Word: parchman
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...album tells a lot about it. The selections-Carnival, Mojo Woman, Crepuscular Air-have an engaging funky, blues-flavored quality, abetted by some light and witty Allison solo flights on the piano. Among the most successful is a swinging, wryly humorous ballad about a misunderstood wife-slayer at "the Parchman Farm" who passes his time "puttin' that cotton in a 'leven foot sack/With a 12-gauge shotgun at [his] back...
Under Mississippi's earthy and antiquated penal system, the tougher and more ruthless a convict is, the better off he is. At the 16,000-acre Parchman Prison Farm such bad actors are used as "shooter trusties," equipped with rifles and vertical stripes, and set to guarding their lesser, not so enterprising, fellows. Loyalty (i.e., shooting an escaping convict) is often rewarded with freedom...
...years of crime-which included grand larceny, cattle stealing and blasting an old man with a shotgun and then drowning him in the Mississippi-hefty, hardfisted, 33-year-old Clarence B. ("Hogjaw") Grammar was eminently qualified to be a "shooter." After he began his life term at Parchman in 1940 he demonstrated other good qualities: he beat up fellow prisoners and talked politely to the guards. When he killed a convict who was attacking a prison guard in 1947, the state gratefully released...
...Hogjaw posed proudly, cigarette dangling from his lips, deputies rushed up to arrest the killers and photographers to record the stirring scene. Said Hogjaw, with an old con's bland and innocent eye: "I did it because I want to be something more than just a number at Parchman." There was no guarantee that he would be released because of his big feat, but there would probably be.more opportunities and it seemed only a question of time. Hogjaw, who had also shot (but only wounded) another fleeing prisoner last August, was obviously the type of man that some Mississippi...