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S03 Episode 07: Music and Prisons, Part 2
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S03 Episode 07: Music and Prisons, Part 2 by Indre Viskontas
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Transcript
Content Warning and Introduction
00:00:00
Speaker
Hey, just a heads up before we start today. This episode contains explicit language, discussion of drug use and assault, and maybe triggering for some listeners. If you're listening with kids around, you might want to skip this episode or find a time when they're not in earshot. Please listen at your own discretion. Music in prison tends to calm the savage beast.
00:00:23
Speaker
whenever there was an uprising or people were just really angry or just, you know, there was a depressing spirit just floating over the prison. Music could cut through it and send any negativity, any evilness. It was send it running. And that was the beauty of music behind bars. It brought people together.
Exploring Music's Influence in Prisons
00:00:54
Speaker
Welcome back to Cadence, the podcast where we explore what music can tell us about the mind. I'm Andrea Viscontes.
00:01:11
Speaker
In this third season, we're talking about how music can influence us. And this is the second part of a two-part series about music in prisons.
BL Sherrell's Journey into Music
00:01:20
Speaker
In the last episode, we found out that music can make a big difference in the lives of people who are incarcerated during their time in prison, but also when they re-enter society. It can help them find their voices and even reduce violence within the prison walls.
00:01:36
Speaker
In this episode, we're going to start with a conversation with BL Sherrell, an accomplished musician and music producer and the deputy director of Die Jim Crow Records, which is the first nonprofit record label in the US dedicated entirely for currently and formerly incarcerated artists. BL recently released her own album through the record label.
00:01:58
Speaker
And while music wasn't something that she spent a lot of time as a child creating, she showed an affinity for wordplay early on, and one experience in particular fueled her passion for poetry.
00:02:19
Speaker
Yeah, so I started writing poetry probably in about the second grade. I started getting into poetry contests around that same time I had a teacher who was awesome and she used to publish my poetry submitted to these contests and I used to win, which by the way, I would really like to know where those frickin' savings bonds are.
00:02:44
Speaker
I used to win a lot of them and I was very talented just writing words. And one day I decided to make one that rhymed. And my teacher, she was an older white woman. She was amazing. I love him, his heart.
00:02:59
Speaker
And she looked at the poem and it was something about birds. They go tweet, tweet, tweet. And I break off pieces of bread so I can let them eat or something. I don't know. I just know it says something about birds tweeting and breadcrumbs being eating, right? And she read it and she was like, I hate this.
00:03:25
Speaker
And she was like, don't ever do something like this again. I hate it. It's horrible. And I was terrified. I might have cried. I was hurt. But even though I was hurt as much as that really hurt my feelings, I didn't stop doing it. I just kept doing it, regardless of... See, something like that, when I hold a person so high and I held her extremely high,
00:03:52
Speaker
And for some reason, I didn't even waste a day. I mean, I wiped the tears and then I just kept doing what I was doing. And I've been a writer ever since. Every here and there, I might write something that doesn't rhyme.
00:04:08
Speaker
But yeah, I've been writing raps since that day. Biel eventually turned her affinity for poetry into rap music.
Impact of Upbringing and Incarceration
00:04:17
Speaker
Her current success belies the troubled childhood that she endured, though, circumstances that ultimately led to her serving a 10 year prison sentence herself.
00:04:25
Speaker
Yeah, so I grew up, which very typical for people coming of my age at that time, becoming teenagers in the early 2000s. My mother was an addict and she brought a lot of traffic and unnecessary violence to the house due from being an addict. You know, just owing people money, people accusing her of stealing things, whatever the case.
00:04:51
Speaker
And I was a very rational, I guess, teenager, but I was caught up in that underbelly of that lifestyle. So I just kind of asked my mom, or didn't even ask. I just told her, hey, from here on out, no more random niggas.
00:05:09
Speaker
selling crack out of our house. I'll do it from here, and anything that comes our way will be meant for us. But you're putting a lot of my siblings in danger and things of that nature, and I think I could do a better job. And I was only about 12 at that time. Prior to that, my grandmother did
00:05:28
Speaker
a lot to raise me. And she did all the way up until her death, but she didn't live with us. So when she would leave, it was thriller. I mean, it was walking dead all in and out the house. So there was a lot of dangerous things that happened. A lot of forms of abuse took place in my home with people who are addicted to drugs. And since there were children in the house, some unfortunate things took place.
00:05:57
Speaker
And it got to the point where, you know, my mom had no choice to accept it because she was not in a place to really put rules down because I was watching what she was doing and I was very mature from my age. So I ended up selling drugs probably about 11 or 12 and it kind of sort of became a family business or a Bonnie and Clyde between me and her, if you will, by the time I was about 12 years old.
00:06:26
Speaker
And like the story of Bonnie and Clyde, B.L. had her own run-ins with law enforcement and ended up in Juvenile Hall when she was still a child. That's when she was first exposed to some of the musical influences that make her own music so rich and original. So, yeah, I had multiple stints in juvenile placements. That was very much a fabric of my upbringing. Part of the reason why I got into, you know, Nirvana, Soundgarden,
00:06:54
Speaker
stuff like that because I would have never heard it in my neighborhood where I was at. BL's writing about the prison experience is remarkably honest. And what she shares tells again in poetic detail just how dehumanizing and cruel the prison system can be. I went to prison for like the dumbest shit ever the first time around. I had a co-defendant who was older and older than me. He was like about 40 and he was like robbing
00:07:24
Speaker
like old people and shit, and I had no idea that he was doing this. He was an addict. He was following people from the ATMs and the banks, and it wasn't just old people, but I feel like he preyed on older people and women and people he knew he can kind of get away with this with.
