New music books take on Paul Simon's 'Graceland' and the history of music and prison

0:00Hey, it's Emperors Book of the Day, I'm Andrew Limbaugh. Big music acts are often masters at self-methology. Each album cycle presents a new opportunity for an artist to reintroduce themselves, to either reject or reinforce their reputations. Today, we've got two books that deal with musicians crafting their persona, and a bit we'll talk about how prison can make or break someone's career, depending on the artist. But first, Paul Simon's Graceland was a career-defining album. It brought South African music to the US mainstream audience and it remains an influence on music today. There's a new book about the history of the album titled Days of Miracle and Wonder by Ashley Khan. Ahead Conte tells Emperors A Martina that the album was a new direction for Simon, one his career desperately needed. That's after the break. This message comes from the Center for US Voters of Broad Foundation. US citizens live, travel and serve all over the world, but wherever they are, they can

1:01stay connected to home through voting. All US citizens abroad may request an absentee ballot to vote in the 2026 election and requesting yours is easy. Keep your connection strong no matter how far away you are. Visit registerabroad.com to get started. The 1986 album Graceland is considered Paul Simon's signature album. It introduced South African music to a global audience and it revitalized Simon's stagnant career. The new book explores how the album was made and its cultural impact. It's called Days of Miracle and Wonder, Paul Simon and the Trials and Triumphs of Graceland. Their Ashley Khan says the album came just at the right time for Paul Simon, who in the mid 1980s was struggling artistically and commercially. Paul was coming off of a less than stellar performance by the album called Hearts and

2:06Bones. It had not been a huge commercial hit. It was critically welcomed, but it wasn't exactly the album that he wanted. It seems like Paul Simon definitely was in a stage in his life and in his career where a change was probably needed. Absolutely. And change came to him in a very kind of off hand way. A bootleg cassette of South African music is what really inspired Paul in a totally new direction. What was on that cassette? The cassette was called Gumboots, a Chordian Jive Volume 2. And there was one tune in particular by a Chordianist thing, Johnson Macallale from South Africa.

3:11And so that song inspired what would be come Gumboots on the album Graceland. I was having this discussion in a taxi and downtown. We arranged in my position on this friend of mine who had a little bit of a breakdown. It is the inspiration for that song Gumboots, but I also hear you can call me out. That's the song that I think most people would know from Graceland, but it seems like the DNA from that cassette is in a lot of those songs. It's a music that was called Ubacanga, but the idea here is that Paul decided that he didn't want to recreate this music with New York studio musicians. His intent was to record it with the musicians who were on that cassette. How did Graceland change the way Paul Simon composed music? Well, Graceland was pretty much a kind of a 90 degree shift for him as far as how he approached songwriting.

4:12Building songs up, starting with a rhythm track, as opposed to starting with the lyric. One of the best examples has to be you can call me out. A tune that was written about an old dinner party and Paul was mistakenly referred to throughout the evening by one of the celebs at the party as Owl. And he took a tune that was a studio jam that really doesn't have shape yet. And here's the album version. Now the breakout star on the album was the South African choral group, Lady Smith, Black Mombazo.

5:13How did Paul Simon get to know that group? Well Paul at first was very intimidated by the idea of working with him. Paul of course had a long time love for vocal harmony. Do Wop, Gospel, but the harmonies of Lady Smith, Black Mombazo, a ten man Zulu choir were something else. Paul of Flew them out to Abbey Road Studios in London and recorded with them there and the tune homeless was born and from then on the relationship blossomed and the next thing you know, they're performing with him on Saturday Night Live.

6:20Now when Grace Land came out the U.S. and other nations were imposing sanctions on the apartheid government of South Africa, there was also a United Nations resolution demanding musicians support the cultural boycott of South Africa. And even though he highlighted South African artists, he was criticized for not speaking out more forcefully against apartheid. How did he respond to that criticism? That was definitely one of the most direct criticisms that he endured was the fact that his songs recorded with South Africans did not clearly state an anti-apartheid message. And yes, every night that the Graceland tour was happening at the very end of the evening, all the musicians would come up front to the lip of the stage and together sing in Kosi, Sicily, Africa, which was pretty much the anthem of anti-apartheid activity.

7:33Did it bear to call Grace Land Paul Simon's signature album? It definitely is looked by Paul as being his signature album. At the age of 44, 45, when many pop stars are being thrown into the oldies bin, he was still able to create very vital, very new, very important music that was opening up minds and hearts and ears around the world. Ashlekan is author of Days of Miracle and Wonder Paul Simon in the Trials and Triumphs of Graceland. Ashley, thank you very much. Thank you, A. Hey, you know that nagging voice in your head, the one telling you to put the phone down and stop doom scrolling? Well, it's time. Look up! Take a daily curiosity break with Shorewave, NPR's Science Podcast. Let your mind wander to the edges of outer space or wonder about what's lurking in the

8:36depths of the sea floor all in under 15 minutes. Shorewave, your daily mental recent. Listen on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. Colin Asher's new book, The Midnight Special, profiles five artists, some of whom spent time in prison, others who were just associated with prison. And what Ashlekan pointed out in his book is that some artists have the luxury of using prison as a cool and dangerous part of their story while others see the careers with her way. Here's NPR's Don Gagne. There's a kind of character and archetype that's deeply embedded in American music history, an outlaw, a gangster, a criminal, someone who's maybe served time. There's an entire treasure trove of music that revolves around an artist's experience with prison. And a new book author Colin Asher traces some of that history and explores how it's been exploited and manipulated. His book is called The Midnight Special, a secret prison history of American music.

