Abstract
Built shortly after Texas’ annexation to the Union, the State Penitentiary at Huntsville, the only remaining Confederacy-era prison in the United States and Texas’ first integrated state institution, is a haunting cultural landmark. Some famous inmates have included James “Iron head” Baker, David Crosby, and Pimp C. Between 1931 and 1986, Huntsville hosted a prison rodeo that featured performers like Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, and Willie Nelson. The rodeo’s proceeds, boosted by celebrity appearances and original music produced in-house by inmate bands, not only funded Huntsville Penitentiary’s recreational programing but also stimulated Huntsville’s economy. Overlapping with the rodeo, between 1938 and 1958, Huntsville inmates performed on a public radio program, WBAP’s Thirty Minutes Behind the Walls, to broadcast the improvements and innovations of the Texas carceral system. Because Huntsville prison used inmate artists as cultural laborers, I analyze Huntsville prison’s musical life within this thesis as what Fernand Braudel calls an anti-market: meaning that these prison rodeo/radio economies are purposefully segregated from normal market processes. Music in carceral settings is often characterized as conveying expressions of resistance or liberation: however, I show Huntsville Prison’s musical programming challenges this assumption. By incorporating interviews, prison journals, warden memoirs, Huntsville prison’s historiography, a codex of inmate performers, carceral theory, and several generations of music produced in and out of the prison—I show that interpreting Huntsville as an anti-market helps us understand that recreational music programs that enable inmates to publicly demonstrate their rehabilitation incentivize compliant behavior that lubricates an anti-market.