The best-known version of the gospel song “I Give Myself Away,” by Pastor William McDowell, is an opulent display of religious praise. For more than nine minutes, backed by swelling instrumentation and a full choir, McDowell sings of surrendering himself in lines such as “Lord, my life is in your hands.” A stripped-down but equally powerful version of the song opens the new album “Some Mississippi Sunday Morning,” which was recorded inside the Mississippi State Penitentiary, a maximum-security prison also known as Parchman Farm. Around three minutes long, with piano as the lone accompaniment, the song begins with a single vocalist repeating the line “I give myself away / so you can use me.” Midway through, another singer joins in, and then another; the language doesn’t change, but the vocals accumulate, stunning and imperfect. If you feel uncertain about the existence of God—and therefore about the meaning of words of surrender echoing through the halls of a place like Parchman—you may find the performance only heartbreaking.

“S.M.S.M.” was recorded by Ian Brennan, a California-based producer who has collaborated with artists around the world, from the northern-Mali collective Tinariwen to a group of Cambodian musicians who survived the Khmer Rouge. Brennan worked for three years to get clearance to record at Parchman. He was finally granted a date this past February, with less than a week’s notice. He took a red-eye to Mississippi, arriving early on a Sunday morning, in time for church services. The prison chaplains had assembled a group of singers, who are credited on “S.M.S.M.” as Parchman Prison Prayer. The performers make the most of the limited resources at their disposal. Parts of the body become percussive instruments; two singers have the impact of an entire choir. The most captivating songs on the album rely almost entirely on the human voice, and some are tunes that you may recognize even if you’ve never set foot in a church.

The gruesome history of Parchman dates back to 1901, when the State of Mississippi bought up former plantation land in the heart of the Delta. Work on Parchman’s eighteen thousand acres took place from sunup to sundown. For years, the head driver would mete out punishment with a leather strap known as Black Annie. Lately, the brutalities at Parchman have taken more insidious forms—inoperable showers and toilets, cells that lack mattresses and are overrun with rats. In 2022, a U.S. Department of Justice report found reasonable cause that the facility violated the constitutional rights of the people incarcerated there, nearly seventy per cent of whom are Black.

Within this container of cruelty, amid atrocities born of the mother of all atrocities, there was always music. There were work songs, through which incarcerated people could occupy their voices and their minds while their bodies toiled. There were field hollers, rising above the repetitive sounds of sharecropping—upbeat if the work was moving quickly, slower when it had begun to take its toll. There were songs that were also pleas: for food, for water, for rest, for a lover left behind, for someone beyond the walls who might still have an ear to the wind. There were songs of devotion, asking for mercy and forgiveness, and also preaching the gospel of giving oneself over to God.

Parchman Farm is not the only such institution with a rich musical legacy. In 1959, the folklorist Harry Oster recorded an album at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, a.k.a. Angola Farm. But Parchman has a special connection to the Delta blues, because several of the best Mississippi bluesmen—among them Booker (Bukka) White, R. L. Burnside, and Big Bad Smitty—did stints there. The blues is a mythological genre, smuggling wisdom inside tales of evils and exploits which sometimes strain credulity. But the blues songs that came out of Parchman functioned as a form of testimonial. Musicians would get out of prison and, through song, bring word of what it was like on the inside. White, on “Parchman Farm Blues,” recorded in 1940, shortly after his release from the farm, sings of starting work “just at break of day” and issues a warning: “Oh, listen, you men, I don’t mean no harm / if you wanna do good, you better stay off ol’ Parchman farm.”

The music of Parchman was preserved from the inside, too, thanks to the work of Alan and John Lomax, a father-son musicologist duo specializing in field recordings. The Lomaxes visited various prisons across the Southern United States, but they returned most often to Parchman, recognizing that work songs were the ones least likely to survive beyond the horrors of the prison fields. They were not as salacious or as narratively captivating as other blues tales; they wouldn’t translate to the radio or the stage. The Lomaxes’ early recordings at Parchman, from the nineteen-thirties, were re-creations of the sounds of the work line. Technology wouldn’t allow them to capture many voices at once, so they held small-group sessions and then attempted to piece together the songs as they might sound in the middle of a workday, under a high and vicious sun. Back then, Parchman Farm had a women’s camp. One of my favorite Lomax recordings is of a group of women singing the Reconstruction-era spiritual “Oh, Freedom!” in clean unison over the harsh static of the tape. The words are at times drowned out, but the sharpness of the harmonies is not. The voices ascend achingly on the words “And before I’d be a slave / I’d be buried in my grave.”

