Alabama Prison Swing

Through the 1940s and ’50s, the Draper Prison Band, sometimes known as the Draper Prison Swing Band, played across much of central and south Alabama, making music for a range of civic and social functions. They were scheduled to play a Valentine’s dance at an American Legion hall in Troy in 1953, but there was a last-minute change of plans.

“I regret to inform you that our orchestra will not be able to fill your engagement,” Warden B. R. Reeves wrote to the Legion’s dance chairman. “Several members of the band escaped last Saturday night and have not, as yet, been recaptured.” On the way back to the prison from a PTA-sponsored dance near Birmingham, two of the players — guitarist Clarence Watkins, who was doing six years for burglary, and trumpeter Steve Cooley, serving three for grand larceny — managed to disappear. The Valentine’s show would not go on, Warden Reeves explained. “We can not play without these members.”

Local newspapers found the whole thing amusing. “Those ‘homesick blues’ were just too much for two members of the Draper Prison Swing Band,” the Montgomery Advertiser reported. The Troy Messenger quipped that “When the band played ‘Good Night, Ladies,’ apparently they meant it.” At least a few papers across the country — in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Vermont — picked up the story.

Draper Correctional Facility opened in Elmore, Alabama, in 1939, at the site of the old Speigner Reformatory, and within a few years it had established its popular band, by all accounts a top-notch group of musicians. The band covered a lot of ground. They played VFW halls, American Legion posts, and National Guard armories, and they set the mood at too many small-town high school dances to count. They entertained alumni associations and Jaycees clubs, played for Christmas and New Year’s dances and for at least one Halloween party. They helped raise funds at benefits for the Clay County Red Cross and the Coosa County March of Dimes, played picnics for the Chilton County Masons and a Farmer’s Day celebration in Luverne. They appeared at barbecues for the Wetumpka Rotary Club, the Clay County Farm Bureau, the Pike Road Methodist Church. They swung out patriotic tunes for speech-making, morale-boosting wartime rallies in Elmore County, paraded at the opening of an Alabama Cattlemen’s Association convention in Montgomery, performed at the Grove Hill Fireman’s Ball, provided backdrop to banquets for the Montgomery Boys Club and for graduating high school seniors in Lineville. The prison also boasted formidable baseball and basketball teams, and the band accompanied the athletes as they faced off against area competitors. They played square dances and round dances, entertained dancers and diners at the Greenville Steak House and the Cheaha State Park Hotel. They appeared again and again in the communities of Ashland, Goldwater, Thomasville, Marbury, Weogufka, Pintlala.

At the close of each year’s state legislative session, the Draper band performed for Alabama lawmakers at rowdy celebrations in the Capitol rotunda. One veteran legislator, Democrat Pete Turnham, represented Lee County for forty years, from 1958 to 1998, and as he approached retirement he remembered the old dances as reflections of bygone days. The Draper band “would set up in the rotunda … dressed in their white uniforms,” he reminisced, and he added: “There used to be a lot of drinking on the final night in the old days. They’d dance a little and party a little.”

This 1953 photo by a Birmingham News photographer — the only photo I’ve seen of the Draper band — presents the musicians on one of those nights. “Prison band whoops it up,” the caption reads, describing the “music-makers … in prison garb, giving out with the merry tunes,” all “part of the fund [fun?] that marks the end of a long legislative grind.”

It’s possible that the previous year’s escapees, Steve Cooley and Clarence Watkins, can be seen in this photo, but I don’t know. A few days after their escape, they were turned in, both of them by their parents.

Soon they were back on the bandstand.

Postscripts:

If you or your family have memories or photos (or recordings??) of the Draper band, I’d love to hear from you; you can find me at burgin@bhammountainradio.com, or comment in the comments below. I’d especially love to hear from any musicians or their children.

I don’t know when the Draper Prison Band called it quits. Every newspaper reference to the band that I’ve found, except for one, dates to the 1940s and ’50s. In 1981, a band of Draper inmates performed at a farewell party for the retiring prison commissioner; whether the prison hosted a band in all the intervening years — and whether it continued to send such a band out around the state — I don’t know.

