Word: prisoners
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...nine tables, the gamblers played stud, low ball, twenty-one or panguingui. The cards were dealt, the winners raked in the pots. Then, at 3:20 p.m., a bugle blew, and all the players got up and went back to their cells. Gambling at Nevada's State Prison in Carson City was closed...
There is scarcely a prison in the world where inmates do not gamble on the sly. But at Nevada's prison, gambling-just as in Reno and Las Vegas-is strictly legal. The reason, say prison officials, is based on realism. "I don't approve of gambling personally," says Art Bernard, who was Nevada State Prison warden until last spring. "But I am a great believer in facing facts. Making it legitimate for the prisoners gives you a control over it that you wouldn't have otherwise. It gives them something to do; if they have...
...prison is tucked in a barren bend of the Mississippi, looking toward fields of Louisiana sugar cane. Inside Angola's cyclone fences are the lifers-men serving sentences for rape and murder. Periodically a short man in rumpled suit and bow tie moves into the prison toolroom, lugging a tape recorder, a six-string guitar, a twelve-string guitar and a fiddle. Around him gather the prisoners-"Guitar" Welch, "Hogman" Maxey, Robert Pete Williams-to shout out their songs...
...Angola prison is a favorite hunting ground of Folklorist Harry Oster. A scholarly teacher of English at Louisiana State University, Oster roams the streets and backlands of his adopted state to record its rich musical patois-French, Cajun, Negro French, Anglo-Saxon. In four years he has spaded up material that many a folklorist would give his magnetized recorder heads...
Another Alumnus. Angola Prison remains Oster's favorite folk source, and Robert Pete Williams, 42, his favorite singer. A lifer for shooting and killing a man, Williams has, in Oster's view, the "tremendous drive and anguish" that characterized the fabled Lead Belly, another Angola alumnus. Williams recently improvised his own prisoner's blues...