Southerners engaged with the music that came out of their carceral institutions. Guitarist Bukka White managed to record a couple of songs before being sent to Parchman Farm. In fact, his song "Shake 'Em On Down" became a hit. White was so famous within the prison that not only was he exempt from much of the work, but the governor of Mississippi knew who he was—and even attended a performance. This kind of fame was uncommon, and most musicians did not find that their talents won them any special treatment.
Meanwhile, in the North, Southern prisons became laboratories as folklorists sought to record and study Black music. Working for the Library of Congress, John Lomax and his son Alan were charged with collecting folk songs, which as John described, were, "songs… in musical phrasing and in poetic content are most unlike those of the white race, the least contaminated by white influence or the modern Negro jazz." Lomax thought prisons were ideal because they were segregated and isolated—"thus a long-time Negro convict spends many years with practically no chance of hearing a white man speak or sing."
Lomax's writings about this work are stunningly paternalistic, rooted in a kind of white voyeurism that at times, reveals its own racist underpinnings. His fetishistic interest in African American music also caused him to look down on any music or musician whose influences were "too white." To Lomax, songs could only be "folk songs" if they were divorced from any connection to white popular culture. Lomax believed at some level that there was an essential or "pure" African American form of music. Moreover, his treatment of the people that he recorded rested on cooperation with prison authorities—and, in a few cases, outright coercion. On at least one occasion, he enlisted a warden to compel John Gibson (also known as "Black Samson"), a man incarcerated in Nashville who was uncomfortable singing non-spiritual music, to record folk songs.
The Lomaxes were not the only musicologists plumbing Southern prisons for musical brilliance. David Cohn, a journalist and expatriate Mississippian, spent time at Parchman Farm for a book, God Shakes Creation, for which he recorded lyrics from women imprisoned in the camp. Harry Oster, an English professor, followed the lead of the Lomaxes in the 1950s and went back to Angola State Prison to record work songs. and in the case of Robert Pete Williams, recorded a full album. As late as the 1960s, folklorist Bruce Jackson was conducting oral histories with incarcerated people in Texas. He also recorded an album of songs, Negro Folklore from Texas State Prisons.