Season 195 ~ You're In The Jailhouse Now

myrnaukelele · Nov 7, 2015

You're in the Jailhouse Now ~ songs about being in prison. Any song that has Jail/Prison/Cell in the title OR the lyrics. Any song about being or getting locked up. Original songs welcome. Multi-tracking is fine as long as the ukulele is front and center. Prizes- uke stickers and buttons. I'll have several winners.
Usual rules apply.

This is a NO LIMIT Season! There are SO many prison songs. I love hearing all the varied songs people bring to a Season like this. I'll comment on as many vids as I can.

PLAYLIST:https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa0rFxLGSfivaXUrwF9_VojjeKjkot6-o

BONUS PLAYLIST: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLa0rFxLGSfivUUu-QgWvIDzP6gBS6QLva

hendulele · Nov 7, 2015

Woo-hoo! This will be fun!

lelouden · Nov 7, 2015

Finally! its funny Ive had this on my list for a long time. I thought you would do this months ago.

Its a great theme Myrna

Tootler · Nov 7, 2015

Interesting theme, Myrna. I'll have to look up something traditional.

I'm playing my uke on a train tomorrow. Going from Pickering to Whitby and back on a steam train on the North York Moors Railway, one of our heritage lines.

http://www.nymr.co.uk/

YorkSteve · Nov 7, 2015

Tootler said:
Interesting theme, Myrna. I'll have to look up something traditional.

I'm playing my uke on a train tomorrow. Going from Pickering to Whitby and back on a steam train on the North York Moors Railway, one of our heritage lines.

http://www.nymr.co.uk/

Me too! Hope to see you there.

myrnaukelele · Nov 7, 2015

lelouden said:
Finally! its funny Ive had this on my list for a long time. I thought you would do this months ago.
Its a great theme Myrna

I had both themes in mind when it was my turn to host last summer. I flipped a coin and Honky Tonks won.

barefootgypsy · Nov 7, 2015

Great theme, Myrna! Who knows, with a bit of luck I might even get an entry in... I have an idea and I will try! But whatever - have a great week!

bird's eye view of my ukelele · Nov 7, 2015

great theme myrna!

TheOnlyUkeThatMatters · Nov 8, 2015

So many great traditional, folk, blues, reggae, soul, punk, rock, etc. songs for this week. I'm predicting a great Sesaon. Gracias, myrna'.

AlanDP · Nov 8, 2015

Hmmm...I don't know. Not many country songs about being in prison.

bacchettadavid · Nov 8, 2015

Thanks for the liberating theme, Myrna!

I plan on becoming a seasonista by week's end.

uke4ia · Nov 8, 2015

This is an old video. I'm posting this because I did a video of this song in Season 105, and so far I've never done a song twice in the Seasons, so I won't be doing it for this week. When I had my heart attack(s) and triple bypass surgery in 2010, I had a long series of dreams in which I was with friendly people in various places around the world. But in every dream, these people I'd never met would tell me they were my best friends (or even my wife), and in every dream the house or apartment we were in had no exterior doors, so I couldn't ever leave. I felt that all these people were holding me prisoner. In one of the dreams, six-foot-tall talking angora cats were arguing with me. When I finally came to, I found that something had gone wrong with the angioplasty I'd gone under for, it was now six days later, and I'd had emergency bypass surgery. I now think that the dreams were the way my brain had interpreted the doctors and nurses while I was very slowly coming out of the anesthetic. (The nurses got crabby if I didn't correctly tell them what the date was.)

This video was made four months later. I wrote new lyrics for some music I'd written in the early '80s, and this was the theme song for Triple Bypass Tour 2010. I really like that during the instrumental at the end, my knuckles were rapping on the uke so much that it sounds like a tabla player is accompanying me.

UkeCan1 · Nov 8, 2015

"Like a River" - Modern Man

Okay, so you didn't really expect me to open with a serious song about prison, did you?

Since the demise of the fabulous former funny folk trio Modern Man (David Buskin, George Wurzbach, Rob Carlson), I seem to have become something of a Modern Man cover band ... this is my third song of theirs. If you were at UWC 6 (Myrna, I know you were!), you might remember me performing "Jews Don't Camp" at the open mic ... that's David's best known song.

Every comic folk artist or group has a folk song that makes fun of folk songs. This is theirs. In it, a character really does get sent to prison. It is a specific prison ... one that most of us here are already long-time inmates of, I think.

Here's Modern Man's "Like a River":

Don't miss their much funnier version ... with way more shtick than I could possibly emulate with only one person.

pabrizzer · Nov 8, 2015

Convict Maid.
Lyrics are from a traditional poem but I only used 5 of the 10 verses.
Music is by pabrizzer.

mythinformed · Nov 8, 2015

Cool theme Myrna, I would love to see one of our resident songwriters write a Formby style song called 'Don't drop your soap in the shower on a Sunday' ........The challenge has been laid

Shady Wilbury · Nov 8, 2015

Excited to say I've written a new one for this week. (Super theme, Myrna...you're partly responsible for my being awake at 12.30am, scrambling to catch the germ of an idea before it slipped away.)

Harry122 · Nov 8, 2015

This is an interesting song in that it was written by Western swing musician Spade Cooley, who spent the last nine years of his life in prison after murdering his wife.

xommen · Nov 8, 2015

Lyrics are by Joel Sattler he can be found on Kompoz, where you can make his lyrics into a song, they are also available on http://www.authorsden.com/visit/viewpoetry_all.asp?Authorid=115016. I've searched through Kompoz to see if there was a lyric that would fit this them and as this one has prison in it, I guess it does. I did some multi tracking and also recorded the base audio in Garageband with three tracks (that is why there are much more microphones then I would normally use).
This is called the Power to Pray, music is by Me.

UkerDrew · Nov 8, 2015

I bumped into this doing research for this season and thought I would share it. I didn't find much I would actually use but I dare you not to listen to a few of these work gang songs and field hollers recorded at Parchman and not feel misery and the transcendence contained in these important historical recordings.

Mississippi Prison Recordings 1947 and 1948 by Alan Lomax

The Lomaxes and other collectors of their time (and also decades later) found some of the most powerful vernacular music of the American South in the region’s oppressive and violent prison system. The songs they found there, John and Alan Lomax wrote, “or songs like them were formerly sung all over the South. With the coming of the machines, however, the work gangs were broken up. The songs then followed group labor into its last retreat — the road gang and the penitentiary” (Our Singing Country, 1941). Bruce Jackson, writing about prison song in the 1960s, explains, “Southern agricultural penitentiaries were in many respects replicas of nineteenth-century plantations, where groups of slaves did arduous work by hand, supervised by white men with guns and constant threat of awful physical punishment. It is hardly surprising that the music of plantation culture — the work songs — went to the prisons as well.” The tie-tamping and wood-cutting chants, field hollers, and the occasional blues recorded by Alan Lomax on paper-backed tape at Mississippi’s Parchman Penitentiary in 1947 and 1948 remain among the most vivid documents of this genre of African American song.

wee_ginga_yin · Nov 8, 2015

Singing Carr's monologue from Cool Hand Luke, a bit of improv.

Season 195 ~ You're In The Jailhouse Now

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