In 1898, in reference to a Good Friday Easter service which included an organ and soprano soloist, Warden Woodbridge of the Connecticut state prison was said to be “a firm believer in the power of music to humanize, uplift, and stimulate the moral delinquents under his charge to something nobler and better.” The prison newsletter’s included effusive praise of the soloist as “the possessor of a soprano voice of wide range and great sweetness…[E]very phrase and difficult passage in her singing showed the effects of cultivation and thorough training… and appealed very forcibly to the better nature of all within the sound of her voice.” The review may have been slightly inflated as she shares a last name with the warden, though if they are related it did not say.
Not all presentations were religiously themed, nor were they limited to the more sophisticated styles of sopranos and organs. Earlier in 1898, the amusingly eclectic “Elite Banjo and Graphophone concert” included not only strumming but also virtuoso “singing and whistling .” The graphophone, a variation of the more well-known gramophone/phonograph, had mixed results, as it “tickled the boys to such an extent that they rather marred the effect by their laughter…[but] it was a novelty to the older residents of the institution.”
As the twentieth century passed, music became less an ecclesiastical mission and increasingly an integral part of secular prison life. In 1966, Johnny “Spider” Martin played a jazz concert in Connecticut State Prison at Somers, with the prison newspaper noting that “a type of music once disdained as being fit only for bars and bordellos was being performed in a sacred concert.” The prison chapel had given way to the concert hall, and music for its own sake was burgeoning.
Musicians well-known to the outside world began to perform more frequently in prisons. The preeminent example undoubtedly being Johnny Cash, who played his first prison concert at California’s San Quentin prison on January 1, 1958. Cash became a fixture in prisons around the country, notably Folsom Prison, the eponymous facility of his 1955 hit “Folsom Prison Blues.” In 1968, Cash performed and recorded a live album entitled At Folsom Prison. That record ended up selling over three million albums and reviving his career.
His performances were so popular that Cash’s prison concerts were used as a reward for good behavior and withholding them became a threatened punishment. In an announcement for an upcoming concert with “The Folsom Blues Warbler” at Arkansas’s Cummins Prison, The Pea Pickers Picayune warned that “escape attempts, a good rhubarb foul-up or whatever could land you in ye hole will cause you to miss the man who gives out the music.”