Back to Angola

Daniel Atkinson is a teaching assistant of ethnomusicology at the
University of Washington, but he prefers to refer to himself as a pimp.
He cites Too $hort to prove his point.

“$hort defines a pimp as someone who’s paid to talk,” Atkinson says.
“I’m paid to talk about something that I know, that most every other
black person knows.”

Sitting in his Fremont apartment between thousands of vinyl records
and a framed newspaper from the ’40s declaring “Japan Bombed,” Atkinson
explains that the history of African-American music is riddled with
“white guilt.” From the early blues recordings of the Lomax family to
the modern wave of white writers and academics who “try to save the
day,” those before him, he believes, let their cultural agenda get in
the way of the music.

“They are so distant from that kind of despair, that lifestyle, that
expectation where you grow up and die young or go to penitentiary,”
Atkinson says. “That leaves me.”

He’s not the first to make such a claim. What’s new here is his work
to prove the claim as fact. To erase the distortion from the musical
record, the 33-year-old Victorville, California, native returned to one
of modern musicology’s points of origin—Louisiana’s Angola State
Penitentiary.

In 2005, with funding and equipment from Experience Music Project,
he set out to Angola to continue where musicologists John and Alan
Lomax—who recorded blues legend Leadbelly inside the
penitentiary—left off 70 years ago. What musical culture
prevailed in the 18,000-acre prison complex today, particularly in
terms of hiphop?

“What I got from the prison administration was, basically, that
hiphop doesn’t exist,” Atkinson says with a laugh. In a way, the
administration wasn’t lying; they limit guest access to only “trusty”
inmates, lifers 40 and up who’ve shown good behavior. Those are the
only inmates Atkinson would meet, none younger or possibly in tune with
hiphop. The difference between presentation and reality was the first
of this trip’s red flags.

They invited him to record performances and interviews, and at
first, that’s all that interested Atkinson—delivering the first
African-American ethnomusicologist perspective of this isolated,
preserved hunk of musical history. But what the self-described
“ABM”—”angry black man”—discovered was far more
compelling.

“I wasn’t there to write about the continuation of the slavery
plantation system, but they kinda forced me, the administration,”
Atkinson says. “They had their standard Christian dog-and-pony show,
saying, ‘We’ve got these darkies in check.’ I have every reason to
believe that they did not think that I was black until they actually
saw me. They had planned this whole thing, and it totally backfired on
them.”

With help from recorded conversations, he describes a black-majority
prison population, most of whom are in for life, who “reflected a very
antebellum way of looking at Christianity and at their incarceration,
very similar to slaves in the 19th century.” Between countless quotes
that reinforce the inmates’ biblical belief in their subservience (“You
hear a lot of guys refer to themselves as Job,” Atkinson says),
gorgeous voices and four-part harmonies leap from the tapes. Of
particular note is an immaculate rendition of “The Star-Spangled
Banner.”

Atkinson marvels: “A version of the national anthem that fervent,
that proud, comes from someone who is on the lowest end of the social
strata, where they don’t even exist as human beings.”

He returns to Angola this month to broaden his recordings—to
possibly even dig up hiphop there at last—and put his work toward
completing his Ph.D at UW. It’s the latest in projects that revolve
around his Angola experience. In addition to giving speeches, and a
summer internship with the Smithsonian that he hopes will lead to work
with the institute’s new African-American museum, he works with
Berkeley, California, jazz saxophonist Howard Wiley on the Angola
Project, a full-band jazz re-creation of the sounds Atkinson
recorded.

Above all of that, of course, is his hustle, not at all as
self-serving as the word implies. He hopes to develop a junior-college
course “about fetish, how the system and society keep you in a certain
way” that can act as a collegiate gateway for young people who share
his childhood experience of poverty and inertia. And though he has
other musical post-Ph.D aspirations in mind, the shadows that hang over
African-American music and culture are still his chief concerns.
Especially when those shadows pass over his own head.

“There are elders at Angola who will keep their head down and eyes
to the sky and address me as a superior, as sir,” he says. “There’s
something fundamentally wrong with that. I could not stomach it to see
a man my father’s age address me as sir.”