00:07:43
Speaker
There was an ongoing investigation because it was a pattern because he was following people from ATMs and from banks. And sometimes he would get them when they're like right up the street from the ATM or whatever. Or sometimes he would get them when they're like about to go in their house. So it was like a pattern. So it was like a whole investigation about this. I didn't know that any of this was happening. I was none the wiser. I was just, you know, high selling drugs out of his house.
00:08:08
Speaker
So one day, he had owed me some money, and he was trying to sell a phone to someone. And this wasn't like an iPhone or nothing. This was back in the day. So this was like a Nokia. So he was trying to sell a phone to someone. He told me, hey, I'm about to sell this phone. After that, I'm going to have your money. Can I get back on or whatever? Because we kind of had a phone, and I would over him fucking up some money or something.
00:08:35
Speaker
I was like, yeah, it's cool, whatever. I was waiting on a chick to come. I had no idea. None of this was going to happen. I was sitting on the couch. I was strapped up. I was waiting for my little shorty to come over. I ain't going to have to go and put my dick on. I wanted that. I already have it on. I was sitting there kind of waiting.
00:08:56
Speaker
And he went outside to go sell the phone. And I started hearing like a lot of screaming and stuff. And I went outside just to tell them like, hey, you guys can't argue out here because I had a lot of neighbors that really hated me or I thought they hated me at the time. And I went out. I'm like, yo, you guys can't do this here. You know, this is a place of business and it's three o'clock in the morning and it was raining. Couldn't really see that well. And the guy was just like stuttering and stumbling around and he was like, I need my phone.
00:09:26
Speaker
My information in there, I ain't leaving without my phone. And my co-defendant, he was arguing with him like, you said you had $20. Just in that. And the guy was like, I only got $8. That's all I got on me. And now I'm on the porch like, and they're arguing about $20 and they're making all this noise. I'm like, yo.
00:09:46
Speaker
So I started off really nice. Like, hey, sir, you got to leave, whatever. This is not the time for that, whatever. And then I was like, y'all arguing over $20 fucking dollars? Nah. Then I started kind of getting aggressive. Like, get the fuck out of here. Y'all got to take that shit somewhere else, whatever. And the guy was like, I ain't leaving without my phone.
00:10:04
Speaker
And when he said that, I was like, because my co-defendant told me that he was selling a phone. He didn't say he was selling the person's phone, you know? So he was saying it like it was his. He was like, all my information is in their phone. And I was like, now my wheels start kind of turning. I'm on drugs. I'm on like, probably like eight Zannies, probably like a pint of syrup and, you know, countless amounts of weed. So I'm standing there and something just hit me like, this ain't right.
00:10:33
Speaker
But I just thought that my co-defendant was trying to set me up. That was my first thought. I didn't think he was a cop because he was about 24, 25. He was a young guy. He had a hoodie on. He looked normal. And I was just standing there waiting for something to pop off. I felt like something was going to pop off.
00:10:52
Speaker
And the next thing I know, I think once the cop realized he wasn't going to get the phone, I didn't realize any of this until after, until we went to trial. I was able to kind of piece together the things that happened. Once he realized he had to get the phone to know that the phone was the stolen item, right? And then that was when he could make the arrest. But because that wasn't going to happen, I think he just
00:11:14
Speaker
was gonna just, I guess, make the arrest. I don't know what he was gonna do, but I know what he did, which was pull the gun out. He never said that he was a cop or anything, but he pulled the gun first. I didn't give him the opportunity to say anything after that. So he pulled the gun. I pulled my gun. We started like shooting back and forth. And then like a guy from across the street started shooting at me too. And that's when I got a
Court Experience and Consequences
00:11:40
Speaker
little worried. I still didn't think they was cops though.
00:11:42
Speaker
And I ran in the house. By the time I got inside the house, like I got shot in my leg, I kept running. By the time I got to like the kitchen area, I got shot in the top of like right underneath my neck, like right on my left shoulder blade a little bit. Yeah, like, yeah.
00:12:00
Speaker
like where your neck and your shoulder kind of connect, kind of right there. So when that happened, I was like, wow, these, these, these motherfuckers, they trying to take my head off type shit. So I kind of duck down and I was kind of waiting for the bullets to stop and they wouldn't stop.
00:12:17
Speaker
And now I'm terrified. Now I'm waiting on the cops. At this point, I mean, I'm ready to go to jail. So I'm like, somebody is like trying to kill me. I didn't know if they was coming in the house. I didn't know. I just knew it was like a rain of bullets. Over a hundred, by the way, was shot into the house.
00:12:32
Speaker
So everybody in the house was shot like these like so I didn't know that then but I found out later um so I was just I I tucked the gun and I just kind of hid in a corner and I was just waiting for the bullets to stop I was I was you know shot I couldn't really do much and I seen lights and I seen you know get your hands up get out
00:12:54
Speaker
And I put my hands out quick, like, hey, like, I'd rather go to jail for, like, you know, some random-ass shooting than to get killed by these, like, crazy men. Like, I thought, like, I didn't know what was happening.
00:13:06
Speaker
And they dragged me out. They put me, they handcuffed me. And when they got me outside, that's when they just started like literally, I felt like they were trying to beat me to death. Like it was like 30 cops and they was just all stomping me, hitting me with nightsticks, spitting on me. And I was handcuffed so I couldn't protect my head. I couldn't protect nothing. And the whole time I just kept thinking,
00:13:31
Speaker
Why are they fucking me up like this? Why are they doing this? It still didn't dawn that these men were cops. I just was like, why are they going so hard?
