No More Good Time in the World for Me recorded by Bruce Jackson (review)

No More Good Time in the World for Me, marvelously curated and beautifully presented by Dust to Digital, is a two-C D wallet case of about 2 hours of work songs sung almost entirely by J. B. Smith, or "Smitty," an inmate at Ramsey State Farm, a prison in Rosharon, Texas. It was recorded by folklorist Bruce Jackson in 1964 and 1965. A few of the songs presented here were released by John Fahey's Tacoma Records in 1966 on an LP titled Ever Since I Have Been a Man Full Grown, but otherwise they have been unavailable to the general public.

In his excellent introduction to the album, guitarist, producer, and folklorist Nathan Salsburg says: "African-American work songs are long gone. . . . The songs were singularly affecting, but it's hard to mourn their extinction." Surely, while most antique music enthusiasts will have work songs in their collections, the genre has experienced no significant revival and is heard today more as history than as activated, replicated, and transferred oral tradition. "Many of them," Salsburg says, "arose from social, economic, and political arrangements that deserved to die."

As if from hell itself, then, Prisoner Number 130196, J. B. Smith, emerges: a leader of work songs and the vernacular poet of Ramsey State Farm. Smith, who was imprisoned variously for robbery and spousal murder, laughs, taps, and warbles his way through the album, apparently enjoying Bruce Jackson's visits. Despite his affability, there is little biographical information on Smith to be found here, as Jackson lost track of him after a brief parole and re-incarceration. Instead, the content of the album conveys the experience of total institutionalization: here is a voice crying out in a place that flattens class, occupation, and personal taste into a strict routine.

As such, these songs lack occasion in the outside world, and the divide between these songs and what average listeners will be accustomed to hearing is illustrative of the chasm between work songs and more commercialized or plundered blues genres. This fact is only reinforced by the utilitarian purposes of the music here: to keep fellow inmates working safely and unpunished. The album situates Smith in this genre very well: he is both an arbiter of rhythm and a deeply private dithyramb with a gift for metaphor and a local vocabulary of river-rangers, boasts, far-off cities, bushes, beating suns, mojo hands, cotton fields, hounds, shotguns, and imagined escapes to hot spring resorts.

Smith sings the same melodic line in about half of the pieces here, yet all possess many small ornamentations and shifts in emphasis and/or phrasing. "Each song," Salsburg writes, is "charged with its own emotional ambience, as a season preacher intuits the particular colors and atmospheres that should imbue each portion of his service." This preacher-to-congregation quality is not an overstatement. Smith mostly utilizes the refrain form ABB A (where both A and B are the same words repeated and not merely indicative of an end rhyme) and fills strophic melodies with trills, legato and staccato phrasings, hums, and alternative points of emphasis or beat (a moving target, after all, if one is hammering or cutting down a tree).

There is one accompanied song, "Sure Make a Man Feel Bad," at the start of the second CD, and its comparatively explosive harmonies make one wonder how the experience of Jackson in intimate, one-on-one interviews might have changed Smith's performances of public work songs. That said, the general effect of the album is that the listener is not only invited into the cell where the folklorist and his subject came together, but also into the experience of the solitary prisoner: a place where infinite difference and infinite repetition echo against high walls.

This infinite repetition...