9:39Colin Asher joins us now. Welcome to the program. Thank you very much for having me. It's an honor. First, I'd like you to talk about the title of the book. It references the song Midnight Special, written from the point of view of an inmate in prison, hearing a train roll past outside late at night. Tell us about that song and why it teased things up for you. A few things, one, it's venerable. It's been played. For a long time, it's a reference point that a lot of people have. Secondly, I think the metaphor in it is actually quite beautiful and says quite a bit about the American experience of prison. As you explained, the myth that shapes the song is that if you're in prison, the train passes by at night. If the train's light shines upon you through a window, then you'll be released next. A late Midnight Special, Chinese ever loving light on me. Well, what a good nation and a care it to.

10:44And I think there's something really interesting in there about the notion of precisely how much justice is involved in the incarceration of those folks who are hoping the light will shine on them. You frame your book around five musicians, starting with folk and blues singer, Huty Ledbetter. People know him better, maybe, as Ledbetter. Why did you choose to begin the book with his story? I wanted to talk about the influence that policing and incarceration have had on American music from the Southern Prison Farm Era up until the modern mass incarceration era. And Ledbetter just made a lot of sense. He's born in 1889. Unfortunately, he does end up spending a lot of time in Southern Prison Farms. Performs quite a bit in there, learned quite a bit of music while he was inside. And then when he comes out, sadly, and unfortunately, is very much defined by his prison experiences, which is an experience that many artists since have had to wrestle with. It's a way to talk about the way prison used influence music right at the period when we're moving from slavery into prison sort of replacing slavery.

11:45There are five artists profiled, including Ledbetter. Tell us what your criteria was first. What I really wanted to do was tell a slightly different story with each section. I was trying to cover a lot of ground historically, roughly a hundred years. I also wanted to capture different aspects of the musical culture that I'm trying to describe. So the section about Huty Ledbetter, about Ledbetter, is about Southern Prison Farm Era, but it's also about the way the image of incarceration attaches itself to him and how that lives through time. I wanted to talk about, as a contrast, urban policing and the development of jazz. If we skip ahead to the jazz age, another artist you profile, El Mojo, 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 Ledbetter.

12:46Right? 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. If El Mojo had gone unvelested by the police and he had been given the right to perform live, he could have had a career that lasted much longer and was resulted in many more recordings. The same can be said for any number of jazz musicians. So we started with Hughie Ledbetter. Johnny Cash, someone who makes the book, but who was never actually sentenced to prison, despite his reputation, despite playing in prisons and being a hero to prisoners, was not of that system.

13:48Exactly right. I wanted sort of a counterpoint in my narrative, a white musician, whose story would shine a light on the disparities between the ways that white musicians and black musicians experience the criminal justice system. He is somebody who made literally millions of dollars singing about policing and singing about incarceration. And as you point out, I've never spent more than a night in jail. And I'd like to be clear, I don't begrudge him any of that. He made a great many mistakes. He engaged in some questionable behavior. He was an addict as some of the other people in the book are. And he was treated with grace and humanity by the criminal justice system. My take is not that that's a problem. My take is that everybody else should have been treated with the same grace and humanity. And throughout Johnny Cash's career, we should note that he spent a good deal of time elevating the voices of the incarcerated.

14:50Cash, as you say, was an advocate for prison reform and an earnest one did specifically help out some musicians who were incarcerated, raised money to make improvements inside some prisons. The fourth section of the book focuses on Ike White. He might be the most obscure musician in the book. He was a young man who was incarcerated at the end of his teenage years in California and ended up spending almost his entire music career inside prison. In that section, what I really wanted to talk about was the musical culture that can exist inside institutions. The final section of the book you focus on the life of the career and the death of Tupac Shakur. Describe why you chose him. He was conceived while his mother was on trial. She was a black panther. She was somebody who spent a lot of her time and energy trying to fight against police abuses. She's eventually exonerated, but that experience really ends up defining his life. And once he becomes a young man, he's growing up in a world that is profoundly different from the one that I start the book with.

15:56You know, he's growing up in sort of the beginnings of the mass incarceration era. He ends up living a life that is defined literally from conception to death in somewhere another by contact with the criminal justice system. I'm wondering if you think his prison music is his own genre. And along with that, why do we keep returning to it? If I had to say, I'd say prison music is probably 10 genres. One thing that I try to really get at in the book is there are a couple of contradictory strains of the American psyche. And one is this incredible creative urge. That urge has gifted the world blues and jazz and hip hop and country music. But the other urge is this sort of repressive one that runs throughout American history, where we're constantly fearful of each other and trying to legislate away our liberties and incarcerate people. And those two things are directly in contradiction to one another.

16:58Music Music is about individuality and expression and this carceral repressive urge is trying to fight against that. So I don't know that we will ever be free of this because those two things I suspect will continue to exist in American society. Colin Asher is the author of the Midnight Special, a secret prison history of American music. Colin, thank you. Thank you so much. That's it for this week on NPR's book of the day. If you want more, you can sign up for a newsletter at npr.org slash newsletter slash books. I'm Angel Limbong. The podcast is produced by Chloe Weiner and edited by Megan Selden. The show elements for this week were produced and edited by Fernando Downe Roman. Martin Patience and Samantha Baleban, Melissa Gray, Emico Tomogawa, Mark Naveen, Barry Gordamer, Daniel Arthman and Sarah Rabin. Thanks for listening.

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