00:13:43
Speaker
My neighbors came out and my neighbors were trying to break through the barricade and shit like, yo, that's a girl. What is y'all doing? And they was crying and screaming and trying to fight. And then the whispers started, yo, they saying that's a girl. They saying that's a girl. It started whispering down. And mind you, I told you I had the dildo on, right? So it was like the print.
00:14:10
Speaker
they, I started seeing, I started hearing them saying it and they were like, I started to see their thought process kind of like, they were like hesitating with the kicks now and hesitating with the, cause they're like, what are they, why do they keep saying that? And then I started saying it like, yeah, I'm a girl. I'm a girl. Like, cause I saw that was kind of working and that's when they finally kind of like let off of me. And it was like a lot of, they had shot into the,
00:14:37
Speaker
into the house. So they was outside and they were shooting inside. So the whole, all the windows and stuff were shot out. So when they were like stomping me, which was the worst, the worst pain of it all was there was glass. It was like millions of little shards of glass on the ground on the porch. So as they was like stomping me and stuff, my body was getting like
00:14:58
Speaker
pierced with the glass. That's the only pain that I really remember vividly, like with every kick, with every, I just felt the glass just piercing my skin. It was just like, oh fuck. And I couldn't protect anything. So when they finally let me up, they put me in a stretcher and I looked over and I saw the guy that I was shooting
00:15:17
Speaker
with, he had a badge wrapped around his neck. It was out now. And he was just crying, just bawling on a stretcher. And I just looked and I was like, wow. I was like, you have fucked up. Like royally, like it's over, bitch. Like just go ahead and just die right now. Like that's just how I felt when I saw that badge wrapped around a man's neck. And they took me to the hospital.
00:15:42
Speaker
That was a whole situation with the dildo all over again. People act like they never seen the dildo. It was fucking ridiculous. And then I was supposed to get surgery to get the bullets removed and stuff, took me straight to the jail, left me in the present for seven days.
00:15:59
Speaker
So I didn't get a shower. I didn't get anything to eat. I didn't get, you know, they, they, they did me like the worst. I lost probably about 14 pounds in the seven days when I got, by the time I got to the county, I had like bruise ribs, broke jaw, bullet wounds, just pus, just coming out of every, every scar on my body. When I woke up, I would have green and yellow shit all over my sheets, like, and um,
00:16:28
Speaker
I didn't remember anything that happened. My grandma came to see me and she was like, oh baby, look what happened, what'd they do to you? And I was like, no, I was like, gramps, they didn't do nothing to me. I mean, I got shot, but after that, I just got locked up. I couldn't remember.
00:16:43
Speaker
anything. All I remember was the shooting and then popping up in the county. Like the whole seven days was gone. The whole stomping was gone. The whole hospital shit was gone. Like my whole like memory was gone. So I'm sure I was pretty concussed and all that stuff. And then when I had to go to surgery to get the bullets removed, they were like, Oh no, you got court. So they sent me to court instead.
00:17:09
Speaker
And by then I was calling my grandma, I'm like, you gotta call the lawyer because my wounds weren't healing. So I was like infected everywhere. And they took me up to the medical and they took like these tweezer things and they just jammed them in my wound and just pulled the bullets out.
00:17:28
Speaker
like with nothing. They didn't give me no anesthesia, no numbing, no nothing. They like sat me there. I was sitting. I was sitting. I wasn't even laying. I wasn't even in like a hospital gown or anything. I was still like in my gel clothes. And they just pulled the shit out with like tweezers. It felt like I was having a baby. I never had a baby, so I don't really know, but I know it was painful. And all the way up until, I want to say 2018, I still had that bullet in my back.
00:17:58
Speaker
And I just started having like serious problems with it. And because they told me that, oh, it's not a bullet. It's just it's just a graze because I couldn't see. There's no mirrors. So they told me I was only shot one time.
00:18:11
Speaker
And that was a graze. And when I started having these problems in my neck, and when I went to go get it checked, I had this big old cyst, and they was like, oh, it's a whole ass bullet right there, you know? It's right by your fucking spine. It could paralyze you. So I had to get it removed in like 2018, which is 13 years later. So yeah, it was fucking brutal. And it was so stupid. That's the whole thing. It was so stupid. It was like over like $20. I didn't know any of that at the time,
00:18:41
Speaker
When I was sitting in court, I was just like, what the fuck? Like, this is why I'm here. Like, I was just like, wow. Like, this is some bullshit. So, you know, I'm thankful for my judge for kind of knowing that I wasn't really aware. He just, you know, he understood. I was just literally at the time trying to protect myself. And I think he knew that, but he, you know, he had to give me some type of time. But I say all that to say, like, some of the most severe cases are from the most dumb shit.
00:19:12
Speaker
A lot of people I know who doing them like a lot of time is from something so minute or something so stupid.
Maintaining Identity and Dignity in Prison
00:19:20
Speaker
So anytime that I'm faced with something really dumb and stupid, I just think about that shit. Like, you know what I mean? Like, it could turn really ugly really quick, you know?
00:19:32
Speaker
We often think that people who are incarcerated, especially those who are serving long sentences, must have done something that would have warranted that kind of punishment. But sometimes it's just a matter of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. And of course, as a function of a society in which mass incarceration is a massive social problem.
00:19:53
Speaker
Biel's music and writing about the prison experience is remarkably honest and what she shares tells again in poetic detail just how dehumanizing and cruel the prison system can be and helps us understand a little bit the role of music within that system as music helps us express who we are but also discover who we are and how we feel about things.
