When Texas was fertile ground for prison bands

From The Marshall Project:

Ten years ago, I was in a procrastination hole, putting off a draft about how badly this or that prison was treating the people inside, when eBay’s algorithm served up a vinyl record called “Behind the Walls.” For 20 bucks, I could hear songs sold at the 1972 Texas Prison Rodeo, played by men serving time back then.

Having grown up in Texas, the prison rodeo part was actually the most familiar to me. Up until the mid-1980s, as many as 100,000 people would descend each year on the prison town of Huntsville to watch so-called “convict cowboys” dodge bulls and ride broncos. There were guest performances by stars like Dolly Parton, Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson.

But prison bands were also part of the draw, and proceeds from their albums went to fund rehabilitative programs inside. This album was mostly country songs with bits of jazz and surf rock, and the racially integrated group of musicians sounded like they were having a blast:

The joy in this recording is all the more surprising when you consider the racism and brutality in Texas prisons back then. But it was part of a golden age of prison music across the country. I’ve counted 15 albums made by bands behind bars in the 1970s, on the cusp of the rapid prison expansion we now call “mass incarceration.” Pennsylvania lifers opened for Stevie Wonder; Otis Redding’s former bassist played in a Virginia prison soul band; and a California prisoner worked with Sly and the Family Stone’s manager.

After my first eBay purchase, I began to collect music by incarcerated people. I was spending my days reporting on how hard it is to make prisons more humane, and how brutality behind bars can foster more crime on the outside. This music nourished my spirit because it showed that a more redemptive approach was possible. As the formerly incarcerated composer Kenyatta Emmanuel Hughes told me in a 2023 interview, “If we experience the art being created in those spaces, we will know, ‘These are human beings, and we need to rethink whether we should be throwing them away.’”

As I hunted for records, the Texas prison music from the 1970s remained a white whale. I kept seeing references online, but the recordings were hard to find for sale, much less streaming. So I started making calls. One was to the Texas Prison Museum in Huntsville, not far from the defunct rodeo grounds. The executive director, David Stacks, revealed they were sitting on a goldmine: about five hours, with around a hundred songs. He said I could come visit and plug my portable turntable into my laptop, putting all this music into digital form.

Here is that music, much of it online for the first time.

The Texas Prison Museum holds eight full-length albums produced by the Texas Department of Corrections and sold at the annual rodeo between 1972 and 1982. There’s also an album from 1965, featuring numerous prison bands that toured across the state, which was not unusual back then.

Country music dominates, but the albums also show off a dazzling range of genres, from soul to rock to funk to surf to rockabilly to Latin jazz. There are impressive covers of Louis Armstrong and James Brown, as well as a playful ode to Dolly Parton, by a band that probably shared the stage with her:

There are almost no women on these recordings. The all-female prison string band known as the Goree Girls played at the rodeo a generation earlier, but by the 1970s, the Texas Department of Corrections had focused its music programs on male prisons.

There are many Black performers, but little in the lyrics about racial injustice, which sticks out when you consider the politically incisive albums topping the charts around the same time, like Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” and Stevie Wonder’s “Innervisions.”

“It was understood that certain topics were off limits,” recalled Morgan White, who is Black and was a clerk at the Wynne Unit music department in the 1980s. “Rock the boat, and you’re out.”As the prison system faced a growing number of civil rights lawsuits, White knew they had a privileged position, and could jeopardize it by singing about racism or poor conditions.

But between songs about trucking and late-night barrooms — which evoke the “outlaw country” style of Merle Haggard and Waylon Jennings — criticisms of prison life do sneak through. On a 1974 record, singer J.D. Thomas complains about labor conditions on a prison farm (“They are working the devil out of me!”) and portrays an innocent man facing execution (“The chair is awaiting me, but my soul shall not be chained!”)

But the most moving lyrics are about loneliness, heartache and how incarceration strains families. On the 1982 record, singer A.J. Forman recounts how his wife left him for another man. He isn’t sure if he’ll ever see his child again. “I’m a free man tomorrow, but I’m afraid to go home,” he sings.

Many of these musicians are likely deceased, but a hunt through public records brought me to White, who wrote, sang and played piano and drums on four of the records. He’s 86 now and still sings gospel at his church outside Seattle.

In his 20s and 30s, he told me, he was in and out of Texas prisons for burglary and robbery. When he first arrived in the 1960s, a warden sent him and other men to perform at county fairs and at least one high school prom. He suspected the warden was pocketing much of what they got paid, he said, but it was better than the alternative: Farm labor and the threat of whippings by field officers.

In the 1970s, a music professor named Harley Rex organized music classes at numerous prisons and ran songwriting contests to pick music to record at the Wynne Unit’s studio, where White worked. “The musicians skated around problems. The officers treated us better,” White told me. “Every song you did on the albums, you’d get $10 for writing it, and if you played at the rodeo, you got $5.”

He knew the rodeo provided the prison system with good PR — a welcome distraction from news of civil rights lawsuits and escape attempts — and money. Prison officials claimed the rodeo made as much as $250,000 a year, writes historian Mitchel Roth in the 2016 book “Convict Cowboys: The Untold History of the Texas Prison Rodeo.”

But it was also a chance to become a better musician: “They used us, but we benefited from it,” White told me. Here he is on drums in 1965…

… and singing a song he wrote in 1980…

The rodeo ended in 1986. Roth, the historian, writes that prison officials grew afraid of financial liability, should participants get injured in the arena. Over the following years, the state’s prison population exploded — from around 40,000 people in 1986 to 140,000 today — and the music program shrank. Some Texas prisoners do still get to make music, but they don’t perform for the public or sell albums.

According to Roth’s book, alumni of the prison music program went on to play with Ray Charles and Chet Atkins. Formerly incarcerated drummer Benny Medina told me his career included gigs with legendary saxophonists Dexter Gordon and Sonny Stitt. In a phone interview, Medina called the Wynne Unit a “Mecca for the cream-of-the-crop musicians.”

Prison officials were eager in the 1970s to remind the public that the walls were more porous than they might have appeared. On the back of the 1974 album, an official wrote, “Some are sad songs, but some have the flicker of hope that reflects the inner thoughts of incarcerates who someday will again be free to use their God-given musical talents.” We don’t call people “incarcerates” in 2026, but it remains true that most people in prison will leave someday. Perhaps their music can teach us to welcome them back.

Press play on the song below and hear the full trove of songs as a playlist on YouTube.