In the late forties, Alan Lomax went back to Parchman to record both songs and interviews, which were later compiled on an album. During one interview, Lomax asks a man named Bama what makes a good work-song leader. It doesn’t matter if a person can “sing just like Peter could preach,” Bama replies. If “he didn’t know what to sing about, well, he wouldn’t do no good.” By contrast, he continues, “here’s a fella, maybe he ain’t got no voice for singing, but he’s been coöperatin’ with the people so long, and been on the job so long . . . he knows just exactly how it should go.” I thought of Bama’s words while listening to “S.M.S.M.” Unlike the Lomaxes’ recordings, it is focussed entirely on gospel, but both projects feature people seeking salvation, hoping to be released, through song, either from their earthly woes or from eternal ones. Bama’s point, I think, was that a leader’s singing voice mattered less than whether he knew what to say to help men on the line achieve deliverance.

It must be said, though, that there is nothing lacking about the voices featured on “S.M.S.M.” A solo version of “Hosanna” features a singer with a soothing, sweet tenor accompanied only by what sounds like some faint tapping on a chair or a table. “Locked Down, Mama Prays for Me,” one of two original pieces on the album, is a spoken-word number performed over a background of fingers snapping and a vocalist singing the Canton Spirituals song “Ride This Train,” which serves as both a joyful invitation and a gentle word of caution. (“The Lord God says he’s coming back / but he didn’t say when.”) “Running for My Life,” by Lee Williams and the Spiritual QC’s, becomes, “I Gotta Run,” a fifty-second free-form repetition of the titular lyrics. Only at the very end of the track is the thought completed, by a group singing, hauntingly, in the background, “. . . while the blood keeps running warm in my veins.”

Many of the small miracles of Parchman Prison Prayer hinge on the power of voices working in unison. A gospel choir melds singers into a single sonic entity. Incarceration collapses individuality in a different way. I’ve spent time in a county jail more than once. On the first occasion, when I was twenty, the guards would slap the cell doors with their nightsticks, metal against metal, to scare folks into staying awake. It worked on me, as I lay on the top bunk of a cell. My cellmate, who had been in for significantly longer, clocked my quickened breathing and chuckled. “Don’t stress that shit,” he said. “If they do something to you, they gonna do it to all of us.” At the time, I read this as a way of saying, “We’ve got your back.” But now I think he meant that suffering there took place collectively: even if it was doled out unevenly at any given moment, no one remained untouched.

I approached “S.M.S.M.” with some skepticism, not because I doubted Brennan’s impulse to record the sounds at Parchman but because of how such recordings inevitably interact with the outside world. There are people who have never set foot in a prison, have never written to anyone inside or put money on their books. Surely, many of those individuals nonetheless understand that prison is hell. But I worry that the incarcerated life as a trope in entertainment encourages the average person on the outside to consume the horrors inflicted inside while remaining at a safe remove. A show or a story or even a song from prison might have the paradoxical effect of estranging people from what makes “S.M.S.M.” what it is—a document of the work that it takes to survive in a place not made for survival.

I ultimately let go of my reservations, both because the songs themselves are so beautifully rendered and because, in the end, “S.M.S.M.” seems made less for the public than for the men singing. They are simply doing what they do on Sundays, waking up and praising the Lord; they’d do the same whether or not the tapes were rolling. I’ve never been clear on what’s supposed to happen to those people who are granted entry to the promised land—if it’s deemed that you have suffered more than others have, does your corner of Heaven come with more robust comforts, or do the saved all get the same eternal life? I do, however, believe in the power of men gathering, in an inhumane place, to wrestle back some slice of their humanity by saying, “Whatever they haven’t already taken from me, I will surrender to You.” It’s enough to make me imagine a promised elsewhere, though hardly for my own sake. ♦