00:20:17
Speaker
When I wrote First Impressions, a song that was on the Dodge and Crow EP, they was asking like, what was your first impressions when you were incarcerated? And I didn't have the answers because I was so far removed from that. I was so far
00:20:32
Speaker
I didn't know how I felt. So I had to go back in time and think about being an 18-year-old girl and thinking about how it made me feel. And there's no lie that I was standing next to, I have a line in that record that says, they telling me to wiggle my toes, squat while I cough. The girl next to me, her minstrel's on and out drops a clot. And they telling me to wiggle my toes all while they watch, the word degraded and can't define the situation.
00:21:00
Speaker
But by the time I wrote that song, I was working outside the gate. I was stripping every single day, period or no period. So I had become so desensitized. I used to tell people who come in for five years, eight years, and if they was going to be my Sully and they're in there crying and shit,
00:21:17
Speaker
I would tell them, yo, five years is nothing. Chill out. You can sleep there. Eight years, you'll be fine. You'll be out in a second. I just desensitized the time. It had no concept to me really. They made me feel like time and nothing. I could die any day now. We're not guaranteed, but that's the dehumanization that takes place.
00:21:42
Speaker
So it was very hard for me to tap into the original motions of how I felt when I was in front of four guards stripping
00:21:53
Speaker
you know, squatting, spreading my ass cheeks, lifting my titties up. I mean, even if you're period on, they tell you, yo, yeah, snatch that tampon out. Yeah, we need to see the leak. I mean, all that stuff became very standard to me 10 years later because I was doing it for so long and they realized how bad it fucked me up.
00:22:13
Speaker
because when it first happened, when these things were first happening, I couldn't believe that this was the process, you know? Even BL's name reflects the identity shift that she underwent in prison. So we had a TEDx that I did that was really cheesy and stupid. Please, nobody look it up.
00:22:30
Speaker
But we did it while we were incarcerated. And we were the youngest group that was going to perform. And all the freaking DOC superintendents and shit were on our ass. They didn't like anything we were doing. So my friends sometimes call me bearded lady. I will have fun when they get kind of mad. Or if I'm getting mad. If I'm getting mad and they don't want me to be mad, they'll be like, oh, the bearded lady's about to go off. They'll do shit like that.
00:22:55
Speaker
So they kept denying our names. And I had just wandered up. I said, fuck it. We're going to be B.O. Sherrell. So it was like a hidden joke that kind of fucked with the admin without them knowing we're fucking with them. We're like, yeah, our name is B.O. Sherrell. And we thought they were going to ask, well, what does it B.O. stand for? But no, of course, the Burbains were like, B.O. Sherrell? B.O. Sherrell? I like that. B.O. Sherrell? Yeah, now that's a good name, guys. Good job. We were just looking at each other like, well, what the fuck?
00:23:24
Speaker
So yeah, the BL is bearded lady. I don't know if you've seen me or know what I look like, but I have a full-blown beard and I have like double D tits. And a lot of times when people look at me at first, they're like, what the fuck is that? But when they hear my music, they fall in love.
00:23:50
Speaker
So I absolutely think music has a way of connecting people on a human level that they may not have been able to see just through their aesthetic, you know, eyes.
00:24:05
Speaker
With the gang at the bar, stumble all the way to the car Slap your back of the leg, I see the stars as they roll back All of a sudden hit, scoot the soul, bam the snack Caddy moving real fast, bean on the dash, law on that ass Bang God with his crash, that's what shit go black
00:24:20
Speaker
When you come to a cracker, got your damn arms tied behind your back. You don't even know what happened, but you know you ain't a rat. So they take you to Book and Bell, a few racks, you ain't got that. Victim gettin'
Consuelo's Story of Escape and Coping
00:24:30
Speaker
life like that. In our last episode, we talked to Catherine Bockens, the founder of Rehabilitation Through the Arts, and she cited a saying that women go to prison for a man, or that most women go to prison for a man. Catherine herself ended up going to prison to follow her husband, but as a person working in the prisons, not as a person who was incarcerated.
00:24:50
Speaker
But Consuela Gaines is a person who more literally followed a man into prison. Well, what led me to prison was my heart. I fell in love with a gentleman who was facing 20 years for four counts of armed robbery.
00:25:08
Speaker
And with me being not really wanting to lose another male figure in my life that I had grown so attached to, I concocted a plan to help him to escape from jail.
00:25:25
Speaker
And ultimately, that plan, it worked. I did assist him in escaping from the custody of parish jailers in Opelousas, Louisiana. Broad daylight, sawed-off shotgun, very similar to something, you know, Bonnie and Clyde are known for. And that's what they called us, the modern-day Bonnie and Clyde.
00:25:47
Speaker
It made national media attention and we left Louisiana and we were gone. We were pretty much on the lam for eight days until they caught up to us in Tybee Island, Georgia. And we were extradited back to Louisiana facing charges of armed robbery, aggravated escape.
00:26:11
Speaker
convicted felon possession of firearm on top of federal charges of transporting stolen vehicle across the state lines. So we were facing a considerable amount of time. The armed robbery charge within itself carried 99 years. I was the first offender.
