XXVI: THE ALBERT WOODFOX SESSION
This past March, I had the honor of recording vocals and a video interview with Albert Woodfox for the Die Jim Crow project. I remember in 2016 the day he was released: I printed out a photo of him and Herman Wallace with arms around each other in a prison visiting room. I glued it behind the cover of a new notebook I had just begun writing in. It felt like a major moment both in my life and in human history.
“I think humanity is not as bad as it could be but it’s not as good as it should be. And I can play a very big part in doing that.” – Albert Woodfox, first broadcast interview upon release. Democracy Now! (2/22/16)
The exact day was February 19, 2016. Albert Woodfox walked out of a Louisiana jail after spending 43 years in solitary confinement; more than any other prisoner in US history. He was in solitary for a murder of a correctional officer which he did not commit. The case details verge on absurd — for instance, a state witness who was paid off in an endless supply of cigarettes by an Angola warden — and it went on for decades; but Albert did not break. Since his release in 2016, Woodfox has been touring the world to speak out against the tortures of solitary confinement and the broken US criminal justice system.
Last November, I met Woodfox at a Portraits of Justice Symposium in Philly, where he was the closing keynote speaker. I approached his friend Leslie George after the speech to see if she thought Albert would be interested in lending his voice to a song. Leslie made the introduction and Albert liked the project, so we kept in touch and eventually made it happen when I came down south in March.
On a warm and grey New Orleans afternoon I drove over to Albert’s home where we would be doing the recording. We’d only met briefly in November and exchanged a few phone calls and emails since, so I got him familiarized with the project again with a copy of the Die Jim Crow EP Book and a listen of the accompanying record. We listened to the EP in its entirety as Albert read through the book carefully. Afterwards, I explained my idea, to the effect of: Would you be willing to speak about your experiences in solitary confinement over a pre-recorded instrumental track?
The instrumental was “SHU,” a song composed and performed by Michael Tenneson, who’d spent a year-long stint in solitary when he first entered prison in the early 1980s. Tenneson is serving five life sentences and will never be released. The track was recorded last April during the CTCF sessions.
I played Albert the instrumental and he was ready to go immediately. What followed was two takes of Woodfox going into detail about his decades in solitary and what kept him from breaking. After the second take, I felt confident we’d gotten it. The “SHU” [segregated housing unit] track will be featured on the Die Jim Crow LP and will feature samples of Albert’s free-form spoken word takes interspersed with other sounds and voices. It won’t be of the Easy Listening genre.
After the session, we sat down to shoot an interview. It was amazing to hear about how important music was throughout Albert’s time in solitary, as well as his firm commitment to social change and revolutionary struggle. You’ll get a sample of the song in there too:
I was also lucky enough to be gifted a signed copy of Albert’s autobiography Solitary, which I strongly recommend reading. You’ll notice two passages are quoted in the video. I started the book on this March trip and couldn’t put it down throughout, despite my extremely full days recording at prisons on the rest of the journey. I made a point to finish the book before editing the video interview because I wanted to include the most pertinent quotes in it. (Admittedly, I was also just glued to reading it).
I’ll close out with a quote that didn’t make the edit, which includes Herman Wallace and Robert King, Woodfox’s comrades of the Angola 3 [more on Wallace & King here]:
