Parchman Prison is in the Mississippi Delta and is notorious for brutal conditions and a very high black population. In 1996, the historian David Oshinsky said, "Throughout the American South, Parchman Farm is synonymous with punishment and brutality. It's the closest thing to slavery that survived the Civil War." Ta-Nehisi Coates quoted Oshinsky's writing in his 2014 Atlantic article, "The Case for Reparations." The prison was founded in 1901, on a former plantation site.
Acclaimed field-recording producer, Ian Brennan, has recently released his latest project, The Oldest Voice in the World (Azerbaijan) “Thank you for bringing me back to the sky,” which features the wisdom and voices of those over 100 years old.
It is a sad and tragic fact that those with albinism living in East Africa are persecuted and literally hunted, based on the belief that their body parts can transmit magical powers and that they are in some way “demonic”. Because of this prejudice and hate they are regularly dismembered often while still alive or killed, which has led most to understandably live in fear. Estimates are that over one-hundred Tanzanians with albinism have been murdered in the past decade, many of them children.
Ian Brennan is a Grammy-winning music producer (Tinariwen, Malawi Mouse Boys, Ramblin' Jack Elliott, The Good Ones [Rwanda], Zomba Prison Project) and author. His seventh book, Muse-sick: a music manifesto in fifty-nine notes will be published in the fall of 2021.