00:26:28
Speaker
that crime made Gordon second offender. So my first time ever being in trouble in my life, had never had a speeding ticket, parking ticket, jaywalking ticket, no tickets, no trouble with law enforcement previously. So, you know, at the age of 23, I found myself
00:26:48
Speaker
entering the prison system in Louisiana and it was pretty scary not really knowing what to expect going in especially having never been in the system before and when I went in you know I found myself
00:27:06
Speaker
on lockdown pretty much because of my charge, my escape charge, and I was surrounded by women from all walks of life, all ages, all colors from throughout the state of Louisiana, some from other areas, and some were very talented with singing because
00:27:30
Speaker
At some point someone would start singing in the lockdown units. But the first 18 months, I was pretty much alone in a cell. And I basically was my radio because we weren't allowed radios. For that amount of time, I had to become that radio. I had to become the music that I missed. And most times, you know, that's what I did. When I wanted to hear music, I had to sing.
00:28:00
Speaker
Take my hand and lead, lead me on.
00:28:19
Speaker
Consuela is the choir director for the Louisiana Correctional Institution Choir. And she, unlike Biel, was surrounded by music as a child. And at first, prison took away her voice. It was only later that she found it again. I grew up around music musicians. So I had been pretty much exposed to music from an early age. Probably my parents realized that I had a voice when I was about
00:28:49
Speaker
seven years old. Then I started singing in the church choir at about nine, 10 years old and really started developing. I mean, I had a fantastic choir instructors who really took time with me and it probably was equivalent to me having taken singing lessons or voice lessons because they really took time with me to teach me how to breathe and
00:29:19
Speaker
just how to really come out of myself and allow the music to take control. So when I was incarcerated, it was like I knew that I could sing a lot. Most people didn't know that I was a singer. But when they discovered that I was a singer, it was always, Consuelo, would you please sing for me? Sing a song for me.
00:29:46
Speaker
which most of the times I would just go ahead and do it. And while I was in lockdown, being able to really hear my voice with the acoustics that were in that cell, I had a better opportunity to really hear my voice without so many outside distractions. I was really able to focus on fine tuning
00:30:14
Speaker
doing the riffs and just playing with my voice, really doing exercises, you know, to see and to witness the different octaves that I was able to obtain that I didn't realize that I could until I was in that setting. So that's pretty much how
00:30:36
Speaker
I discovered a different side of my voice. And it was amazing to me, really, to be able to experience that. And it was crazy. I was like, well, had I not been in this cell, had I not come to prison, I probably wouldn't have ever really had that opportunity to really listen to my voice. But I took pleasure in it.
00:31:05
Speaker
And of course, other people who were listening, they didn't really realize what I was doing. They were just enjoying the fact that I was singing. But it was quite an experience for me to be able to really appreciate my own voice. Because a lot of times I'm like, oh, I'm all right. I'm mediocre or whatever. But then there were times that I would sing and I was like,
00:31:34
Speaker
Yeah, you know, it may not be Whitney Houston, but you're pretty good. But I think there's something else that I'll say about you Consuela too, which is that in addition to a voice, you also had a calling. That's Ben Harbert. He's a professor from Georgetown University who met Consuela at the prison when he was investigating how music was being made within prison walls. They ultimately published a paper together.
00:32:00
Speaker
When we brought the cameras in and we did that interview in your dorm, you had really stressed how much you used your position as the choir director to bring out other people's voices.
00:32:12
Speaker
And I feel like in prisons and looking at people who are incarcerated, we tend to over focus on this idea of individual expression. And that bothers me because the whole prison system is based around this idea of atomizing people and not being able to focus on community and working together.
00:32:35
Speaker
And one of the things that Consuela was able to do with the choir is create a community and create opportunities for people to get folded into that community. And that's what was so striking.
00:32:51
Speaker
Yeah, you might not have sounded like Whitney Houston, but I think the choir as a whole and to see all these different personalities in there all working together was a really striking thing and frankly takes more work because all of the pressure of incarceration is to isolate somebody, to focus on the individual. What did you do wrong? How can you fix yourself?
00:33:15
Speaker
pull yourself up by your own bootstraps. You can't get support from other people. And music does the opposite. Putting someone's voice next to each other is music.
00:33:27
Speaker
Even humming, I mean, that was something that I learned when I was a little girl. If you don't know what to say, just hum, just hum. And even humming was a voice. And so music takes on many forms for people who are incarcerated. And it means different things for different people. For me,
00:33:55
Speaker
It was an escape from where I was. It was me reconnecting with things that I learned growing up with my family. It was...
Ben Harbert's Documentation of Prison Music
00:34:07
Speaker
my way of remaining free, even though my body was confined. It was my way of giving back to God, something that He gave to me, something that always, you know, when I sang,
00:34:27
Speaker
I was very concerned about how God felt because he's the one who gave me that voice. And to be able to share that was such an honor and a privilege because he could have given it to anyone. And to know that he gave it to me let me know that he loved me. So my way of telling him thank you was sharing that with others, especially throughout the difficult time.
00:34:56
Speaker
Ben met Consuelo when he was working on a project to update American music songbooks. He had realized that they were woefully out of date, and that led him on a journey that eventually put him in front of Consuelo. I guess for some of us, prison finds us, and for others of us, we find prison.
00:35:15
Speaker
I was the latter case. So I was coming from a folk music school in Chicago, the Old Town School of Folk Music, and I was revising the song book for that school. And I was digging into the histories of American folk music. And one of the things that I kept coming up against were all of these songs that had an origin in prisons.
00:35:40
Speaker
So songs like the Midnight Special, Lead Belly's song, all of the old work songs, which essentially were prison farm songs. All of these came from prisons and being aware of music in so many other countries.
00:35:57
Speaker
I was struck by how prevalent that was in American folk music and then just followed that lead on why is that. So I started looking into that and found John Lomax's work who had toured through the American South trying to find authentic folk music in prisons.
00:36:18
Speaker
And I started learning more about this story of how work songs that had come from Africa sustained those who were enslaved during that time and then later incarcerated as an extension of that oppression.
