For Ozarks at Large, I'm Jack Travis.

Colin Asher's new book, The Midnight Special, The Secret Prison History of American Music, explores the careers of five musicians, from American music icon Johnny Cash to lesser-known Ike White, and how those musicians' ties to the American penal system affected their careers and popular culture.

There are Arkansas connections in this book, including Johnny Cash, Huddy, Lead Belly, Leadbetter's visits and performances at Arkansas Prison Farms 90 years ago, and the subject of the brief introductory chapter, Calvin Levy.

There would be a lot more about Calvin Levy in the book if I had been able to find more out about him.

Certainly an important figure in Arkansas, not as important a figure in music history broadly as he should have been, and that has a lot to do with where he got his start.

You know, as I recount in the book, you know, Levy was a gigging musician, a working musician, and got his first real shot when he recorded a song called Cummins Prison Farm, which is the lead into the book.

You know, fortunately slash unfortunately, it's a great song, but he was encouraged to promote the song as memoir rather than simply as a work of art.

But Ike White, how, how did you find out about him, and, and what did it take to find out about his life?

In the book, he examines musicians who, for one reason or another, have had prison associated with their careers and their music, artists like Lead Belly, Tupac, Arkansan Johnny Cash, and another Arkansan, not as famous as Cash, Calvin Leavy.

You know, Leavy was a gigging musician, a working musician, um, and got his first real shot when he recorded a song called "Cummins Prison Farm," which is the lead-in to the book.

You know, it, fortunately/unfortunately, it's a great song, but he was encouraged to promote the song as memoir rather than simply as, as a work of art.

Um, you know, this had some, I, I would argue, some fairly devastating effects for his career.

It ended up that, you know, his best opportunity in making some money off his music was also to pretend that he had a criminal history, which he did not have.

Um, and that eventually sort of comes to define him in the public eye.

He's known not only for the song "Cummins Prison Farm," which anybody who hasn't heard it should definitely listen, it's, it's an amazing track, but as somebody who had done time, which again, he had not done.

Then let's talk about sounds from Rikers Ireland and why you chose that record.

Absolutely, yeah.

Sadly is correct.

It is very sad that so many incredibly talented people have passed through Rikers.

I'm not sure how far back I should go, but, you know, I will note for anybody not listening in New York City, you know, Rikers Island is... an island right off Manhattan between Manhattan and Queens.

It was originally actually quite a small chunk of land, and it was developed by the city quite literally.

There's no hyperbole here.

So tell us about that.

So can you just talk a little bit about just jazz and that era and specifically you're looking like at that spot to tell part of this book's story? Yeah.

Sure, yeah.

Overall, the book is trying to talk about roughly a century's worth of history and the ways that criminal justice policies and policing affected the development of music.

So with the jazz section, I'm really focusing on the development of modern jazz, right? Like right around the post-war period and going forward into the 60s and 70s.

I'd ended up choosing Elmer Hope as one of my key players.

He was a piano player who, as you know, best friends with Thelonious Monk, who's a name that most people know much better, and Bud Powell, who at least among jazz aficionados, that's a big name.

The three of them were so tight that people in New York called them the Three Musketeers.

You talk about that story and why you started with Huey.

If we skip ahead to the Jazz Age, another artist you profile, Elmo Hope, had a very different experience.

absolutely during the development of modern jazz there was i argue a very rational desire to escape the sort of image that had attached itself to blues musicians and to lead belly right the idea was modern jazz is an intellectual endeavor which it is it is genius it is one of the great gifts america has given to the world And the effort to separate modern jazz from earlier forms of black music involved hiding any criminal records, involved never sort of pandering to that outlaw image.

I think that this was a very rational thing to do, and I think that...

It did a lot to preserve the way the music was received.

I also think there was a downside.

A lot of suffering was unacknowledged.

A lot of challenges were sort of swept under the rug.

I'm wondering if you think, is prison music its own genre? And along with that, why do we keep returning to it?

But getting rowdy, getting reckless, playing music, getting arrested, they've gone together in this culture for a long time, right?

You know, getting rowdy, getting wild, and that sort of being part of American musical culture.

Certainly, there's some of that, right? There's no way to deny that and wouldn't want to.

But a big part of the book is pointing out the disparate ways in which the same behavior... is treated differently by law enforcement depending on who's engaging in it.

You brought up Johnny Cash, so we can start there.

Johnny, I always feel slightly defensive when I talk about Johnny because I don't ever want anybody to think that Johnny's the devil in my book.

He's not.

Was there a point in considering who to feature in your book where you said, you know, the real guy who has prison as part of his life and is certainly as well known as Johnny is Merle Haggard?

talking about

Johnny.

No, and thank you.

It's good to hear.

That was a section I was concerned about.

Yeah, no, I love Johnny's music.

I think Johnny was brilliant.

Yeah.