The Draper Correctional Facility grew to become Alabama’s oldest active prison, and like other Alabama prisons it came under fire for its inhumane conditions, deemed “deplorable” in an investigation by the Department of Justice. It closed in 2018, and the state Department of Corrections announced plans to repurpose the site as a Life Tech Transition Center, designed to assist parolees in their transition back into mainstream society.

Now Draper is back in the news. To reduce the spread of Covid-19 in Alabama prisons, Draper facilities were reopened as a space to quarantine inmates as they moved into state prisons from county jails. Descriptions of the current facilities are heartbreaking, and the ACLU and other civil rights groups have decried the conditions as unconstitutional, petitioning Alabama Governor Kay Ivey to terminate the facility’s use and provide adequate, humane medical care for the inmates. For more about this, please visit ACLU Alabama’s website.

P. S. New posts to this site have been scarce in recent months; life, as you know, has been full. To keep up with future posts as they happen, I invite you to follow the blog:

A quick overview, if you’re new here: A lot of what goes on at this site (today’s post, for example) has to do with fairly obscure corners of music history, especially in Alabama, where I live. Many of the posts are the extras, outtakes, bonus tracks, and asides from my music research and writing, and from my radio show, The Lost Child. Other times I write about writing itself and, more generally, about the creative process. Sometimes I write about teaching (I teach high school English, Creative Writing, and Film). Sometimes I draw pictures. If any of that sounds up your alley, I hope you’ll look around and come back often. You can support these endeavors by buying my book, Doc, about the late and great Birmingham jazz artist, Frank “Doc” Adams. (The link is to Amazon, but I encourage you to buy it from someplace local instead. If you don’t have, or can’t get to, a local bookstore, then check out bookshop.org.)

Thanks.

Sources for the above story include The Dothan Eagle, The Troy Messenger, The Centreville Press, The Prattville Progress, The Ashland Progress, The Alexander City Outlook, The Montgomery Advertiser, The Enterprise-Chronicle, The Wetumpka Herald, The Alabama Journal, The South Alabamian, The Union-Banner, The Cleburne News, The Clarke County Democrat, and other local, contemporary newspapers. I recently found, on eBay, the original Birmingham News press photo of the band and went down this rabbit hole from there.

“If This Ain’t Hugging, Show Me Now”: Juke Boxes & Juke Joints, Hank Williams, Jim Folsom, & Alabama Square Dance Politics

In the spring of 1948, Alabama Governor “Big Jim” Folsom helped host a huge “Square Dance Jamboree and Show” at Montgomery’s City Auditorium, the culmination of a daylong school for square dance callers. The headliners were the Strawberry Pickers, the downhome string-band who’d helped propel Big Jim into office, along with Montgomery’s own singing star, Hank Williams “and his gang.” Hank was a regional favorite, broadcasting out of local radio station WSFA; his MGM record, “Move it On Over,” was already a hit, and he was on the verge of national country stardom. The ads in Montgomery’s Advertiser newspaper billed the jamboree’s “2 BIG HILL BILLY BANDS” and promised “Good Clean Fun For the Entire Family.”

Strawberry Pickers, Hank Williams square dance ad — “Swing your corner on a rusty gate. Now your own if it ain’t too late.”

As far as Jim Folsom was concerned, there wasn’t much some good singing and dancing couldn’t fix. His 1946 gubernatorial campaign leaned heavily on the popularity of the Strawberry Pickers, who’d filled his rallies with old-time fiddle breakdowns and rustic country crooning. His inaugural party crammed 6,000-plus revelers into an airplane hangar at Montgomery’s Maxwell Air Force Base, where the usual black-tie ball gave way to an old-fashioned barn dance. And as soon as he entered office, he overturned a law that made roadhouse jukeboxes illegal, telling the honky-tonks to “oil up their machines” once again. The jukebox law was a prohibitionist tactic to, in essence, make drink joints less enticing social hangouts, but the new governor loved both music and beer, and — as the populist “big friend” of the “little man” — he saw the anti-juke rule as just another way to keep the working man down.

“I’m just common folks,” Folsom explained — and “common folks have just as much right to dance as rich people.”

Among Folsom’s many critics were members of Alabama’s teetotal set, religious conservatives who blanched at the governor’s well-known penchant for drink. But this crowd, too, he figured, could be won over with a little old-fashioned dancing. In collaboration with the Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) board and the Southern Farmer newspaper, Folsom championed a push to bring wholesome, family square-dancing right into the honky-tonk, and into the day-to-day mainstream of Alabama life.

