with the cruelty for which they once had immunity; the work of logging teams was being transferred to machines; and younger black prisoners \u201csaw the songs as holdovers from slavery and Uncle Tom days,\u201d as Nathan Salsburg quotes Jackson in the Oxford American,\u00a0<\/em>and later in the\u00a0liner notes to Dust to Digital\u2019s collection of Smith\u2019s songs<\/a>.<\/p>\n

One can imagine younger prisoners wanting to repudiate the music of their predecessors, but it\u2019s also not hard to imagine that the songs themselves might have struck younger black prisoners in the sixties as defeatist or resigned. \u201cThe songs,\u201d Jackson wrote in the introduction to Wake Up Dead Man<\/em>, \u201cconcentrate on the devices and forms of control, and the manifestations of impotence. The language of the songs is highly concrete, but the themes are not; the themes are negatives: things like unlove and unfreedom and unimportance.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"J.<\/a>

J. B. Smith.<\/p><\/div>\n

Everywhere in Smith\u2019s songs, imprisonment is associated with private trauma and regret. \u201cNo More Good Time in the World For Me\u201d floats from memories to hopeful promises to gestures of abandonment and loss. A representative line begins with a loud, air-clearing \u201cwell.\u201d \u201cI\u2019m a lifetime skinner,\u201d Smith sings, stretching out skinner<\/em>\u2014a word for the driver of a prison mule team\u2014until it bleeds into a sighing \u201coh brother.\u201d (Smith likes to punctuate his stanzas with personal addresses; in its thirteen minutes, the same song contains appeals to \u201criders,\u201d \u201cpartners,\u201d \u201cbuddies,\u201d \u201cbabies,\u201d women, and men.) When he sings \u201cI never will go free,\u201d he runs \u201cwill go\u201d hurriedly together, like a single word capped by a drawn-out vowel. \u201cFree\u201d is two long, muffled syllables, leading to the murmured cadences of the last line: \u201cNo more good time, buddy, in the wide, wide world for me.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smith incorporated dozens of lines and stanzas from other prison songs into his lyrics, but the resulting songs didn\u2019t exactly resemble any of the music he\u2019d studied or led. He told Jackson that his song \u201cWoman Trouble\u201d was \u201ca little short one\u201d\u2014it runs to fourteen minutes\u2014about a man \u201cworried about some old woman in the free world.\u201d The speaker is haunted over the absence of a woman (\u201csaid she\u2019d be back tomorrow, partner, but she carried her clothes\u201d). But he also moves in a world populated by shadowy, threatening male overseers and guardians. His parents worry that his work for a \u201cMr. Cunningham\u201d is breaking him down; he \u201ccan\u2019t run away,\u201d he says, because \u201cthey got a man at the crossing won\u2019t let me by.\u201d In this, one of Smith\u2019s grimmest songs, you feel the singer\u2019s world constricting, the pressures outside him stoking and intensifying the fire inside. There are glimpses of something unspeakable:<\/p>\n

\n

She got a hole in her belly, boy, and it won\u2019t get well,
And the more you rub it, well, the more it swell.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In other cases Smith\u2019s songs get energy from displays of defiance, turning from resignation to boasts and threats. \u201cRider, your two-barrel Derringer \u2026 it don\u2019t worry my mind,\u201d the narrator of \u201cI Got Too Much Time for the Crime I Done\u201d tells his overseer: \u201cOh, the way I\u2019m lookin\u2019, that\u2019s the way I\u2019m goin\u2019.\u201d The speaker in \u201cNo More Good Time\u201d warns that if he \u201chad my .32-20, rider, just one round of lead \/ I wouldn\u2019t leave enough living, oh man, to bury the dead.\u201d The astonishing, twenty-three-minute-long \u201cEver Since I Been a Man Full Grown\u201d is full of proud announcements posed as counterfactuals or put in the subjunctive, visions of what Smith could or would do had he the power:<\/p>\n

\n

Well, I\u2019m goin\u2019 to Oklahoma, marry an Indian squaw,
When I get her daughter, I be her son-in-law.<\/p>\n

If I beat you to the Brazos, sergeant, oh man, you can blow your horn,
Well, I done got worried, I\u2019ll be gone \u2019fore long.<\/p>\n

Had my big horse pistol, buddy, just one round of ball,
I would leave here walkin\u2019, I wouldn\u2019t run at all.<\/p>\n

If I had the good luck, buddy, oh, hey, oh, like I had the bad,
I\u2019d win a barrel of dollars and a keg of halves.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n