In Texas, a long-forgotten series of prison albums offers a rare way to hear what incarceration sounded like decades ago.
The albums were recorded by incarcerated musicians inside Texas prisons and sold as souvenirs at the Texas prison rodeo in Huntsville. The now-defunct spectacle for decades drew huge crowds to watch prisoners compete in gritty rodeo events and perform on stage.
Maurice Chammah, a staff writer at The Marshall Project, says he first stumbled onto one of the records about 10 years ago on the image of an album cover on eBay.
“It had a man being flung from a horse on the cover,” Chammah said. “And on the back, it explained that every year in Huntsville, Texas, there was a prison rodeo.”
That discovery led Chammah into a deeper search through a largely overlooked corner of Texas history, one that connects prison culture, country music and changing ideas about punishment and rehabilitation.
From the 1930s until the mid-1980s, the Texas prison rodeo was a major public event. Tens of thousands of people came to Huntsville on Sundays in the fall. They watched incarcerated men take part in dangerous rodeo contests. But they also heard music from prison bands that had spent the year rehearsing inside units in East Texas.
Sometimes those musicians shared the bill with major stars, including Johnny Cash, Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson.
The Texas Department of Corrections, as the agency was then known, recorded many of the bands and sold their albums at the rodeo.
Chammah said the prison system, in effect, operated like a small in-house record label. He said estimates suggest that roughly 3,000 albums were sold each weekend.
What makes the records remarkable is not just their rarity. It is how good the music is.
Chammah says the songs sound fully in conversation with the music of their time; country, folk, jazz, soul and even traces of surf rock. Some of the performers were seasoned musicians. One drummer later played with jazz great Dexter Gordon. A saxophonist had performed with Ray Charles. Another musician, Morgan White, appears across multiple albums playing and writing on several instruments.
But the records also capture something harder to hear in today’s prison system: a stronger public language of rehabilitation.
Chammah is careful not to romanticize the era. Texas prisons were still brutal places. Incarcerated people labored in fields, often under violent discipline, and prison culture still carried echoes of slavery. But he says the music programs reflect a period when officials, at least in part, promoted the idea that people in prison could be prepared to return to society.
There are songs about heartbreak, loneliness and the anxiety of returning to the outside world. In “Afraid to Go Home,” a man nearing release worries that the woman he loved has moved on and that he no longer knows how to live in the free world. In “Wait for Me,” another begs a loved one not to give up on him.
Chammah says the songs humanize the men who wrote them. Even when they avoid openly criticizing prison, they reveal longing, regret and uncertainty. For the musicians, the songs may have offered a way to express emotions that ordinary conversation could not.
And for listeners on the outside, Chammah says, the music offered something else: a reminder that people behind bars were still people — talented, wounded and hoping for another chance.
The Marshall Project is now building on Chammah’s reporting with an email newsletter devoted to prison music. The plan is to send listeners one song recorded in prison each week, some contemporary, some drawn from older archives, including the long-lost Texas prison rodeo records and prison blues dating back to the 1930s and 1940s.
Chammah says he is also inviting the public to help fill in the gaps. Many of the Texas recordings were sold only at the rodeo and never widely preserved, so he is asking anyone who may have records, tapes or other prison music artifacts to come forward and contact him.
