CLEVELAND, Miss. — Just 30 minutes down the road from the Mississippi prison where they are serving time, Lee Andrew Smith and six other incarcerated people felt free — for a few hours.
On stage before a crowd of more than 100 people at the GRAMMY Museum Mississippi, Smith riffed on his guitar alongside fellow members of the Parchman prison band. About halfway through a rendition of Luke Combs’ “15 Minutes,” tears begin to stream down his face.
All kinds of things cross your mind
With all this doin’ time
And a chain gang waitin’ in a long line to use this phone
Same old view, a cinder block room, same old jumpsuit on
I’m just tryna make the best of the rest of this life sentence
But enough about me, I only get 15 minutes
The 44-year-old Smith — who has a close haircut and a salt-and-pepper beard — turned his back to the crowd. He continued playing his guitar, standing there in his well-worn brown cowboy boots and prison-issued, green-and-white striped pants, before walking off stage. After a moment, he returned.
In the audience, tears flowed down his wife’s face. “I feel what he feels,” Joann Smith said. “He was thinking about home … he misses his children, misses his mom, wants to be home with his mom, so all of those things probably ran across his mind.”
The concert this summer was the third stop on the Parchman Band’s tour through the state with country singer-songwriter Charlie Worsham. It’s part of a musical tradition that dates back to the early 1930s at the prison. The Mississippi State Penitentiary, a prison farm, has a long history of brutality and sits on about 18,000 acres of flat, fertile land in the Mississippi Delta, where the blues were born.
“The torch has been passed down to us,” said Leonard “LJ” Stevenson Jr., 33, a founding member of the latest iteration of the band. They’ve since played at other prisons and festivals and shared the stage with blues legend Bobby Rush. “I’ve heard some of the old ’60s Parchman Band originals, and I can relate to it because I’m living it firsthand,” Stevenson said. “That was basically prison blues.”
Playing in the band offers the incarcerated men a chance to experience life outside the walls, said Marc McClure, the former superintendent at Parchman who restarted the group in 2023. Proceeds from the band go into the state’s inmate welfare fund.
“(The band) gives them that opportunity for one moment to be human and be accepted, which leads them down the road to forgiveness and redemption, and they can be different than what got them there,” he said. “The crime doesn’t dictate their life forever. That band gives them that hope.”
With Smith on lead guitar and Stevenson playing bass, the band also includes Houston Jones on keyboard, drummer Jakellsey Hollis, and vocalists Steven Chambers, Charles Glassco and Michael Snell. The white and green stripes on their pants are indelible reminders of their biggest mistakes, but their music — and the album that will be coming out next year — are a testament to them being so much more.
On that spring night at the museum, the band played its way through a full spectrum of emotions, from slow ballads serenading women they love to electrifying originals that talk of wild times before prison. They also backed Worsham on some of his own songs, and recreated some country covers that evoked the reality of doing hard time in Mississippi.
Stevenson played in the background, laying the bassline that undergirded the songs. As he and his band members got into a groove, a slight smile peeked out from behind his cinnamon-brown beard. Smith’s fingers, almost a blur to the naked eye, glided effortlessly across the strings as he traded solos with Worsham and Jones.
Though he stood at the back of the stage, Smith performed in a way that demanded attention. He smiled and pointed out the prettiest woman in the room — his wife — before the band performed a soulful rendition of Chris Stapleton’s “Tennessee Whiskey.”
You’re as smooth as Tennessee whiskey,
You’re as sweet as strawberry wine
You’re as warm as a glass of brandy
And honey, I stay stoned on your love all the time
Smith stepped to the front of the stage, not missing a beat as he stared into his wife’s eyes. He walked his fingers up and down the electric guitar’s neck, delivering a complex solo that drew applause and cheers from the audience.
“Music is his freedom,” his wife said. “He’s free when he’s dealing with any type of instrument.”
The men took turns in the spotlight, telling stories of love and redemption through songs that will be featured on their upcoming album.
Vocalist Charles Glassco, also known as Beast, introduced a high-energy song he wrote for his wife called “Love You Out Loud,” about proclaiming his love publicly, no matter where they are. And Jones, who played both guitar and keyboard in the show, introduced a low-key ballad he wrote to his daughter, who he described as “a great friend.”
I tried my best, just couldn’t give it all to you
I couldn’t be who you needed me to be
But I just wanted you to see
…
I would climb the tallest mountain
Part the Red Sea
Just to have you right here next to me
The themes of love, hard times and redemption in their music have roots in the Delta. It’s a place where Black people — ensnared in the traps of racial terror and White supremacy — made meaning of life on a prison farm as they provided free labor for the state. Incarcerated people worked in the fields, picking cotton, hoeing corn, and working for the state in what historian David Oshinsky called “the closest thing to slavery that survived the Civil War.” They worked to the sounds of field hollers to keep the work tempo and pass the time.
Over the past century, legal action brought an end to corporal punishment, including with a leather whip named “Black Annie”; the end of prisoners given the power to shoot fellow incarcerated people; and upgrades to Parchman. Yet, violence, rampant drug use, poor security, and a brutal underground economy run by gangs have endured.
The music has endured, too, except for a gap in the 1990s.
Like more than 2,000 Mississippians today, Smith, Stevenson, Jones and Chambers have been sentenced to spend the rest of their lives in prison. Stevenson said his life sentence is torture, mentally. “I have a family. I’m engaged now. I have a kid,” he said. “It’s hard being on the phone with them, and not being able to hear first words, see first steps, first heartbreak, first game.”
But he and the other band members are among the few who get to leave the prison grounds and play music in the free world.
“This is as good as it gets for guys like Houston, guys like LJ, because they’re never going home. This is home,” said Trish Doty, a former prison warden who once did vocal coaching with the band and coached LJ in softball. “What sort of justice does it serve to lock them up and throw away a key and give them nothing?”
After the show ended, Smith took the stage again.
“I can’t help but to cry with certain things going on, because this is a thing that I dreamed of all my life. And even though I have this on,” he said, his voice cracking as he pointed down at his green-and-white stripes before pointing up toward the sky, “God’s still fulfilling his promise for me. I’m so grateful.”
“God is good,” an audience member shouted out.
“Yes,” Smith said, “He is.”