If the last song was the theater of working, then this is the wellspring of such material. Recorded by the great collector of rural and traditional music of the Americas throughout the ‘40s and ‘50s, Alan Lomax made these haunted recordings and interviews in the late forties in the guts of the South. This was at the point when chain gangs and labor prisons where the only kind punishments next to death that the South was offering to offenders. Through the interviews on these recordings, it is clear that much of the continued southern rebuilding was done by the black men that were reputed to be free and to whom the South were openly hostile. When one prisoner was asked by Lomax what crime landed him back in the cotton fields much like ones he sharecropped as a child, the man responds that “all [he'd] done was stay in Mississippi one day too long.” The field hollers range from beautiful to violent, but every one of them is empowered by the singer's force, the need to use the voice and the story to ascend. It's something that we, as we sit at this desk with the phone on mute, could never imagine. The repetitious use of the phrase “early in the morning” followed by a laundry list of pains – from heartbreak to jailbreak to the sharp teeth of bloodhounds – inspires growing anger with each round. The only rhythm binding their wail is the breaking of rocks with their hammers so that the South may rise again. Our jobs are not so bad, even though some jerk ate the yogurt in the refrigerator that was clearly marked as ours.