ABSTRACT
Prisons are central to society; however, most people know little about them. Indeed, while prisons evoke fear, as recently as in the nineteenth century they have been romanticized as a place for spiritual renewal. Prison fieldwork, even for the Lomaxes, often came at a human cost to those studied. Lomax was not ashamed of his coercive methods. He saw the prisons as a site for the purest black music, in which the black tradition had been unaffected by contact with white American culture. Community music scholars have also taken an interest in prison music from their own standpoint. In 1971, a priest working in the Justizvollzugsanstalt Bayreuth, a first-offender prison for men, started a choir. Martin Winckhler, who had studied the special education and worked in the prison as an educator, took over the leadership of the ensemble in 2006.
