Tag Archives: Louisiana

We open with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” performed by Odetta off of the 1959 album My Eyes Have Seen. The “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” also known as “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory,” is a lyric by the American writer Julia Ward Howe using the music from the song “John Brown’s Body.” The final stanza includes the …

Our opening song is “I’ve Grown So Ugly” by Robert Pete Williams, who was imprisoned in the Louisiana State Penitentiary in the mid 1950s. The rest of our music is by women prisoners and will come from field recordings taken in the 1930s and 40s from such plantation prisons as Parchman in Mississippi and Angola in Louisiana. In 1935, Parchman …

This week, we hear from Curtis Ray Davis II, who talks about the racist history of Angola Prison- the Louisiana State Penitentiary. After we read a statement from hunger striking prisoners in Orange County, we then hear a moving account from Davis. He talks about Louisiana’s non-unanimous verdict, which essentially nullifies the votes of non-white jury members. Davis spent decades …