00:36:36
Speaker
And music had this amazing role of bringing community, of allowing people to measure time and get through difficult days to regulate the work to protect each other. As I was paying attention to that, I was also reading in the 1990s about this huge influx of money that was going to private prisons.
00:37:02
Speaker
and was really shocked with the fact that there was more money that went into prisons in the 90s than went into the internet. And I figured that if we're incarcerating more people than anyone has in history, why are we still paying attention to these old folk songs from the 1930s?
00:37:21
Speaker
And so what I did was I retraced John Lomax's steps as best as I could. And I reached out to three different states where Lomax had been to Texas, to Louisiana, and Mississippi. And Texas didn't reply to me at all. Mississippi said I wouldn't be able to interview anyone incarcerated there, which is sort of problematic if you're trying to learn more about music there.
00:37:49
Speaker
And I'd reached out to Louisiana, and at the same time I had reconnected with an old grade school classmate of mine whose godmother happened to be the acting warden at the women's prison. And those ins are always better than just simply calling the front desk.
00:38:07
Speaker
So with that connection and with the intent of using that as a stepping stone to get to the much more infamous prison, Angola, I went to the women's prison. And that's when I met Consuela among several other singers there. And listened to the choir, did some interviews. Consuela, I'm sure you remember that day.
00:38:29
Speaker
And I was walking out, and I think it may have been you who said, or maybe it was somebody who was also sitting at that table, as I was packing up, I remember one of you said, I'm glad you came here because no one pays attention to us.
00:38:42
Speaker
And this was in the days before Orange is the New Black, and the idea of women incarcerated just wasn't really on the map. And I was walking out of the prison, and those words just were in the back of my mind. I have to come back. I have to pay attention to this.
00:39:02
Speaker
And it ended up being a really important aspect, not only in meeting Consuela and working with her and getting a perspective on the women's prison, but it also allowed me to think through how gender then is a part of incarceration and how gender is a part of music making when incarcerated.
00:39:22
Speaker
What Ben discovered in the Louisiana prisons was so powerful that he ultimately turned the story into a documentary film. It's called Follow Me Down, portraits of Louisiana prison musicians, and it was released in 2012.
00:39:35
Speaker
I want to be careful that we're not giving too much power to what music is doing because prisons are still awful places. And I became interested in talking to people about what that experience was like going from that escape that Consuelo was just talking about
00:39:53
Speaker
to that reality of the prison after a performance or after singing to yourself or something. And Clay Logan in my film, I don't remember if we put this in the film or not, but he had talked about how the experience of leaving the band room and leaving the practice where
00:40:12
Speaker
All of his world was simply the musical interaction between him and his bandmates. And he said when he would walk out, it was like coming up from a submarine and just how radically different that world of music and that reality of prison is.
00:40:32
Speaker
And because music has power, but it's a limited power. And if we give too much praise to music, we tend to forget what devastating institutions prison is. And we lose our urgency of needing to deal with mass incarceration. And music in prison tends to calm the savage beast.
00:40:55
Speaker
whenever there was an uprising or people were just really angry or just, you know, there was a depressing spirit just floating over the prison, music could cut through it.
00:41:12
Speaker
it would literally cut through it and send any negativity, any evilness, it would send it running. I don't care what type of music it was, it would just
00:41:30
Speaker
get rid of any negative vibes people had when music came into the picture. And that was the beauty of music behind bars. It brought people together, had folks reminiscing in a good way. It wasn't in a bad way where people were just crying and just ready to go home or try to escape or something like that, but just
00:41:59
Speaker
it brought people home, it brought people back to moments where they had good times, you know, times that they didn't ever want to forget. And that music tend to make you remember certain moments in your life that you didn't even realize until that song came on or you heard somebody singing
00:42:25
Speaker
a particular song. You can almost remember the exact moment when that song had an impact on your life.
00:42:36
Speaker
In the last episode, we talked to Claire Bryant of the Chamber Music Ensemble Dakota, and it got me to wondering whether classical music or music that is foreign to a lot of people who are incarcerated or even sung in a different language might serve a different purpose compared with music that people might be familiar with or sung in a language that everyone understands.
00:42:57
Speaker
This reminded me of the 1994 film, The Shawshank Redemption, and there's a really famous scene in which one of the inmates, played by Tim Robbins, hijacks the public address system to play a duet from my favorite opera, La Nocida Figaro.
00:43:15
Speaker
He plays the Consonetta Solaria for two sopranos. It's probably one of the most famous musical parts of the opera. And in the movie, Dufresne's friend, Red, played by Morgan Freeman, who also narrates the film, has this to say, I have no idea to this day what those two Italian ladies were singing about.
00:43:34
Speaker
Truth is, I don't want to know. Some things are best left unsaid. I'd like to think they were singing about something so beautiful it can't be expressed in words and makes your heart ache because of it. I tell you, those voices soared higher and farther than anybody in a gray place dares to dream. It was like some beautiful bird flapped into our drab little cage and made those walls dissolve away. And for the briefest of moments, every last man in Shawshank felt free.
00:44:04
Speaker
I think it's worth considering that that is another way in which music can be of use to people who are incarcerated, that it can remind them of what's beautiful and that there is a reason to hope. Admit so much.
00:44:20
Speaker
to be able to still be connected to music, to not have that part of me taken away. So it meant everything to me. And I tell people even today, had it not been for music,
00:44:39
Speaker
While I was behind bars, I probably would have lost my mind because it helped me through so, so much. It helped me through losing relatives. It helped me through the fact of, you know, my parents aging, getting older, and I'm not there. It helped me through when my father passed. It helped me through so much.
