The prison thing that the late Johnny Cash had going on was quite a cash cow for him. And so it was too for other singers like Porter Wagoner. There must have been quite a spate of prison records during that period, because so many of them have crappy album covers.
 Not that the intention is necessarily to ride on their coattails. Take this album here. This was produced by Folkways, and was meant as a field recording for a folklore society in Louisiana.
It is likely that it is intended to be the social record of the work songs of prisoners in that prison in that period. Anthropologists would be sent to Angola prison located on the Mississippi River, also near the Mississippi border. The prison was a former plantation whose slaves came from Angola, a country on the African continent. |
 Ronnie Neuman appears to have been (and continues to be) a popular jazz musician, since I see him prominently on many search engines. However, I have learned in my researches that this does not necessarily mean that there is actually any information about Mr. Neuman.
Little information is known about Neuman or his album “A Little Bit of Latin and a Little Bit of Jazz”, recorded at a Minneapolis night club called The Padded Cell. |
 A wrestler I knew from Chapionship wrestling in my childhood, Sweet Daddy Siki looked unusual to me as a child because of his black skin and what appears to be blonde hair. He hails from Texas, but came to Toronto in 1961 to tour in wrestling. Despite his name, he played the villain in some of his wrestling matches.
Here, Mr. Siki is doing something more villainous than taking a piece of wood and beating his opponent with it. Here, he goes outside of his talents in wrestling to sing you a song. And to make it worse, a country and western song (OK, I hate country music, so sue me). He is said to “square off” with Country Music. My bet is that Country Music loses. |