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‘Forty-Four Hammers’ Is Part of a Rich History of Prison Work Songs
Listen if you like: Leadbelly, Blind Lemon Jefferson, B.B. King
In 1964, researcher Bruce Jackson traveled to prisons in Texas to record the songs that Black work crews had inherited from their enslaved ancestors. Jackson used a reel-to-reel tape recorder to capture a number of these work songs, along with spirituals, toasts and sermons. The resulting album was called “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons.”
We’re featuring “Forty-Four Hammers,” one of many songs on the album in which the melody follows the rhythm of axes striking trees and hoes breaking up soil. Jackson recorded men singing it at the Retrieve State Prison Farm, a former plantation located near Galveston, the birthplace of Juneteenth. Versions of the same melody and lyrics — about pining for beautiful women — were sung by men earlier in the 20th century in prison recordings from Alabama and Louisiana, suggesting deep roots across the South.
One of the singers on “Forty-Four Hammers” was Morgan White, whose song “It’s Over” we featured in Issue 10. He told me in an interview that working on a segregated field squad in the 1960s felt like time travel. “Every officer on his horse had a hoe handle or ax handle or an industrial-sized stapler, and he’d hit you across the head with them,” he said. The songs helped him get through long days in the Texas sun. “You used the songs to keep time. It took your mind off what you were doing.”
The compilation featuring “Forty-Four Hammers” wasn’t the first of its kind. Prison field recordings were pioneered in the 1930s by folklorist John Lomax. He was a complicated figure who traveled tirelessly across the country, preserving music that would otherwise be lost to time, but he also faced accusations of exploiting musicians financially. He had a tendency to write off prison singers he didn’t think were “authentic” enough.
Jackson, by contrast, came of age in the 1960s, and while his work is not explicitly framed as activism, it is infused with a certain indignation. “I experience an unmediated loathing for the context that made and makes these songs possible and necessary,” he wrote in the book “Wake Up Dead Man: Hard Labor and Southern Blues.”
Listening back 60 years later, ahead of Juneteenth, Jackson’s recordings convey how much prisons have maintained not only the literal reality of forced labor, but also the cultural dynamics of slavery.
When Jackson recorded this music, Texas held roughly 12,000 prisoners. Now there are more than 130,000. Some still do agricultural work without pay. Some of the prisons are still on former plantations and are named after slave owners. On my way to prison interviews, I still see rows of men in white uniforms picking crops. It still feels like time travel.
But one thing has changed: For all the terrible things Jackson witnessed, he was allowed in the 1960s to walk around the prison grounds and talk to scores of incarcerated people about a huge range of subjects. This is impossible to imagine as prisons across the country have become much more restrictive about media access.
Jackson once asked the head of the Texas Department of Corrections, George Beto, why he was so accommodating. Beto responded, “How can we find out what we’re doing wrong if we don’t let people like you in to tell us?”
LINER NOTES:
Song: “Forty-Four Hammers” | Album: “Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons” | Location: Retrieve Unit, Brazoria County, Texas |
Singers: Virgil Asbury (lead), Lemon Jefferson, Floyd James, Henry Landers, John Bell, John Gibson, Morgan White | Recorded by: Bruce Jackson | Year: 1964; recorded and remastered in 2018