The Mistakes of Yesterday, the Hopes of Tomorrow: Prison, Pop Music, and the Prisonaires

Abstract

In the mid-1920s much of Nashville's black population was concentrated on the city's north side, with smaller, poorer black neighborhoods scattered within the city's industrial center near the banks of the Cumberland River. Dotting the landscape were poorly constructed frame houses with no indoor plumbing, buildings that, despite rents that absorbed most of a family's income, were the only affordable housing for the majority of the city's working-class African Americans, a significant portion of whom lived in cramped, unhealthy, desperate places with metaphorically resonant hardscrabble names that sounded lifted from dime novels: Black Bottom, Mud Flats, Crappy Shoot, and, most notoriously, Hell's Half Acre.' In 1926 Vanderbilt graduate student John Gordon Gay personalized this scenario in his study of Henry Emerson, a fourteen-year-old black boy who lived in the city's poor and overcrowded Capital Hill area. Gay's thesis was