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Christian talks with Colin Asher, author of The Midnight Special: The Secret Prison History of American Music, recently longlisted for the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Colin is also the author of Never a Lovely So Real, the biography of Nelson Algren, Thompson's contemporary and fellow Federal Writers' Project alumnus. They get into why Algren hated the film version of The Man with the Golden Arm and what 880 pages of FBI file can reveal about a writer's life.
From there it's the music: how policing and prisons shaped American genres, from Lead Belly's carnival-style packaging to the freedom to create that Johnny Cash enjoyed that others never got.
The conversation closes on Ike White, the prison-recorded soul musician whose rise and fall feels like it was lifted from a Thompson novel, where the characters never see the doom coming.
