![]() ![]() It's part of my history because I used to hear my family talk about these things." They were singin' blues and somebody would play the harmonica. At the end of the rows, at break time, when they're eating baloney and crackers and cheese. Mitchell Price, 55, Dallas: "My mother's the daughter of a sharecropper and that's what they did in the fields, they sung the blues. "Just being here for almost 29 years since I was a child," he says, "that's the blues in itself." Ledale Williams is taking the blues literature class at Parchman for three hours of college credit at the University of Mississippi. The feeling of the blues is all too familiarįor these inmate students, the course syllabus may be new but the feeling of the blues is all too familiar. They're reading poetry from Langston Hughes and a play by August Wilson. They're listening to blues songs by Big Joe Williams, Ma Rainey, Little Walter, Hound Dog Taylor, and Bessie Smith. ![]() They're exploring how the themes of blues lyrics-bad luck and trouble, sexual escapades, and euphoric freedom-get expressed in literary forms. The course is The Blues Tradition in American Literature. But inside this austere classroom, they're all college students. Their crimes range from drug possession to armed robbery to homicide. They're wearing green-and-white striped pants, and shirts with " MDOC convict" stenciled on the back, for Mississippi Department of Corrections. Nine big men sit attentively at their desks inside the Mississippi State Penitentiary-the once infamous prison labor colony known as Parchman Farm. Inmate/students practice blues harmonica during a classroom session of the Blues Tradition in American Literature course inside Parchman Prison in Mississippi. ![]()
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