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These songs belong to the musical tradition which Africans brought to the New World, but they are also as American as the Mississippi River. They were born out of the very rock and earth of this country, as black hands broke the soil, moved, reformed it, and rivers of stinging sweat poured upon the land under the blazing heat of Southern skies, and are mounted upon the passion that this struggle with nature brought forth. They tell us the story of the slave gang, the sharecropper system, the lawless work camp, the chain gang, the pen.' --Alan Lomax This is a complete album's worth of previously unreleased material from the same field recordings that yielded the legendary album, Negro Prison Songs. (Reissued in its entirety as Prison Songs V. 1: Murderous Home; Rounder 1714.)

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