00:45:07
Speaker
It was my best friend, really. I love the friends that I had over those years. The single best friend that I had was music because it never, ever felt me. It never, ever let me down. It never, ever disappointed me. It would do exactly what I needed it to do.
00:45:28
Speaker
Whenever I turned to it or relied on it, it did exactly what I needed it to do. It never, ever disappointed me.
00:45:39
Speaker
Consuelo, one of the things I hear in what you're saying is that the time was then had a relation to you, which connects to a lot of the ways that I've heard other people talk about it. Because music is a relationship with time. When you're making music, you have a different reaction to time. Timing, tempo, a feel, and this. And that is such a different
00:46:03
Speaker
feeling of time than incarceration is, which is the most abstract time that you could imagine putting on a person. It has no relation to you other than something that you have to suffer through. But if you think about it with music, when you practice a scale, for instance, you have an engagement with time not only in that moment, but it relates to the time you practiced that scale yesterday, and the day before that, and the way you might practice that scale tomorrow.
00:46:29
Speaker
So that play with time actually is incredibly meaningful and is a way of like engagement where you have your hands in time, you're playing with time. And when you're doing that with other people, it's even more meaningful. But the time that seems so strange to me having never experienced incarceration but hearing people talk about it is that idea of time that you've given into.
00:46:56
Speaker
and just giving in to the time of the clock and waiting for it to run out. And I heard people refer to like the living dead or the walking dead, the people who just like at a certain point have given up and are just serving time and those years just slip away and they're gone. But music then gives you a chance to actually get really intimate with time and to play it. And in a way this gets back to what you were saying about power.
00:47:22
Speaker
because then that thing that you're sentenced to, you have a relationship to all of a sudden. It's not just that clock time that's ticking away, but something that is meaningful time that allows you to have a connection with the time that's going by. So we talk about music bringing people together, but it's more complicated than that. Music can become intertwined in our relationships in ways that are more than just the simple, oh, grooving to a beat.
00:47:50
Speaker
It's like the way that it brings people together is really more of a, it reconfigures our relationships with a wide range of people. And if you think beyond the choir or the band, music also puts people in relationships in prison with administrators, with outsiders, with outside audiences, with church groups coming in, with legislators coming in,
00:48:16
Speaker
to do a tour. And had Consuela not taken those opportunities, I wouldn't have met her. She wouldn't have met some of the people who became advocates for her there. And that's something that I've seen at a lot of different institutions is that the musicians learn how to navigate the place.
Humanizing Incarcerated Artists Through Music
00:48:43
Speaker
And
00:48:44
Speaker
you do that by developing relationships. I mean, if you think about it on the outside, when you're a musician in a town, you develop a relationship with a venue, you might develop a relationship with a funder, you might teach, and you might develop a relationship with a music school that allows you a studio.
00:49:04
Speaker
You develop a relationship with the press to advertise your gigs. You might develop a relationship with the music store to buy equipment, right? All of those relationships are really important, even though you might not think of the person selling you guitar strings as an important person. It gives you all of these wide range of relationships.
00:49:27
Speaker
And from what I've learned, that can be a really important thing in a prison because you have an excuse to get to know people. And there's so much mistrust and there's so much suspicion of people that those simple interactions can be a really grounding thing for people. And people do it through other ways. Some people do it through sport. Some people do it through participating in a vocational program or something like that.
00:49:56
Speaker
But musical activity really rests on having all of those different people who support the musical activity. You know, from the people opening the door to the venue to the people who are writing reviews of your music. And the same stuff happens in prison.
00:50:24
Speaker
So music might not just help people while they're in prison find their voices. It might also be their ticket out of prison. For Bielle, it turned out to be a major career change and led to her taking on the deputy director position at Diagym Crow Records.
00:50:43
Speaker
Yeah, so I started writing a, he reached out to us. We did a TEDx and he reached out to my friend and my friend wasn't a performer at the time. So she sent a letter to me like, hey, somebody's writing about something. I don't know what's going on, but you might want to check it out. So I checked it out and from there I saw his format. He wanted to do an album based off of mass incarceration. I'm a conceptual album.
00:51:09
Speaker
that is very moody, pink Floyd the wall. I was totally into it. And I started writing records for him for that. I wrote quite a few records to the point where he told me, okay, that's enough. We want other people to write too. And we put some of those records on the EP, Dodger and Crow EP, which was headed to the streets in First Impressions.
00:51:31
Speaker
After that, by the time then, I was home. I was approaching home. So when I came home, we just started recording. And we had a lot of extra recordings that didn't fit the narrative of the album. Because the album goes all the way from the menstrual era, into the renegade era, into the war on drugs, into your introduction with prison and jail and cops and stuff, into solitary confinement where it gets moody and instrumental.
00:51:59
Speaker
you know, mental into the family's perspective. I mean, I don't want to give it all away, but it tells the whole complete story. And we had music that was outside of that from other artists. So the question was, you know, what do we do with that other music? And that's when we became an organization. And that's when we built our board. And I've been deputy director since then.
00:52:19
Speaker
And then we have such a great, wonderful relationship with our band directors. They are truly our family, the ones that are inside. They're beautiful, beautiful judges of character. And some of them had done some fucked up shit. But when I tell you, I'm 32 right now. So if someone committed a crime 30 years ago, I can't imagine how many people they have become since then. Because I'm like 20 different people since birth. They're amazing people. And we trust them.
