Shine a Light

Lead Belly sang his way out of prison. Johnny Cash shot a man in Reno just to watch him die. And did you hear the one about bebop pianist Elmo Hope, his hot band, and their captive audience — of fellow inmates at Rikers Island?

Two of those are shorthand versions of the truth. Oversimplifications. The other is an outlaw tale, made from scratch. All three deserve fuller, more factual telling. Nuance and context. A truth to set them free.

Fortunately, we have Colin Asher’s The Midnight Special, which unspools the myths to give us these men in full. In profiles of Lead Belly, Cash, and Hope, as well as soul singer Ike White and hip hop icon Tupac Shakur, he also gives us something larger — a dark-side portrait of an American prison system built more to punish than to rehabilitate.

It’s a book about violent and discriminatory justice. About drugs and other personal demons. About bad choices but also, sometimes, second chances. Ultimately it’s a book about the soul of man and the glory of song, like “The Midnight Special,” a prison-set train song with a hopeful chorus: Let the Midnight Special / shine the ever-lovin’ light on me.

Asher calls it a “revisionist history” and reminds us that “the hands laying down a piano solo on a majestic bebop track were, likely, once bound by cuffs” and “the forbidding prison walls rising beside our highways and within our cities are entrapping people who gather, when they can, to perform with as much talent, love, and passion as any group on the outside.”

The Midnight Special opens with the story of Huddie Ledbetter. You probably know it. How the guitar player known as Lead Belly twice won his freedom through song. How he was “discovered” by legendary folklorist John Lomax and found fame performing his prison laments.

In this simplified version of events, which fit snugly in the confines of newspaper headlines of the day and the likewise narrow minds of Jim Crow America, Lead Belly was the “Murderous Minstrel” (Time magazine) and “a virtuoso of knife and guitar” (Brooklyn Eagle) who would “do a few tunes between homicides” (New York Herald Tribune). As if he wasn’t a flesh-and-blood man but a side show with main-stage talent.

Asher’s book, thankfully, gives us Huddie as husband to Martha. He gives us a musician who loved to play, and not only prison laments — hymns, cowboy tunes, work songs. He gives us an elder statesman of song, living in a New York apartment building amid the 1940s folk scene, holding court for younger musicians.

It also gives us a Black man in fraught America at the mercy of the white-controlled police and courts. And — in a major theme of the book — Asher explains why Lead Belly, for his own sake and survival, was often complicit in playing the part of the singing convict:

Both Huddie’s music and the idea that his convictions gave his work authority survived him —  establishing a precedent that musicians have been trying to escape, or exploit, ever since.

It’s never a simple story. It’s not black and white. Drape it in prison grays. For example, while the prison connection was marketing gold in Lead Belly’s case, it was career poison for Elmo Hope and other jazz musicians, preyed upon by police, their art demonized by politicians. As if jazz were a scourge to be stamped out.

Then there’s Johnny Cash. He “never spent more than a night in jail,” Asher writes, avoiding prison despite his manic drug use and many brushes with the law. Yet his song-fueled outlaw image sold tons of records.

What if he’d been treated as Black musicians often were? Asher wonders. Would his career have died behind prison walls? Or would he have been “reduced to a caricature the way Huddie Ledbetter had been and greeted in New York with headlines reading, AMPHETAMINE ADDICT HERE TO PLAY A FEW TUNES BETWEEN PUBLIC DRUNKENNESS ARRESTS?”

Even so, Cash wasn’t conning us. He famously played prison concerts and befriended musically inclined inmates. He advocated for prison reform and wrote songs not just of lawlessness but longing.

And what of Tupac Shakur? His characters were “descended from the figures who populated the blues and Black folk songs,” but he didn’t just write about them as victims. In his songs, they fought back. His writing was aggressive, unflinching, provocative — and it pulled him into the national debate about whether one man’s art could be the cause of another’s actions. His song “Soulja’s Story” was blamed after a young man fatally shot a state trooper in Texas.

Never mind that “Soulja’s Story” is a cautionary tale:

Tupac doesn’t advocate violence in it, as the media and politicians claimed; he warns young men they’ll die if they pursue the life of a “soulja.”

That’s the true worth of this book. It delves and wrestles, seeks a complicated truth. Or to put it musically: The Midnight Special, like the train song of its title, shines an ever-lovin’ light. It illuminates stories kept too long in the dark.