No More Good Time In The World For Me

Field recordings of solo voice. In 1965 and 1966, folklorist Bruce Jackson traveled to a prison in Rosharon, Texas to record the songs of field laborer and convicted murderer J.B. Smith. As a younger man in the South, Smith had often led work songs in the fields, and he sings several of them here. Deeply intertwined with the history of pre-Civil War slavery and post-Civil War racial oppression, African-American work songs had largely disappeared by the mid-60s, and this release includes some of the last recordings of those songs.

But it also features several works of Smith's own creation. He called them “little 'ol songs,” but they are anything but. Stretching up to 23 minutes in length, these pieces are about Smith's personal experiences: the torture of incarceration, his arrest, the people who hurt him throughout his life, his desire to escape prison, his Christian faith and his calls for redemption.

Except for one piece, everything here is sung only by J.B. Smith, without any kind of accompaniment. In part, these songs bear witness to the innumerable traumas of oppression that reverberate through American history and into the present day. But they are also the expressions of a complicated, painful, intense individual existence. Judging by how this sounds, these are the songs of a man for whom the act of singing was one of the only consolations of waking life. Hearing them forces the listener not only to abandon contemporary notions about what makes a song, but also to confront the emotions of a person who committed a terrible act in his lifetime, and who is trying to figure out how to live in its wake. These songs provoke major ethical quandaries, both for Smith and his listeners. And they are some of the most powerful, haunting works of recorded sound I have ever heard. FCC WARNING: 1-5, 2-1.

DISC 1: 1. (13:28) Personal narrative song. 2. (1:32) Work song. 3. (5:21) Work song. 4. (9:45) Personal narrative song. 5. (1:20) FCC (f**). Spoken word. 6. (7:45) Personal narrative song. 7. (1:32) Work song. 8. (23:13) Personal narrative song.

DISC 2: 1. (6:21) Borderline FCC (“I know a good whore.”) Three other singers accompany. 2. (4:32) Work song. 3. (14:30) Personal narrative song. 4. (0:59) Spoken word. 5. (6:31) Personal narrative song. 6. (11:26) Personal narrative song. 7. (5:22) Spiritual. 8. (7:51) Personal narrative song. 9. (0:48) Spoken word. 10. (4:10) Spiritual.