Filed
1:00 p.m. EDT
05.24.2026
Singer, songwriter, drummer and pianist Morgan White appeared on 5 albums inside Texas prisons. Outdoors, he mentioned no to the music business.
This essay is a part of Redemption Songs, a limited-run e-newsletter that spotlights one music every week by incarcerated artists. Join now to get a brand new music every Sunday afternoon till September.
Meet One of many Most Prolific Artists From Jail Music’s Golden Age
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Like many session musicians, one of the crucial prolific and versatile performers to ever report in American prisons has a reputation few would acknowledge. However lately, whereas gathering and digitizing albums made behind bars, I saved seeing Morgan White’s title on report sleeves. He composed, sang and performed drums and piano on not less than 5 jail albums from 1964 to 1982, all in Texas.
White’s songs hinted at his biography. On “It’s Over,” which he wrote and carried out with the Wynne Unit Band, the protagonist pleads with a lover from behind bars. However apart from his lyrics, I didn’t count on to be taught extra about him. Most musicians who confirmed up on jail information from this era are exhausting to search out and sure deceased. So it was all of the extra thrilling when White, now 86 years outdated, picked up my name and advised me about his 20-year music profession in Texas prisons.
White began drumming within the Nineteen Fifties as an adolescent in Temple, a small metropolis close to Austin, the place troopers stationed at Fort Hood would blow off steam by playing and dancing. A theft put him in Texas prisons for a lot of the Nineteen Sixties. He labored in cotton fields and noticed males tortured, whipped and overwhelmed with hoe handles. “It was actually like a plantation,” he advised me.
In 1964, anthropologist Bruce Jackson visited Texas correctional amenities to report work songs that had been created by enslaved Black folks and handed down via generations. White was housed on the Retrieve Unit, a jail working on a former plantation, and joined an a cappella group to sing these melodies.
He quickly earned his approach — via good conduct — into the Texas Division of Corrections’ music program, the place some males had been allowed to kind bands. The company trumpeted its extra humane facet with a 1965 album, through which White exhibits off his jazz drumming abilities. Right here he’s with a gaggle referred to as The Gamblers:
However the music program couldn’t make up for the trauma of plantation work. “They put us again into society indignant,” White advised me. “I used to be a strolling time bomb.” In 1977, he dedicated an armed theft of a jewellery retailer and obtained a life sentence. By then, the music program had grown, and White remembers crossing paths with musicians who would later play with Diana Ross and Ray Charles.
He started to jot down songs featured on information offered at an annual jail rodeo. “It’s Over,” which incorporates a “Shaft”-esque hi-hat and swirling horns, drew instantly from his personal expertise. “After I acquired the life sentence, I used to be with a lady,” he advised me. “She was my solely help. But it surely acquired to a degree the place she stopped writing letters, and I knew one thing was incorrect.”
Then got here the annual jail rodeo. He acquired to go away his cell and carry out for the general public at a stadium. Scanning the group, he noticed his girlfriend within the embrace of one other man. “She stopped simply lengthy sufficient to search for at me, and I noticed her.” That was their final contact.
Four years later, he acquired out of jail early after successful an attraction. He gave up his clerk place within the music division, he advised me, to David Crosby, who had simply arrived. Certainly one of his final songs, penned behind bars, is known as “Come Residence.”
Not like lots of his friends, White selected to keep away from the music enterprise, having heard tales of exploitative report labels trapping Black musicians in long-term, low-paying contracts. As a substitute, he acquired a job as a analysis affiliate at Prairie View A&M, a traditionally Black faculty in East Texas. After retiring, he moved to be with household in Washington state, the place he joined a church — and a gospel choir.
Whenever you hear him sing now, it’s straightforward to think about him commanding the eye of hundreds of individuals on the rodeo, telling all of them about his regrets and the way exhausting he’s working to show his life round, and hoping one particular listener will take it to coronary heart.
LINER NOTES:
Band: The Wynne Unit Band | Album: “The Texas Jail Rodeo Presents: Behind the Partitions (1980)” | Track: “It’s Over”
Songwriter, Electrical Piano, Vocals: Morgan A. White | Arranger: Tom Miller | Recording Engineer: Dale Mullins | Assistant Sound Engineer: William Brooks | Baritone Saxophone: Carlos Alvarado | Electrical Bass: Jesse Borrego | Guitar: Vincent Bott | Tenor Saxophone: Phillip Campbell, Antoine Joseph | Trumpet: James Campos, John Indo, William McGill, John W. West | Percussion: Michael Curtis, Nathaniel Morgan | Banjo, Piano, Vocals: Gary Harmon | Trombone: Henry Jordan, Frank Schoenthal, Hoy Steward, Douglas Washington| Alto Saxophone: John Osborne, Claude Reneau, Frank Ricketts | Trombone and Guitar: James Richards