Folsom asked the joints to put up a sign, “Square Dancers Have Priority One Night a Week,” and the ABC board encouraged those places to set aside Tuesday nights for that purpose. Families were invited to come out and dance, grandparents and kids and all — the whole program, the Southern Farmer explained, “helping honky-tonks become community recreation centers.”

But if Alabama needed more square dancing, it needed more square dance callers — which brings us back to Montgomery’s big Jamboree and Show. The Southern Farmer urged all community leaders to participate in the free dance-calling school, sending out direct invitations to select individuals around the state. “Farm leaders, 4-H Club and FFA directors, union leaders, home demonstration agents, school teachers, and social workers have found that square dancing is an invaluable tool for building community spirit, providing wholesome recreation, and attracting both young and old,” the Farmer told potential callers. “As a community leader we know you are anxious to qualify yourself to lead such a program.”

The Southern Farmer was bringing in some heavy hitters for the occasion. According to the ad below, “Some of the expert teachers who will be on hand for the school are–Charley Thomas of Camden, N. J., editor of AMERICAN SQUARES, the national folk-dance magazine; D. B. Hendrix, of Seveirville, Tenn., a famous ‘Smoky Mountain’ caller; and Miss Rosalind Reiman, Atlanta, Ga., well-known authority on Southern folk music and square dancing.”

Large ad, Strawberry Pickers & Hank dance — “Eight Hands Across, Ladies Bow and Gents Knew How, If this ain’t Hugging Show me now.”

In advance of the event, Alabama newspapers pictured the six-foot-eight governor in his element, dancing to the sounds of the “Shoe Fly Swing”:

Big Jim square dance — “Swing your opposite lady, now your own sugar baby.”

The Dothan Eagle newspaper commented, sometimes sardonically, on the square-dancing drive. “This is a fine thing The Southern Farmer is doing,” the paper proclaimed, “helping the ABC board make honky-tonks into community recreation centers for the family. Too long have Granpaw and Granmaw been staying at home minding the kids while Paw and Maw were out juking the night through. Now, just think, the whole bunch can go, chillun and all.

“Under The Farmer’s plan every community will have an expert caller, trained by experts at Montgomery. Night life will soon be in bloom throughout Alabama. Culture will blossom, along with sanitation, for one of the ABC rules requires all dancers to wear clean clothes. And everybody’s going to have fun, juke-joint style.

“Alabama marches on.”

* * *

A couple of quick post-scripts — speaking of square dancing and Hank Williams and Big Jim Folsom — here’s another ad, this one for a 1955 dance at the P. Z. K. Hall in Robertsdale, Alabama. The music’s by Jack Cardwell, a popular country entertainer out of Mobile, who’d recorded tribute songs for both Big Jim and Hank Williams.

Jack Cardwell dance

P. Z. K. stands for Poucreho Zabavniho Krouzku, which is Czech for “educational recreation circle.” The P. Z. K. Hall was built in 1924 by members of Baldwin County’s Czech community, and the renovated hall remains open for business today.

In 1954, Jim Folsom and Jack Cardwell had both appeared, along with a host of the day’s top country stars, at a mammoth Hank Williams Memorial Day in Montgomery. Like any holiday, this one inspired its share of department store sales, as seen in this ad from the Montgomery Advertiser:

Hank Williams Day duds

You might have noticed that for the last couple of months I’ve been chasing “Big Jim” Folsom down one rabbit hole after another; one short blog post led to a second, longer post, led to more and more research, a trip to the state archives, and an epic story, coming out soon in the Old-Time Herald magazine. The square dance and juke joint stuff here is a tiny aside in a much larger story about politics, power, class, race, and downhome music in mid-twentieth century Alabama.

If you’re into southern music, old-time string-bands, and the like, and you don’t subscribe already to the Old-Time Herald, I’d encourage you to change that now. I’m thrilled to tell this story in detail in that magazine’s pages, and I’ll save the rest of the details for the publication. Meanwhile, if you want some more good, wholesome juking, check out my most recent blog post, about Gip Gipson and Gip’s Place — featuring a full Lost Child radio hour of historic, live recordings from that iconic Alabama establishment.

As always, thanks for reading.