00:52:48
Speaker
They create their sound and we come and we record and then it's my job to then maximize it and take it beyond 2020, beyond 2030. It's my job to make it futuristic, not just for the now. Futuristic while also being classic. What is the mission of the label? The number one mission is to create high-quality music for musicians who are formerly and currently incarcerated on a high-quality platform.
00:53:16
Speaker
That's our number one mission. In the midst of that, we do other things. We sent over 12,000 masks into the prisons for PPE benefit that we do every Sunday. We always try to get our hands dirty for any causes, but we live for the music. The goal is to hopefully humanize. I hope that a person who
00:53:38
Speaker
Maybe, I don't want to say, I hope a blue lives matter person, because those people are choosing to be willfully ignorant. So I don't really negotiate with terrorists. But anyone who's not being just willfully ignorant, and maybe their father is a cop or something, and they heard about what I did to save my life or protect my life, I would hope that they would be able to listen to the album and just take away that I'm a great artist and they enjoy my music.
00:54:08
Speaker
A lot of our favorite artists out there, even though they may not be in prison, they've done a lot of fucked up shit that they haven't been held accountable for. So our goal is to humanize.
00:54:20
Speaker
through music. I don't think that what a person did or does or whatever, I don't think that it impacts it that much. And we deal with people who are masters in their profession. They're professionals. That's the difference between DJC and these other organizations who come in and think that they're handing them a bone. To us, we're not handing them a bone. We are working with some amazing musicians, and we're honored. So I just hope that people give the music a listen and understand that
00:54:49
Speaker
It's on par with any and everybody. And I think by the time you're done with the project, you won't even be focusing on the fact that I'm a returning citizen. Now, it's important to understand that one of the reasons why we need a record label that's devoted to people who are currently or formerly incarcerated is because there are so many obstacles to providing individuals with the opportunity to record their music at a high level.
00:55:14
Speaker
Bielle, with her experiences both inside and outside of the prison system, has managed to figure out a solution to many of the problems that people wanting to do this kind of work face. We have to get approval, which takes forever. And most times a lot of states say no. And then once we get that, we have a band director. And they work, work, work. They practice. They write their songs up. They figure out what they want to do. They send it to us, say what you think, blah, blah, blah.
00:55:42
Speaker
If they have 30 songs on their list that they want to record and we got five days, we dedicate to make that happen. So we go in, we have to be in the prisons by about 7 a.m. 645, we leave around 7 p.m.
00:55:59
Speaker
And we build a studio inside of the prison. And one thing about building a studio, a lot of our stuff is done in post. We just really need their vocal to be as clean as possible. We could do everything else on the back end. So we have to build these studios. And I mean, we use blankets. We use clamps. We use PVC pipe. We do whatever they got.
00:56:26
Speaker
That's what we work with, duct tape, whatever, to get the most crisp sounding audio, vocal audio that we can. And we bang them out, bang them out, bang them out every day until the point people forget where they are. We're just all in there making music from Grammy award winners, people who have never been in prison.
00:56:49
Speaker
the people who gonna be in there for the rest of their lives, the people that's about to come home. I mean, we're all one unit in that moment and we're cooking and it's hot. And there's another room where we have our musicians. And when I go in that room sometimes and I see what they doing and we got guitarist, pianist, percussionist, we got singers in the other room, you know,
00:57:17
Speaker
We try to keep it coordinated, but we only have a specific amount of time to gather all this material. So we definitely have to execute at a fast pace without jeopardizing the integrity of the records. And I think we're doing it really well now. Of course, it takes some adjusting. Of course, in the beginning, it was hard for us to catch our flow and
00:57:43
Speaker
have boundaries and schedules and you know, cause everybody wants to be on a song or everybody wants to do this and that, but you know, I think we've definitely caught our stride. Like we execute, we can record five songs with 10 guys in a day. So we get busy.
00:58:03
Speaker
Till I Go. It's my most vulnerable piece on the album. It's the last song. It's about my spirituality. I had a very strong grandmother. She's no longer here, so she hasn't been able to see the success. But I know that they say that she's looking down. So the verse goes a little like, you ever get sad from being happy? I did this shit for gramps. She in the afterlife.
00:58:29
Speaker
And the sacrifices she made, it took half her life. Y'all say she looking down. She hardly had a sight. I feel my faith has lost its appetite.
00:58:39
Speaker
Cause I done served the deacon and the pastor's wife I used to know them verses front to back and back to right Till I read that Bible printed and it's black and white And it's cracker type My spirit don't have a sanctuary It roams cause what is home But God knows it's gold It shows straight through my soul And He chose me Now get a load of me
00:59:02
Speaker
with a beard so you notice me got a look from some of hoes co-op alone in it triple D's who the fuck you know as old as me and I'm supposed to be exactly how she moped in me yeah
00:59:23
Speaker
Thanks for listening to this episode of Cadence. You can find us online at the ensembleproject.com slash cadence. You can also get in touch with us at cadencemind at gmail.com. And you can support us at patreon.com slash cadencepodcast. Cadence is produced by Adam Isaac and me, Andre Viscontis. I also created and write the show.
00:59:43
Speaker
This episode was edited by Noel Nichols and Daniella Hart from Uptown Works. The music in this episode was provided for us by BL Shirell and acclaimed New Zealand composer Rian Sheehan from his album Stories from Elsewhere. You can find me on Twitter at intravis, you can find out more about the label at dijimcro.com, and you can find BL's music at blshirell.com.
01:00:09
Speaker
BL released her first album on June 19th, 2020. Cadence is generously supported by the Germanicos Foundation. Join us in a couple weeks for the last episode of season three as we continue our exploration into what music tells us about the mind.