Parchman Prison Prayer – Another Mississippi Sunday Morning (2025) [Official Digital Download]

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Parchman Prison Prayer – Another Mississippi Sunday Morning (2025) [Official Digital Download]

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There are labors of love and then there are obsessive passion projects that we can only marvel over. For Another Mississippi Sunday Morning, Tinariwen producer Ian Brennan took on the arduous task of obtaining permission to record a Sunday service at the notorious Parchman Farm prison. Though recorded separately, it is presented in the order of a church service. The result is a revelation, as it does not sound like a field recording at all, and it mixes traditional and contemporary numbers beautifully. For obscure prison system reasons, the artists were not allowed to be identified or photographed, so the listener is forced to focus entirely on the music, which shows off the deep variety of traditional gospel.

Parchman Farm, also known as Mississippi State Penitentiary, is a maximum-security prison in Sunflower County. It's the state's oldest prison and its only maximum-security prison for men. You might know about it from Delta blues great Bukka White's 1940 song "Parchman Farm Blues"; he did hard time there in 1937. It was a notorious facility for good reason; inmates were put to work. White sings "If you wanna do good, you better stay off ol' Parchman farm/ We got to work in the mornin', just at dawn of day/ Just at the settin' of the sun, that's when the work is done."

Another Mississippi Sunday Morning begins with a moaned hymn by a handful of voices—a visceral, updated take on the lining hymn tradition that brings to mind Blind Willie Johnson's "Dark Was the Night." It's followed by "Open the Floodgates of Heaven," which recalls Theotis Taylor's beautiful 45s on the Pitch label from the 1970s: piano-driven, falsetto, perfect. If only we could know the names of these artists. The third track, "Grace Will Lead Me On," is a sermonette delivered on top of a simple organ. When we hear a sublime, humorous, contemporary rap tune called "MC Hammer," we know that this effort is a great update to Dr. Harry Oster's sublime 1959 collection for the Louisiana Folklore Society, Angola Prison Spirituals—in scope, and in sound, and in its inherent Civil Rights message.

The music here is uplifting, strong and deep gospel, but Another Mississippi Sunday Morning has to be understood as a political statement, for the simple fact that the United States has a higher incarceration rate than most developed countries. Per the Department of Justice, in 2022, 32% of sentenced state and federal prisoners in the United States were Black–this, despite Black people making up only 13% of the general U.S. population. All profits from the album benefit the Mississippi Department of Corrections Chaplain Services.