The Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman inspired songs such as Booker “Bukka” White’s “Parchman Farm Blues” and Mose Allison’s “Parchman Farm,” while also preserving older field hollers and work songs that folklorists began documenting there in the 1930s because the prison’s relative isolation had sheltered pre-blues musical forms from modern cultural influences. Beginning in 1900, Mississippi acquired about 16,000 acres near this site for a penitentiary, much of it formerly owned by the Parchman family, and for decades the prison operated essentially as a for-profit cotton plantation where prisoners grew food, made clothing, raised livestock, and even served as armed guards or “trusty shooters.” Its harsh working and living conditions made Parchman notorious, though later prison reforms improved its image. Alan Lomax, John A. Lomax, Herbert Halpert, and William Ferris found there a rich repository of older musical traditions, as prisoners with little access to radio or records used work songs to pace labor and pass the day. The Lomaxes first visited in 1933 and returned many times to record blues, work songs, spirituals, and interviews with inmates, including unaccompanied vocals by female prisoners in 1936 and 1939 that Samuel Charters later cited as invaluable evidence of how early blues may have sounded, a 1939 session with Booker “Bukka” White, and a 1959 recording of James Carter’s “Po Lazarus,” later used on the Grammy-winning soundtrack to O Brother, Where Art Thou? After his release, White recorded songs about his imprisonment, including “When Can I Change My Clothes” and “Parchman Farm Blues” in 1940. Other blues artists who served sentences there included R. L. Burnside, John “Big Bad Smitty” Smith, Terry “Big T” Williams, and reportedly Aleck “Rice” Miller, known as Sonny Boy Williamson No. 2, while Charley Patton, Wade Walton, and others recorded songs with Parchman themes. Mose Allison, who grew up in nearby Tippo, first recorded “Parchman Farm” in 1957, and many later artists recorded it. In 1960, former rockabilly singer Wendell Cannon organized a prison band program whose trusty inmate groups performed across Mississippi for several decades, with participants including David (Malone) Kimbrough, Jr., and Mark “Muleman” Massey.