Inmates at Mississippi’s Parchman Prison learn music

Inmate/students practice blues harmonica during a classroom session of the Blues Tradition in American Literature course inside Parchman Prison in Mississippi.

John Burnett

PARCHMAN, Miss. — Nine big men sit attentively at their desks inside the Mississippi State Penitentiary—the once infamous prison labor colony known as Parchman Farm. They’re wearing green-and-white striped pants, and shirts with “MDOC convict” stenciled on the back, for Mississippi Department of Corrections.

Their crimes range from drug possession to armed robbery to homicide. But inside this austere classroom, they’re all college students.

The course is The Blues Tradition in American Literature.

They’re exploring how the themes of blues lyrics—bad luck and trouble, sexual escapades, and euphoric freedom—get expressed in literary forms. They’re listening to blues songs by Big Joe Williams, Ma Rainey, Little Walter, Hound Dog Taylor, and Bessie Smith. They’re reading poetry from Langston Hughes and a play by August Wilson.

The feeling of the blues is all too familiar

For these inmate students, the course syllabus may be new but the feeling of the blues is all too familiar.

Professor Adam Gussow looks out the window of his classroom inside the sprawling Mississippi State Penitentiary, located on 28 square miles of the Mississippi Delta.

John Burnett

“Of course, the blues is not just the music, but it’s also life lived hard,” says Adam Gussow, professor of English and Southern Studies at the University of…