Defining the Songs of Incarceration: The Lomax Prison Project at a Critical Juncture
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article illuminates an underexplored moment in the formation of the well-known archive of recordings of incarcerated people collected by the folklorists John and Alan Lomax. In 1934, John Lomax wrote to 350 correctional institutions across the country, asking officials to transcribe the texts of songs “current and popular among prisoners or ‘made up’ by them.” Despite contacting institutions incarcerating people of many races, ethnicities, genders, and ages, however, the Lomaxes ultimately continued to center on music performed by Black men in Southern prisons. Because of this, I position the letter as a critical juncture in the formation of the Lomaxes’ prison work. Choices made by prison officials (whether to respond to the letter and in what manner to respond) and by the Lomaxes themselves (whether to express interest in songs addressed by correspondents) were influenced by perceptions of the role of music in relation to criminality, imprisonment, reform, and race. These perceptions in turn defined the boundaries of the Lomax prison project. The correspondence considered in this article therefore offers a counternarrative to popular representations of music and incarceration and suggests the limits of the well-known Lomax prison song collection.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".